Guess Who I Used To Lift Weights With?

I read with enormous....well, ambivalence...the series of articles over at All Green Bay Packers by the esteemed Adam Czech on the Packers and Professional Wrestling.  Not, of course, because I find Adam's material normally disinteresting--on the contrary.  I just don't particularly follow professional rasslin' like I did back in the glory years of the early 1980's.

But, I must chime in with an anecdote of my own, and the reason why when Adam does bring up the old school wrestlers on Twitter that my ears perk up.

I had just moved to Green Bay in seventh grade, and that was when my obsessive passion for the Green Bay Packers took off.  Each day after school, I'd walk over to my Green Bay Press-Gazette paper route drop off point and spend 15 minutes meticulously going over the sports section before actually getting my peeps their papers.  I bought a guy's single season ticket off of him in 1983 and attended every home game by myself.

But, as I approached high school, I began to dream of my high school football career.  Now, going to a very small parochial school in Green Bay, the most contact sport we offered during my middle school years was soccer, and I had never even put on pads before my freshman year.

 During the 1982 season, I had stopped at the downtown YMCA on my way back from the Gold Mine at Port Plaza mall and saw the answer to all of my prayers:  a "Lift Weights with the Packers" brochure.  I was in heaven.  Not only could I rub shoulders with Lynn Dickey and James Lofton, but I could get myself in playing shape under their expert tutelage.

I paid my own fee with my paper route money, and walked myself down from my old house on Monroe Street to the YMCA, all ready to get ripped.  I walked in, waiting to see which superstar would be in charge of my complete physical transformation.  Mark Murphy? Johnnie Grey? Larry McCarren?

There before me sat two extremely large guys, and in later years, the irony of the television show "Newhart" would only have made me stifle a laugh at the fact that they were both named Larry.  Where's Daryl?

Yes, Larry Rubens, a backup center behind McCarren, and Larry Phohl, a former CFL offensive lineman on injured reserve, were the two lucky guys who would be guiding my journey into muscles.

Rubens was a an understated guy, who did seem to come into the program with a serious attitude about working with the youngsters.  I didn't know then (as I know now) that each player has a requisite number of hours they must do for community service, but if Rubens had drawn the short straw, he didn't seem to mind.  He saw that I was far from the gym rat he was probably hoping to work with, and while the other teens in the program seemed to already know what they were doing, Rubens started me off from scratch and often took me aside to go through the basics.

Pfohl, on the other hand, was a jovial guy whose voice always seemed just a little louder than it needed to be.  He always had a smile on and didn't mind razzing the kids, something that took mickey out of the 120-pound weakling that was me.  He certainly wasn't a bad guy, but I always looked back and thought Rubens sensed that I was pretty self-conscious and Pfohl's playful banter set me back a bit.

Out of the ten sessions, I went to about six.  I remember a day where Pfohl had made an off-cuff remark to the guys about how they needed to work harder or they'd end up like me, and I chose to take a few sessions off after that.  When I came back a few weeks, later, both Larrys called me by name and welcomed me back.  I finished the session and got my little certificate.  I never got an autograph from them, but that was a personal choice.

Fast forward about six years.  I had moved from Green Bay and finished high school in a small town in southwestern Wisconsin, and my football career was something far from stellar, despite my six weightlifting sessions with real-live Packers.  I had started my undergrad degree at UW-Platteville, which at the time proudly hosted the Chicago Bears training camp.

In the summer of 1988, having worked with the university housing department as an RA, I got a call in July that they needed a shuttle bus driver for the players to go from their dorm to the practice field.  At that point, I didn't have a summer job, so I was thrilled get out of my parents' house and live in the dorm for the rest of the summer.  I drove a little mini-coach bus back and forth each day and transported players that today we still remember by name:  Singletary, Tomczak, and Harbaugh...as well as any number of little-known to unknown players trying to make the roster.

One day, I perused the training camp roster and was astounded to see a very familiar name:  Larry Rubens.  He got on the bus, looked a little older but still the same face.  One day, I initiated conversation (which was a no-no for us anyway) and asked him if he remembered doing a weight lifting program back in Green Bay in 1982.  He looked it me with a puzzled look, nodded "sure" and went to sit down.  Pwned.

