DUNCAN, BC—The Sportstrotter has a lot in common with Santa Claus: like Old St. Nick, I can’t be everywhere in the world at once, so I have helpers reporting on who’s been naughty or nice in various far-flung sporting locations.

(Another way we are similar: like Santa, I have a goat-faced companion named Krampus who roams the streets in the weeks before Christmas, frightening children with rusty chains and bells and birching young girls. Seriously, pre-Christian Alps pagans, is this how you people celebrated the holidays? Whatever happened to “ho ho ho?”)

So when my buddies Matty and Max made one of, if not the essential NFL fan pilgrimages, I asked them to file a full report on their trip to Lambeau Field in Green Bay to see the fabled Packers vs. the Oakland Raiders.

And if you’re saying to yourself, “Wait, wasn’t that last weekend’s Packers game? Is the Sportstrotter filing NFL reports a full week after the game took place?” I should mention that it was totally common practice in my youth for Santa to show up with mine and my Sportstrotter siblings’ presents a week late. You know, cause he had other more important stuff to do…

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Before we get to the Lambeau tales, three thoughts on former US Senator George J. Mitchell’s salacious report on steroid use in baseball, which was released last Thursday, December 13:

1. With the document clocking in at 409 pages, one wonders whether Mitchell hired Thomas Pynchon as his editor on this “report.” Seriously, how long does it take to tell what we already knew — that a ton of baseball players used steroids in the late ’90s and early ’00s, and the owners didn’t care to stop them because, as two of the era’s still-untainted superstars noted quite succinctly, “chicks dig the long ball.”

(I can’t adequately express how much I love the above clip — the irony of shoo-in future Hall-of-Famers’ Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux jealously contemplating the appeal of the man who saved post-1994-strike baseball — and who has essentially been blackballed from the Hall of Fame as a result of actions that fueled this revitalization — is delicious.)

2. But seriously, download the report and read pp. 127-257 (pp. 175-305 in the .pdf version) for all the important who-shot-up-what, and who-jammed-which-needles-into-whose-buttock-type-details. Mitchell and his staff kept Pynchon’s stylistic pen away from this section and laid out the nitty-gritty about 88 former players’ steroid use. Sitting with the document last week in the Toronto Reference Library, I felt like I was reading the sports fan’s equivalent of a US Weekly “Best Celebrity Scandals of the Decade” special report. But with the footnoted, legal-document-lookingness of the pdf, none of the patrons sitting around me had any idea of what dumpster-diving reading I was up to.

The sections about Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte are particularly vivid in their who-shot-up-who-and-how-often detail – I’d love to see the “chicks dig the long ball” commercial remade with these guys, only instead of running up stairs and hitting balls off a tee like Maddux and Glavine, we cut to grainy shots of Roger and Andy jamming syringes into each other’s asses in a seedy hotel room in Tampa.

3. While a frightening number of former players from my favourite team, the Toronto Blue Jays, were fingered by Mitchell (we were, after all, the team that had the unquestionably altered Jose Canseco mentoring our young players in the clubhouse in the late ’90s), two current Jays apparently hit the juice just before coming to town. I’m interested to see how fans react to Troy Glaus and Gregg Zaun next season, considering I attended quite a few Jays-Yankees games the past three years where the loudest cheers were Schadenfreude-laden chants of “Steeeeeh-roids! Steeeeeh-roids!” reserved for the media-demonized Jason Giambi. In Troy Glaus’s case, don’t you think this clip simply screams ‘roid rage?

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Ok, as for Max and Matty’s pilgrimage from Chicago to Lambeau Field last weekend: since this column is already approaching Mitchell-report length, I present for you the boys’ essential take-home comments on the game-day experience that revolves around The Frozen Tundra, the 72,928-seat field that opened 50 years ago this fall:

1. Max grew up in California and is a self-loathing Raiders fan, so he bought the tickets and drove the three-hour trip to Green Bay in his old-man car, a 2005 Lincoln LS Express. (I’m not making this up — Max is a 70-year-old man trapped in the body of a 26-year-old former national wrestling champion. It’s bizarre and frightening).

2. Since Green Bay, Wisconsin, with a metro population of 226,778, is by far the smallest city of any big-four North American Sports franchise, it turns out that there’s tons of tailgating space around the downtown stadium. This even includes, as my friends discovered, the local gas station parking lots, where cars are packed so tight that one could not possibly reach the pumps to refuel a car.

3. Profile of Packers tailgaters: “Guys with headgear made from animal skin, who cook delicious sausages,” says Matty. Max added: “I thought I was at a deer hunters’ convention … either that or ‘hunter’s-gear orange’ is the new fashion fad sweeping the nation.”

4. Max and Matty bravely wore Raiders sweatshirts, even though Matt’s a diehard Chicago Bears fan. Apparently, during the pre-game tailgate, a clandestine fellow Bears fan (the Bears and Packers are bitter division rivals) took a photo of the boys pretending to urinate on the front bumper of a tricked-out Packers “super bus” to send to his friend, a Raiders fan who couldn’t make it to the game.

5. Yes, the guys actually made it inside the stadium! Apparently, the metal benches that provide the majority of the stadium seating get chilly in sub-zero temperatures. Although their seats were nine rows deep in the end zone, even with significant encouragement Max was unable to convince any Raiders to make the famed Lambeau Leap after scoring a touchdown. Maybe because the visitors only managed a single score?

6. Yes, the visiting Raiders were thoroughly dominated in a 38-7 final. The single worst Packer game-day tradition, according to Matty? “Every time the Pack scores, they play ‘Bang the Drum All Day‘ by Todd Rundgren. Which doesn’t even make sense. The stupid song never bothered me so much on TV, but now I don’t think I can hear it without having a seizure. Packer fans are OK on a one-on-one basis, but they’re intolerable as a whole. We split with about eight minutes to play trailing 31-7 to beat traffic, which was a great call as we heard another round of ‘Bang the Drum All Day’ as we were leaving.”

All I can say is that when I think of the Packers and their workmanlike superstar, Brett Favre, I’m reminded of the time the teacher told me I should stay after school — she had caught me pounding on the desk with my hands. But my licks was so hot, I made the teacher wanna dance. Todd Rundgren loves Packers football, baby.

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Posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 5:59 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.