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From the Vault of Art Shay: That Green Light From Wisconsin

By Staff in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 26, 2011 5:10PM

To paraphrase Gatsby — we must believe in overcoming that green light from Wisconsin, their orgiastic future, that year by year we hope will recede before us. It eludes us for the moment but that's no matter. Chicago is young and strong and tomorrow we will run faster and stretch out our arms further...

As I write, it's the day after Armaggedon. The Bear-Packers aftershocks, real and jokey, continue to erupt. I just spoke to the Packer press office in Green Bay, trying to score a headshot of my old handball partner, immortal NFL player and former Packer assistant coach Tom Fears, for this very story. The young guy who politely took my call asked how I was spelling Fears. Right now there's an official sounding item on the net. "Cutler will be fired and replaced by that would-be fondler of both leather and flesh flesh-Brett Favre. The probably phony picture shows Favre (golden hands hidden) in front of the Bears microphone and background. And he's grinning as on his commercials for touch football, or whatever he's selling.

Green Bay — the very name is redolent of its rustic lumber piles abounding the railroad yards, lumber whose processing chemicals make Green Bay's air smell sick-sweet, like Stockholm's air after the pines are boated in from the woods. Both are nasally-challenged, Scandinavian-blooded cities olfactory drunk on a chemical sprayed on healthy trees before they're turned into plywood. Or were for the former housing industry. You probably are living surrounded by this secondary Green Bay export.

From 1962-1965, when Tom Fears was assisting Vince Lombardi in coaching at Green Bay, we became friends. Tom had read a book I had written on handball (specifically on the showboat wildman champion Paul Haber- the Babe Ruth of Handball.) Tom was just about my age at the time. He first made sure that I, a lowly Sports Illustrated and New York Times photographer (who got to push Lombardi around... gently) in fact did write the handball book. I was, after all, a link to the outer world whose respect Green Bay then and now sought. So he challenged chubby me to a game of handball at the Packer gym. I beat Tom 21-6, as a few of his Packer buddies watched then wandered up for me to teach them how to serve hooks and curves. The way Haber had taught me on the pro handball tour, one of my photo accounts. Nothing like having a bunch of pro athletes watch you dismember one of their own in another, if lesser, sport.

Incredibly tough footballers and a few swingers — Bart Starr, Jerry Kramer, Paul Hornung,and Max McGee casually hanging around the St.Norbert's gym, were handball potzers. But with Tom it was an obsession that kept him in good enough shape to die eventually at 77. I got along pretty well with the Packers because Tom told them that I had destroyed a roll of raw TRI-X I'd shot one 6 a.m training morning, showing a buxom high school lass exiting a starter's dorm room down a six foot ladder.

So I behaved against all my instincts of career advancement into the teeth of a dilemma: should I let my picture cause big-time trouble for a star player after I'd been let onto the campus to show the team in its glory? Or just ditch the picture knowing the New York Times wouldn't use it anyway?

In its bigger love affair with the team, small town Green Bay was accustomed to turning a blind eye to all such shenanigans. From traffic tickets right up the miscreant scale. The hell with sin; the churches dealt with that. The team came first. Like the question during my own Time Inc. career of whether handsome mob hitman Johnny Stompanato was knifed to death by Lana Turner herself, or after a hasty 3 a.m. legal conference with eely-bird counselor Jerry Giesler, maybe by her 14-year-old gorgeous daughter, had been shocked, shocked into defending her purity for being pawed by her mommy's boy friend? Reasonable doubt anyone? As Studs often observed, and I've passed on to Chicagoist, "It's all connected, isn't it."

Yes indeed, and here are several historic views of my photo connections to the victors as they exult among their spoils with a few views of us Bear-faced losers, bleeding, but ever hopeful about the future. So we'll wait until 2037 or so, to get another chance at glory. Meanwhile, in Scott Fitzgerald's lovely conceit as a perennial loser, we are all of us merely hopeful boats beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Nelson Algren's Chicago, is also available at Amazon.