The next day, though, he got on the bus with a big smile and said, "Hey...I do remember you!" (that was cool).  We shook hands and I thanked him for putting up with a scrawny kid in the weight room and being patient with him.

He then said, "Hey!  Do you remember that other guy that did the program with us?"  I nodded, remembering the loud, somewhat obnoxious Larry Pfohl.

"Do you know what happened to him?" asked Rubens.

"Actually, I did try and follow you guys for a while," I responded, trying my best to not sound like a stalker.  "You guys were both playing for Memphis in the USFL last I had checked."  This was true, and why I was surprised to see Rubens on the roster for the Bears.

"Yup," replied Rubens, "But do you know what he does now?"

I shook my head.

"He's a professional wrestler."  Visions of small-time wrestlers in Georgia or Minnesota came to mind.  In this corner, the Crusher, Larry Pfohl.

Rubens went on, "Do you know what name he goes by now?"  I shook my head.

"Lex Luger."

I was astounded.  Even at that point I had stopped watching professional wrestling, but Luger was a name everyone knew.  Here was Rubens, the nice-guy who helped a dorky kid learn to lift 25-pound weights without killing himself still fighting for roster spots in the NFL, while Pfohl, the cocky guy who never played a down for the Packers, was now world-renowned.

I followed Luger's career as closely as I could without actually getting back into watching wrestling as a whole, amazed that he eventually squared off against the guys I once loved to watch, like Hulk Hogan and Randy "Macho Man" Savage;  and with even more intense jealousy, watched him have an on-stage AND real-life relationship with Miss Elizabeth.

To this day, I can honestly state that I used to lift weights with Lex Luger.  The statement itself sounds a lot more impressive than the actual story, but now, you have both.

Bloggers Can't Have Their Cake And Then Bite The Hand That Feeds Them

 At the time this article was published, the foregoing belief on Twitter was the Anthony's Smith's Twitter Jail time was due to being reported (in fact, as I learned this halfway through writing the article and included this information).  Soon after it was published, we learned that Smith was auto-banned due to tweeting too much in a time period.

I included an immediate post-script acknowledging this, and said I would republish the article with the information corrected.  I removed three instances claiming that "somebody reported Smith" to the Twitter, as well as my firm belief that Alex had nothing to do with it.

I have included the original article in the comment section of this one.

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If there was no other reason to plead with the players and owners to settle the work stoppage and get everyone back to football, tonight's blowup between CheeseheadTV's Alex Tallitsch and Green Bay Packer Anthony Smith left many heads shaking.

In short:  Smith, the boisterous and confident tweeter, decided to spend much of Saturday afternoon coming up with his own responses to the trending hashtag #fourwordsaftersex, apparently offering many of his own off-color one-liners while interacting with other Tweeters who were doing the same thing.

Tallitsch, longtime Packer blogger, took umbrage to seeing a Packer representing the Green and Gold with street-alley humor and told Smith straight out he didn't like it.  This set off a war of words between the two, resulting in Smith's pre-emptive block of Tallistch's Twitter account before Tallitsch could unfollow Smith.

Now, I know Alex.  And I am fortunate enough to have shared a beer with him.  Alex was one of our original hosts of Cheesehead Radio last year and is an incredible talent.  There's a reason that he has 6,700 followers on Twitter and has tweeted 22,000 times.  He has a passionate following among Packer bloggers, and it is well-deserved. He has also aired his displeasure with Anthony Smith several times on his blog, so no one should have been too surprised when he took exception to some below-the-belt humor from Smith.

I also had the pleasure of having Anthony Smith on Cheesehead Radio last week.  He's a boisterous personality, a Packer, and a Super Bowl Champion.  Now, mind you, after he publicly announced pre-show that everyone should "loosen their jocks and panties" for the show, I was half-expecting to be censoring out a couple of words post-show to avoid a "Mature" rating on iTunes.  On the contrary, Smith was a total professional (if not a gentleman) on the show and gave a great interview.

There's a lot of emotions and "stances" on this issue.  Should Packers be squeaky-clean at all times when they are in the public eye?  Should fans judge players on their personalities or based on their play on the field?  Does Smith have his First Amendment rights to free speech?  Likewise, does Alex have those same rights, too?

