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Matthias Clamer
Mark H. Murphy, on the Lambeau Field bleachers, is the first person to win Super Bowls as both player and CEO Matthias Clamer
Know Your Packers Backers
If Lambeau Field is hallowed National Football League ground—was it this goal line or the far one where Bart Starr sneaked in for the winning touchdown in ’67?—then it was only fitting that the NFL clergy gathered there in early September to celebrate the start of a new season. The preceding months had been dominated by bitter negotiations between the league’s 32 owners and the players’ union, which had led to an owners’ lockout and the cancellation of training camp. For a while the regular season itself seemed in jeopardy until the two sides reached a new collective bargaining agreement six weeks before opening Sunday.
The season’s first game was a clash between the two most recent Super Bowl champions, the Green Bay Packers and the New Orleans Saints, and as the teams warmed up on a clear autumn night, Lambeau had the atmosphere of a homecoming weekend. There was Starr holding a Green Bay Packer flag, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell greeting New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton, and Bob Costas and Tony Dungy doing the NBC pregame show.
A few feet away stood a man few casual fans would recognize, but who was nonetheless indispensable to making this night possible: Mark H. Murphy, the Packers’ president and chief executive officer. Murphy is the embodiment of that rags-to-riches fable wherein the boy working on the shop floor can grow up to run the whole factory. There have been other former players who owned teams, including Packers’ founder Curly Lambeau, but Murphy is the only player-turned-CEO to win a Super Bowl in both roles, as a player with Washington in 1983 and as Green Bay’s CEO last season.
Murphy wore a black suit, paisley tie with swirls of green and yellow, charcoal trousers, and five-lace-hole black shoes. He walked along the grass near the white-chalk sideline, with the shambling, slightly stiff-legged shuffle of the ex-athlete. As the Packers completed their drills and gathered in a pregame huddle, Murphy said, “That camaraderie with your teammates, it’s impossible to match that outside the game, anywhere else in life. They should savor it, because the transition from being a player is difficult, really challenging.”
Few players in NFL history have made that transition in quite so remarkable a fashion as Murphy. That he is here on this field, the head of the most successful team in America’s most popular sport, speaks volumes not just about him but also about the peculiar genius of the organization that he runs.
The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with a population of 102,000, it would be small for a Triple A baseball franchise. Of all the original NFL franchises—located in places like Muncie, Ind., Rochester, N.Y., Massillon and Canton, Ohio, and Rock Island, Ill.—Green Bay is the only small-town team still in existence. The Packers have managed not merely to survive but to become the NFL’s dominant organization, named by ESPN in 2011 as the best franchise in all of sports.
The Packers have sold out 295 consecutive home games, and there are 80,000 names on the waiting list for season tickets. Everywhere you look in Green Bay there is Go Pack signage—at the obvious places, like Brett Favre’s Steakhouse just off Holmgren Way, and the less obvious, like the Pho #1 Noodle & Grill on Oneida Street. Green Bay residents consider it a point of pride to buy their own bodyweight annually in Packers paraphernalia. The Packers led the NFL in apparel sales last year—the top two selling jerseys in the league were Packers Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews—making $27 million just through the pro shop inside Lambeau Field and the site Packers.com. All that swag, and those endless sellouts, made the Packers the 11th-highest-revenue team in the NFL in 2011, with total income of over $280 million, despite the fact that it plays in by far the smallest of the league’s 32 cities. (Ironically, this success means that Green Bay pays into the NFL reserve fund set up to redistribute revenue from larger market teams to smaller market teams.)
