Four volume Green Bay Packers history debunks myths, provides definitive story of team's first 100 years
GREEN BAY – The Green Bay Packers rarely do anything halfway and that goes double for the team's new history of its first 100 years.
What began as an idea for a 300- to 500-page book to be released on the team's 100th birthday — that would be Aug. 11, 2019 — became a four-volume, 1,024-page definitive tome that leaves no myth unbusted, no significant story untold.
"That’s the great part of this. The truth is better than all the B.S. that has been made up about so many things that have happened," said author Cliff Christl, Packers team historian and former Green Bay Press-Gazette, Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter, whose career is as closely tied to the Packers as that of any living journalist.
"The Greatest Story in Sports, Green Bay Packers 1919-2019" is available for $89.99 at the Packers Pro Shop website and in the Pro Shop at Lambeau Field. The Packers printed "several thousand" sets and will authorize a second printing if demand is great enough.
The Packers hired a retired Christl seven years ago with the idea of writing the history, which dovetailed with an idea he was working on for years. Christl is the author of eight books, mostly on the Packers and pro football, and he produces regular features on the Packers.com website.
Obviously, they missed the 100th anniversary deadline. Christl's expertise was needed in setting up the new Packers Hall of Fame in the Lambeau Field Atrium and for a documentary film produced for the 100th anniversary, which delayed progress on the book. Also, he kept moving the goal posts.
"It became obvious to me pretty early in the process that if we were going to attempt to write a definitive history, there was no way we were going to be able to do that in 500 pages," Christl said. "David Maraniss' book on (just) Lombardi is 500 pages.
"It grew from there."
In the end, they settled on four volumes of 256 pages each, and Christl believes he told all the stories that needed to be told, and demolished the pervasive myths that had grown up around the Packers without doing damage to the most unique story in professional sports.
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"Our history is so important to us and such a big part of the organization, we wanted to make sure we got it right," said Packers President and CEO Mark Murphy. "Fans are going to find out there’s a lot they don’t know. I think I know the Packers history well, but I learned a lot."
Thousands of hours went into the preparation, mostly by Christl, although many others contributed. The official publisher is KCI Sports Publishing of Stevens Point, Wisconsin. The book was printed by Friesens Corp. of Manitoba, Canada. Many of the photos were provided by the Green Bay Press-Gazette, which was instrumental in launching the Packers and supporting the team in its early decades, and from less formal sources, such as the mother of a Packers employee.
"The last two years, I really didn’t take any vacation or have a day off. I usually worked most weekends," said Christl, who's looking forward to a life not consumed by work and to reading things he didn't write.
That Christl would write the definitive history, "warts and all," was not in doubt.
"He has great respect for our history, and he is also a perfectionist — he always wants to get it right," Murphy wrote in the foreword to volume one. "We felt it was important that we cover both the good and the bad, so that the reader has a better understanding of our entire history, and an even greater appreciation for the organization's survival and successes."
It was given that Christl wouldn't do it any other way.
"I worked 35 years in the newspaper business telling it as it was and not pulling too many punches. That’s really the only way I knew," he said.
History was a muddled mess
Christl is blunt in his assessment of hundreds of books and articles purporting to tell the team's history in ways large and small.
"The Packers history had just become a total muddled mess. The state historical society got it wrong, our local historical society got it wrong. Even the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the NFL and the Packers themselves started including a lot of those stories. We did it in our media guide," he said. "The author that started it all had really no credibility and was in no position to really write the history of the Packers, and it went from there."
He credits Mark Beech's "The People's Team, An Illustrated History of the Green Bay Packers," with coming the closest to an accurate history. The list of those who failed is much longer.
Christl understands, to a degree, how so much misinformation came about.
"As Lee Remmel told me, and so many of (Curly Lambeau's) players did, Curly was a congenital liar. Lee said he never told the truth. That was part of the problem," he said. "He exaggerated, made up these stories to draw attention in the big cities so the Packers would get good press. It probably benefited the team. Maybe even without it they might not have survived. So there was a fair amount of misinformation, especially in newspapers across the country."
That gave Christl abundant myths to bust as well as errors to correct.
For example, the stories of Curly Lambeau's time at the University of Wisconsin before he helped found the Packers. It was said that Lambeau enrolled at Madison but left when freshman football was canceled and he wasn't allowed to play for the varsity, and instead ended up playing for Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, or variations on that theme.
"Curly Lambeau went to Madison for a weekend, maybe a long weekend. He never checked out equipment or took a physical. What actually happened, we’ll never know, but nothing that has been written about his time there has ever been true. Not one part of it has been true," Christl said.
In reading the work of his seven primary predecessors on the Packers beat, Christl found something to admire in each of them. Art Daley, for example, provided amazing detail on the daily activities of the Packers. Lee Remmel, who also was Christl's predecessor as Packers team historian, was a great storyteller.