All of the questions are worthy ones, and all can be debated.  But, I want to address the one that weighs most on my mind:   his #fourwordsaftersex brainstorming session--that while offensive to many, was no different from hundreds of thousands of other Tweeters who regularly post offensive subject matter to trending topics.

I mean, there's a reason it was a trending topic, and it wasn't Anthony Smith that started it.  Now, maybe Smith crossed a line that a professional football player shouldn't, but under normal circumstances, that would be Aaron Popkey's job to supervise and discuss it with players that are getting a little too jiggy with their tweets.

But Alex's actions in how he handled Popkey's job in lieu of the lockout has repercussions for all bloggers.  You see, what's happened in the last year or so, especially for Packer bloggers, has been nothing short of revolutionary.

Last year at this time, while being a part of the also-revolutionary Packer Transplant Blogcasts, Aaron Nagler and Corey Behnke often called for the credentialing of bloggers, so that we would have the same access to players and coaches that professional journalists do.  It was a rather radical idea, not one that endeared bloggers to media writers, who justifiably protected that perk from the start-ups that wanted equal access.

But, with Nagler's persistence, several writers at CheeseheadTV were partially credentialed for the Super Bowl and the NFL Draft.  Don't second-guess what Aaron and many other bloggers have fought for and how powerful it is in the evolution of sports coverage.  It's amazing.

But even Nagler's access in major market issues doesn't allow all of us bloggers being able to have locker room access after every training camp practice.  And when it comes down to it, being credentialed means you simply get the same access as the media...the same carefully worded responses to questions in press conferences, the same avoidance of bulletin board gunpowder.

Enter the next revolution:  Twitter.  Over the course of the season and subsequent offseason lockout, the number of ring-toting Packer players on the social network has boomed.  And what we're finding is that they aren't commercial or politically correct.  Some of them pick and choose what they send out into the Twittosphere, such as @AaronRodgers12, but many of them use Twitter as if it were their own text messaging service.

On any given day, you can see a conversation between @RyanGrant25 and @Quinn_Johnson45, or @JermichaelF88 and @stickyshields9 as they decide where they are going out to eat that night, or what they did the night before, or how/where they are working out over the offseason.  In many ways, this is the access, the public access, that allows all fans (and bloggers) access to the players we love.

But, it is uncensored.  It is untempered.  It's exactly what the media usually doesn't get to see and often doesn't report:  the guys being themselves, and sometimes, saying stuff they wouldn't say in an interview.  There's a reason we always have a Twitterverse segment during our Packer News on Cheesehead Radio:  many times it isn't even just a tweet from a Packer player or a fan, its a result of a conversation between a Packer player and a fan.

Last year at this time, I wouldn't have even imagined Cheesehead Radio being able to land a player on the show.  We simply didn't have access to them, as Nagler opined often last summer.  Now, we do, and as a result we've been lucky to have some great Packer players on the show in the last month:  Tom Crabtree, Daryn Colledge, and Smith.

As bloggers, we've gotten one of the greatest gifts we could have ever ask for:  insight into the daily lives and thoughts of the players we strive to write about, and often, actual interaction with them.  We are no longer solely dependent on media sources for what's going on.  We can get it from the players themselves, and if that isn't revolutionary, I don't know what is.

But we have to accept that not every Packer is a choir boy.  Smith has always been boisterous and not known for his personal filter before he speaks, but that is who he is.  Whether you believe he is a bubble player or a solid backup in 2011 is irrelevant.  He's a Packer, wearing Green and Gold.

Does that put him on some sort of higher plane than everyone else, meaning a Packer can get away with anything?  Of course not.  Just ask Fuzzy Thurston.  At the same time, I take issue with Smith being vilified for making the same kind of crass comments as hundreds of thousands of other tweeters, simply because he is a Packer. 

Sometimes we get a gift that is far more than we would have ever expected.  We go from 2010 and having no access to 2011 and seeing many Packer bloggers with credentials and all of us with Twitter "inside access" to the lives of the players we are passionate about.  The stupidest thing we can do is to bite the hand that feeds us and drive them off of Twitter because of the hassles they endure from the people that follow them.

