The so-called glamour of covering football

"Do you get to go to the games for free?" they always ask. "You are so lucky."

I often try to remind myself of these conversations as I stand in the middle of a sweaty locker room surrounded by 300-pound children who can pay off my credit cards with the spare change in their pockets. I've got to tell you, that train of thought just isn't working.

No matter how hard I try I will never think of covering the Green Bay Packers for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as anything but a job. If someone wasn't paying me to approach the team's star running back for a brief word only to be told, "I don't talk to you after we win, what makes you think I'm going to talk to you after we lose," then I couldn't see myself doing it at all.

You really can't understand what it's like to cover a professional football team until you've waited around in the locker room for an hour and a half only to be told the player you're in search of isn't coming out of the training room. Or you've tried to defend a story you've written to a player who is in such total denial that he really doesn't think the five balls he dropped yesterday hurt the team.

These experiences just scratch the surface of what it's like to be a pro football beat writer, but I must admit they probably sum up the experience as much as anything else I can think of.

What keeps me interested after 10 years on the beat is not my interest in the Packers but rather my love of journalism. There is no better feeling in the world than to uncover a secret the team is trying to hide. I guess it's the reason I got up the courage as a freshman in 1980 to walk through that door in Vilas Hall and offer my services to The Daily Cardinal.

For some bizarre reason, the football world has adopted a military mentality and it believes things such as injuries, trick plays and contract information are top secret classified information. For the seven years Mike Holmgren was coach of the Packers I heard him refer to a torn hamstring as "a slight pull", torn ligaments and a broken fibula as "an ankle sprain" and a full arm amputation as "a tweaked shoulder."

OK, I made up the last one, but only because it was a running joke among the press corps covering the team. If he ever said a player had suffered a major injury, we immediately assumed the guy was being given his last rites in the locker room.

Uncovering something juicy gives you a good feeling, but it also can result in getting a phone call from the head coach, who is more than willing to sweep his well-known Christian faith under the rug for the seven minutes he's dropping F-bombs in your ear. Come to think of it, reactions like that might be one of the highlights of the job.

Unquestionably, covering the Packers is different than any other beat job in the sports world. Green Bay is the smallest market in professional sports and its fans eat up every bit of information they can get their hands on. And the stuff they don't get, they make up. We chase more rumors about bar fights, drug abuse and infidelity than most tabloid writers do.

Since the team's return to prominence four or five years ago, interest has been at a fever pitch. Covering the game on Sunday has become just a minor part of what we do.

Despite keeping an apartment in Milwaukee I spend Monday, Wednesday and Thursday in Green Bay attempting to find just enough ideas to fill a week's worth of papers. On Saturday, I either fly to another city or drive back to Green Bay for the next day's game. I'm not alone in our coverage either. We have another full-fledged beat guy as well as two backups.

We are basically told to provide two to three stories a day, and on Monday we can have as many as 11 or 12, including the two opinion pieces from our columnists. I'm often in the middle of the all-out tug-of-war for viable story ideas on game day.

I would like to be able to tell you that covering the Packers during their most successful stretch since the Lombardi era has been a boon to my social life, but unless you count tremendous popularity among the guys with whom I play basketball at the local YMCA -- they all love to tell me what's wrong with the team -- I can't really say I'm living the high life.

I can tell you that despite the pedestrian lifestyle this is what I've always wanted to do. I probably wasn't sure of that fact until I started covering Badger sports at The Daily Cardinal. It is there that I found that fire for the job.

And just like that need I had to drop in daily to the dingy office in Vilas Hall, my addiction to this job remains. I'm not sure when it will end. Quite possibly, it will be about the time that guy finally comes out of the training room.

Tom Silverstein served as sports editor of The Daily Cardinal in 1982. He covers the Green Bay Packers for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.