Hundreds of interviews conducted
Other prominent sources included George Whitney Calhoun and John Walter of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Bud Lea and Stoney McGlynn of the Milwaukee Sentinel and Oliver Kuechle of the Milwaukee Journal. And, of course, Cliff Christl, who covered the Packers starting in the wilderness years of the 1970s and '80s and continuing through the 2000s.
"I had interviewed probably over 300 players before the Packers hired me. Some people were really great, Ron Wolf, Lee Remmel, Bob Harlan. I did up to 15, 20 interviews with some of them, lengthy interviews," Christl said. "I’ve got probably 500-plus oral histories. I interviewed players, coaches, scouts, opposing players, in-depth, over about a 15-year period from 1995 to 2010."
Christl said he was on the lookout for untold stories, as well as correcting the existing record.
"I tried to still be a reporter and come up with new things," he said.
An unreported, or at least underreported, story involved Barry Sanders' tryout camp when he was at Oklahoma State University. The Packers were one of nine or 10 teams invited to the future Pro Football Hall of Fame running back's exclusive event. The Packers scout arrived late, or not at all. It's a little unclear, but what was certain was the team passed on Sanders and drafted Tony Mandarich instead, and all Packers fans know how that turned out.
Christl said it's not clear the Packers would have drafted Sanders instead — they were really high on Mandarich — but it's one of those butterfly effect events that could have changed history.
"I think (GM Tom) Braatz was sold on Mandarich. It just shows what a mess Ron Wolf inherited," Christl said.
In addition to the main narrative, pages include recurring breakouts, such as "Slices of a Fan's Life" and "They said it," and quotes or tables of trivia on many subjects. The books include hundreds of photographs, some well-known and others not seen in decades, or ever.
History of the city and fans as well
"This is not just a history of the Packers. It’s a history of the city that supported the team and the people here and its fans. It kind of dovetailed," Christl said.
At times, Christl took deep dives into subjects, such as what made Pro Football Hall of Fame receiver Don Hutson one of the NFL's greatest pass catchers?
"You read about Hutson running 9.6, 9.7 100s. That would put him in Jesse Owens’ class," Christl said. "I think somebody even wrote that he won the SEC 100-yard dash in a conference meet, rushing over from a baseball game."
The truth is less romantic, but no less interesting. Hutson never placed in an SEC meet. He was only the third-fastest man in the 100 at the University of Alabama, but he was probably the fastest player in the NFL, nonetheless. That was important, because in the days of one-platoon football, he was a liability on defense. Also, he was not a wide receiver as modern fans would picture it, more often lining up just a little outside the tight end position.
To show the level of detail, the book is dedicated to the 1,720 players who played for the Packers during their first 100 years, including 20 who were members of the team before it joined the NFL.
Fascinating details include things like biographies of the 1919 Packers players. Take, for example, 22-year-old Orlo "Toody" McLean, who stood 5-foot-4 and weighed 150 pounds. He played in 11 games. Or 27-year-old Gus Rosenow, a relative giant at 6 feet and 170 pounds. He had a deformed left arm from a childhood accident, but played 11 games at halfback.
Knowing where to look was important. Packers stories would mostly be on the sports pages only in places like Milwaukee, but in Green Bay, he cast a wider net.
"At the Press-Gazette, I read the society pages because the Women’s Quarterback Club, that story would not appear in the sports section," he said.
Even before the project started, Christl read every sports page of every issue of the Journal and the Sentinel for 50 years. Then he started in on the Press-Gazette.
"I’d started going through the Press-Gazette, page by page. I started making copies. Spent a fortune at the Brown County Library," he said. "Did that in my off time while I was still working for the Journal. Was doing it as well when the Packers offered me the job."
Christl recognized the timeliness of the job offer because it gave him a deadline to actually get a book completed, even if he did blow through the first one.
"I knew myself well enough to know I probably wouldn’t be around by the time I completed my research," he said. "When they offered me the job, I thought, 'You know, this gives me deadlines. This will require me to get things done.'"
The project has added meaning for Christl, who only recently found a letter from his father, who he never knew, to his mother shortly before his birth in 1947. His father was at a Veterans Administration hospital in Hines, Illinois, suffering from cancer that likely resulted from his exposure to mustard gas during training in World War II.
At the end of the 3½-page letter, his father, also named Cliff, wrote, “Time to close. Cut out all Packers dope from the Press-Gazette or any pro football dope. You’ll find a lot of Packers dope in Art Daley’s sports column.”
Christl the son did not know until then that his father was a Packers fan.
"I didn’t know how big a Packers fan he was. I would hope (he would be happy reading this)," he said.
Contact Richard Ryman at (920) 431-8342 or rryman@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @RichRymanPG, on Instagram at @rrymanPG or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/RichardRymanPG/.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Green Bay Packers: Four decades of effort result in definitive history