As Tweeters, we have the option to follow or not to follow.  Mr Chang said it best: "I have no fantasy that football players are a bunch of boy scouts. That why I don't follow a lot on twitter. My Packer people are the fans"

Was Alex "wrong" to stand up for his beliefs?  No, but there are other ways to deal with it other than going directly on to Twitter and starting a real-time flame war.. Hey...as bloggers, we've been writing critical articles about players for years.  Perhaps that is the smarter venue to voice our concerns about a player, instead of engaging them toe-to-toe in a real-time public throwdown.

As a blogger, I value the access I have to the players through Twitter, even if Randall Cobb won't follow me back (hint, hint).  The reality of the situation is that players are human beings and not all of them will view wearing the Green and Gold in the same vein as wearing a purity ring, even if we think it should.

Did I find any entertainment value in Anthony's contributions to #fourwordsaftersex?  Nope.  I'm a parent, and take a lot of pride in making sure my blog and Cheesehead Radio are suitable for my kids to read and listen to. (Of course, they don't. *sigh*)  But my kids don't have Twitter and I don't let them read my Twitter, either.  So, in the end, I'm not worried about censoring my timeline from any no-no words because my kids aren't reading them, and in the end, that's who I worry most about.  Personally, I didn't find the entire #fourwordsaftersex hashtag entertaining, period, because that's not what makes me laugh.*

But that's no reason for me to become the Packer Police.  I have a choice, and it is to follow or unfollow, just as I have to make that decision with many other people whose tweets I may find irritating, offensive, boring, or just plain stupid.  Sometimes, the person who is irritating/offending/boring/stupefying me is someone whose tweets I highly value, and I live with some of the garbage between the tweets that I enjoy reading.

And I enjoy being a Packer blogger and reading the tweets of the players, and I want to keep it that way.  And when other Packers see their teammates getting hassled, they will once again start censoring themselves and limiting our access to them.

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*  What makes me laugh, if raunchy trending topics don't?  Jon Stewart, Wipeout, and old videos of my kids eating their first birthday cake.

My Off-Again, On-Again Love Affair With The Wide Receiver Position

I used to be the guy that loved the wide receiver.  You see, when I began as a fanatical follower of the Packers back in the 1980's, there were two guys that I was enamored with.  Their names?  James Lofton and John Jefferson.

They opened my eyes to what explosive offensive football could actually be.  Hey, before the acquisition of Jefferson, the running joke was Bart Starr's gameplan consisted of four plays: 1. Run 2. Run 3. Pass  4. Punt

But when Lynn Dickey was able to open up with Lofton, Jefferson, and tight end Paul Coffman, it was electrifying.  Images of that era are forever burned into my memory:  seeing Coffman hurdle a defender for the first time.  It was something I never imagined happening on a football field, and it blew my mind as to the boundaries of human limitations.

I remember Lofton running in open space, sometimes just baiting people in and maneuvering around them.  With the game clock ticking away, Lofton caught a pass and made a dash for the sideline with a defender closing in.  Just as he reached the sideline, he stopped short, allowing the now-relaxed defender to waltz by him, then turned on the jets up the sideline for a long gainer.

And I remember Jefferson, who was unfortunately never used as much as he should have been, often acting as the decoy drawing double coverage to open up the field for Dickey favorites Lofton and Coffman.  Every now and then, however, he would do something amazing that made you remember his glory days with the Chargers.  I remember Dickey throwing up a jump ball to Jefferson, who was standing in between three defenders.  All four went up for the ball, with JJ snatching it away mid-air, then landing with his wheels turning, squirting out as all three were still returning to the ground and into the end zone.

The television commentator: "Well, three-on-one: that's an even matchup for John Jefferson!"

There something about the position of wide receiver, working out there in open space--relying on speed and grace and agility instead of pure power.  Those players inspired me to play wide receiver in high school.

Caveat #1: My high school team didn't actually have a WR position, but a wing-back position in a wishbone offense, so the position was never really thrown to very often.

Caveat #2: the term "play" when I say "play wide receiver" might be better defined as "pretended" moreso than "actually saw time on the field".  Just sayin'.

