Favre as MVP? Try Jack Frost

When I was a kid growing up in the East, it was a given you didn’t play football after November. Thanksgiving Day was the latest you could trust the weather. Oh, occasionally, the Army-Navy game would be scheduled for Dec. 1, but that was the lone exception.

But, then, the pros stretched the season a little bit. They played into December because they had the spotlight all to themselves that time of the year, the colleges were through.

Even so, early December was considered as late as you could sensibly play. In 1934, the title game between the Giants and the Bears was held--daringly--as late as Dec. 9. The Polo Grounds field was frozen so solid that day, the players couldn’t keep their footing. So, in the second half, the Giants switched from cleats to sneakers--and ran away with the game, 30-13. The Bears, in cleats, might as well have been on ice skates.

That was widely considered proof December was too late for a true contest.

But then the dreaded concept “playoff” came into the game. The season stretched to infinity. Title games became post-Christmas. The famous “Greatest Game Ever Played,” the 1958 title game between the Giants and Baltimore Colts, took place Dec. 28.

With franchise expansion, playoffs expanded. “Wild card” came into the lexicon. Into January, as it happened. Finally, the unthinkable occurred: A championship game was scheduled in Green Bay on the last day of December in 1967 when the temperature was well in the frostbite range--minus-16 and dropping. Players looked like the Abominable Snowman or a climber locked in ice since the 14th century by the fourth quarter. Some were hospitalized. The windchill was polar.

Amazingly, they got away with it. In weather that would daunt dog-sled teams, football teams performed. In a season where real bears hibernate, Chicago Bears showed up in short sleeves to throw and catch a frozen football. Doctors are only glad nobody became an amputee.

I bring this up because no team has taken advantage of this grotesque state of affairs as the Green Bay Packers have.

Green Bay, Wis., is probably a drive-and-a-nine-iron from the North Pole. It is exposed to the same Arctic blasts as Nome, Alaska, or Vladivostok, Russia. Daylight in winter is an hour-and-a-half. Summer is July 3. Yet, the National Football Conference champion and the Super Bowl designee is being decided here under conditions where an Eskimo wouldn’t leave the igloo and the name of the home team should be not Packers but Penguins. You don’t try to win so much as you try to survive. It’s a travesty, not a title game.

No team goes to Green Bay in January unintimidated. Visitors should be given a handicap like golfers. A spread like the cards. They should go into the game plus-7 before the kickoff.

It’s important to any invading force to take climate into consideration. Just ask Napoleon. Just ask Hitler. They forgot the Russian winter was like Green Bay’s.

Still, the NFC championship is going to be decided at Green Bay--where the home forces have never lost a playoff game--again this year.

Listen! You want to stake your team’s future on a field where the most common description is “the frozen tundra”?

Even when the home team’s not-so-secret weapon--the climate--is, so to speak, under the weather, it can improvise.

Take Saturday’s game against the San Francisco 49ers. Brett Favre was ready. Reggie White was ready. The ghost of Vince Lombardi presumably was ready. But, at game time, where was the Packers’ MVP--the windchill?

The temperature was a balmy 38. It was raining, not snowing. In fact, the conditions should have made the visiting 49ers feel right at home.

Not to worry. The field, which is the only one I know of which has heating coils under it, was churned up like an enormous bouillabaisse by the first quarter. It was the 49ers who couldn’t handle it. They finally fumbled the game away. They may be used to a wet football up in San Francisco but not one with sleet on it.

Football’s Siberia gets you one way or the other. Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, but the only guys who go out in the mid-January no sun of northern Wisconsin wear cheese hats and long underwear. You might as well not have a Jerry Rice in the sleet and cold where your breath comes out as smoke and your fingers turn to icicles. All cats are gray at night and all football players are equal when your nose turns blue and your fingers won’t bend. Not even the French and German armies could win in those conditions.

Next week, the NFC championship will be decided here once again. It’s either the Dallas Cowboys’ or the Carolina Panthers’ turn in the barrel. America’s Ice House. They will be glad if it’s only sleeting. A team from Texas where you need scarves only the few times a year when a “Blue Norther” comes to town or a team from Charlotte, where the windchill factor is 70 above are probably lighting candles. If it’s the cast from Charlotte, it will give new meaning to the lyrics “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the mo-o-or-ning!”