No, given my lack of size, speed, strength, agility, coordination, and athletic ability, I'd never follow in the footsteps of my heroes, but I would continue to idolize them.  And I don't think there was a player I idolized more than when the Packers drafted Sterling Sharpe.

Again, he was graceful and speedy, but brought a new level of strength and cockiness to the position.  He dared people to stop him, not afraid to run through them as much as around them.  And, it didn't hurt that he wore the same number that I had when I played in high school (again, see Caveat #2 above).

He made Don Majkowski look a heck of a lot better than he was.  And he was Brett Favre's crutch in his tumultuous formative years, when having Sharpe there to catch 100+ balls a year might have been the difference between Holmgren sticking with Favre and not going with Mark Brunell.

He demanded the ball.  This was also something new that I hadn't seen before in my wide receiver heroes, but heck...he was darn good, and good things happened when he had the ball.  He had an infectious smile and made it look like he was having a blast on the field.  I still remember the play against the Lion in the playoffs one year where he caught the ball so far ahead of every defender, he walked up to the goal line and tried to just reach over the plane of the goal line.  A Lion defender snuck up behind him, and an uncomfortable instant replay was averted when Sharpe picked the ball up himself in the endzone, smiling like the cat who had caught the canary.

But my adoration of Sharpe--and my love affair with the wide receiver position in general--came to a screeching halt in 1994.  Sterling Sharpe's neck injury ended his playing career, and no one was giving the Packers a chance to even reach 8-8 without their Most Talented Player.  I fiercely defended Sharpe from his detractors and also believed the Packers were going to suffer a huge setback without him.

But 1995 was the year everything changed.  The Packers weren't a worse team without Sharpe, they were a better team without him.  Favre, no longer pressured to feed the ball into a WR who kept demanding the ball, saw his quarterback rating jump nearly ten points.  The ball was spread out evenly between new team leader Robert Brooks, Mark Ingram, and the running backs and tight ends...basically, whomever was open.

If you can remember back to that time when the Packers (unexpectedly) made the playoffs, you might remember a feature by NFL Countdown where Favre, Brooks, Bennett and all the gang openly talked about how Sharpe had held the team back with his "me-first" attitude.  They gushed about the team-first attitude that had propelled them into being perhaps the only team with a chance to prevent the Cowboys from making it a three-peat that year.  There wasn't even an inkling that the players remotely missed Sharpe.

Chris Berman cut to Sharpe, who had been a part of the studio team in his first year away from football, and you could see the tension and anger in his face and body language.  He yelled his response (surprise!), saying he wasn't a me-first player and he had always been committed to the team above all.  The words seemed to echo in the empty studio where was was being filmed.

At the end, Berman attempted to mend the fences by telling Sharpe, "Sterling, all the guys I talked to miss you, wish you the best, and they wish you were there to be a part of this."  It was in stark contrast to everything we just heard the players actually say in their interviews.

I wanted to rise up to defend my old hero, Sharpe, whose jersey I proudly wore and cheered every time he caught a pass.  But reality set it, as the Packers went deep into the NFC playoffs that year, farther than they had ever gone with Sharpe.  And, of course, the next year the Packers won it all with guys like Antonio Freeman and Andre Rison playing at the wide-out position.

Meanwhile, this coincided with the time when the me-first wide receiver began taking over the league.  Guys like Michael Irvin, Terrell Owens, Randy Moss, and Keyshawn Johnson made no bones about being "the guy" and demanding the ball.   The showboating, the grandstanding, the obnoxious behavior all started turning me off to the "Highlight Wide Receiver" that ESPN now seemed to love and give 24/7 attention to.

But ever since the departure of Sharpe, the Packers have employed the team-oriented wideout.  Who can forget the day after Favre's father passed away, when Donald Driver, Javon Walker, and even Robert Ferguson (of all players) swore that whatever Favre threw that Monday Night against the Raiders, they would catch for him?  And they did it.

Wideouts with attitude problems (Koren Robinson, Terry Glenn, Bill Schroeder, even Walker) were quietly excised from the team.  The Super Bowl-winning stable of receivers--Donald Driver, Greg Jennings, Jordy Nelson, and James Jones--were a case study of ego-less, team-oriented talent.  When Jennings, the clear primary threat, was essentially a non-factor early in the 2010 season, many rushed to his interview podium to ask how upset he was at not getting the ball enough.

Naturally, even if Jennings was upset, he never let on.  And as the season progressed, and the injury-riddled Packers found their footing offensively, Jennings again assumed his role as the #1 receiver.  Had that been Sterling Sharpe (or Owens, or Keyshawn), that lull in production could have exploded on the field and in the locker room.

So, no longer have I been that "WR guy" that I was as a kid.  Perhaps, like my musical tastes, my appreciation for the game of football has matured.  Just as I have put my Debbie Gibson cassettes into the storage unit and downloaded The Best of the Eagles on iTunes, I no longer have solely WR jerseys in my Packer closet.  I value the impact of a running game, dissect the ins and outs of Dom Capers' 3-4 defense, and have measured the impact of special teams on a win or loss.

Hey, 20-Year Old Me would have taken umbrage with 2010 Me for all of those articles I wrote petitioning Mike McCarthy to quit throwing the ball so much and commit to the running game.  But, 2010 Me has realized that it takes more than that explosive Dickey-to-Lofton passing game to win a championship.  Perhaps, in the dark decades of the 70's and 80's, when my formative years as a Packers fan were established, finished 8-8 and having an exciting passing game was the best we could hope for.

But with two Lombardi trophies under our belt since those days, you realize the impact of what a complete team effort requires.  Oh, don't think I've totally lost my WR fettish.  When I wore my Packer jersey each week from the Patriots game through the Super Bowl (without washing it), it was none other than my #85 Jennings jersey.  But I would have been just as happy wearing my Rodgers, Hawk, Matthews, or Bulaga jersey.

The reason I write this, however, is that WR passion from my youth was stirred just a bit this past draft when the Packers took Randall Cobb in the second round.  Ted Thompson has made it a habit of drafting some talented, team-oriented wideouts in almost all of his drafts, but Cobb brings just a bit of swagger to the position.

Normally, that bit of bravado would throw some yellow flags up for me, because heaven knows I've learned my lesson.  But Cobb has already established through the media and his Twitter account that, despite bringing some of that electrifying agility to our return game and offense, he has sought out the team veterans to create relationships with them...nothing required during offseasons when there isn't a lockout.

A players who hit it big in college, both as a returner and a receiver, but also as a Wildcat quarterback, could easily step into the big leagues believing the spotlight should be on him, and we've seen it over and over again through the years.  But it's been noted that at Kentucky, where his pure athleticism would have been enough to warrant his playing time, he established himself as a team leader, needing no prodding to put in the extra time watching tape or conditioning.  He bonded with his coaches, viewing them as family, not as "the Man busting my hump".

And coming into perhaps one of the healthiest team environments in the NFL will seal the deal that this kid will be a playmaker, an electrifying player who has awakened the hope in me of looking forward to a wideout that will awaken my childhood passions for seeing the wide receiver dominate the field again. 

No, I don't expect Cobb to supplant Jennings as the #1 receiver, but I do hope that he can enter the game and make cornerbacks desperately call for safety help over the top.  I'm hoping he's a guy who can stretch the field and force defenses back, creating for room for guys like Ryan Grant and James Starks to find a hole.

But, yes...there's an immature part of me that longs to see Cobb catch a ten-yard slant and dip and bob, shift and weave through defenders for a long touchdown, just like I used to cheer for in awe with James Lofton and Sterling Sharpe.  There's a part of me that, despite every effort I've made to wean myself away from glorifying the wide receiver position, wants to see this corps have the kind of season that will help Aaron Rodgers challenge Tom Brady's 2007 campaign and 50 passing touchdowns.

When we saw the Packer offense sputter several times at the end of the season and into the playoffs this past year, relying on the defense to pull out the game for them, the addition of Cobb could be the difference between nail-biting finishes and putting inferior teams away early.

Is that wishful thinking on my part?  It could be.  Cobb hasn't even put a jersey on yet and run in shorts, much less taken an NFL hit. 

But that's 20-Year-Old Me talking.  Now, where is that storage unit with my Debbie Gibson tapes again?