Aaron Rodgers Coming to Minnesota – For Real This Time
Tom Woldum
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Earlier this season, I wrote an article for PurplePTSD.com that stated, satirically, that as a blogger I needed to master the art of clickbait. I suggested a series of nearly-to-completely ludicrous headlines that might raise my visibility among readers, clickers, and search engines everywhere—and even used one of them as the actual headline for the article: “Aaron Rodgers Coming to Minnesota”. I suggested then that the Rodgers headline was a natural for Packers Week – which is now upon us in full force. Using that headline, the article became the greatest (and, quite possibly only) hit of my blogging career to date. Nothing whips up the public in these parts like any kind of fuel poured on the fire of the Vikings-Packers rivalry. That article went “viral” within 6 hours, and boosted my readership by roughly twenty times what one of my regular columns would garner.
I’m not too proud to try this shameless tactic again—but this time, of course, I speak the truth. Aaron Rodgers, along with the rest of the Green Bay Packers, will indeed come to Minnesota, to take on the Vikings on Sunday–and to be clear, they will promptly leave immediately after the game.
I must admit the viral aspect of that article caught me off guard, but in hindsight it shouldn’t have. The passion that folks who root for these two franchises have for their teams leads to a consistent state of hysteria whenever they enter one another’s orbit. If there’s one event that occurs in Minneapolis that can bring together men and women, Republicans and Democrats, optimists and pessimists, meat eaters and vegans, and even residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul, it’s the annual visit of The Pack to US Bank Stadium. Each year, when this game comes upon us, we are all one, united in our agreement that it’s the most important thing to occur in our town since Father Hennepin, Pig’s Eye Parent and the Pillsbury Dough Boy joined together on the banks of St. Anthony to found the Twin Cities and talk trash about the Packers.
What we’re not so united about are the logistics of this rivalry. There is, after all, a strong contingent of Packer fans living among us, hiding in plain sight, throughout the metro area. There are couples who have somehow fallen in love despite one being a Viking fan, the other a Packer fan. Some families (mine included) have somehow managed to love and adore one another even as one or more members inexplicably break away and join up with the other side. Though the animosity is real, it’s clear that at least some of us are willing to make exceptions.
What greater exception was there, after all, than the glorious year that was the Brett-Favre-Comes-To-Minnesota season of 2009? For my money, the most fun I’ve ever had watching this team was the year Favre successfully completed a long con against his former employers, pulling the old fake-retirement trick, setting down temporary roots in New York, and then one day helicoptering into the Vikings practice facility like an international dignitary or a Special Forces operative, joining up with his former rivals, linked by a mutual desire—nay, need—to kick the Packers’ collective asses. We all instantly dropped any animosity we held towards the quarterback that toyed with our emotions for a decade and a half, and together, he, the rest of the Vikings and a few million purple-and-gold fans rode that lovefest into a season sweep of the Packers, then coming oh-so-close to winning the NFC Championship Game. Of course, the next year Favre was still recovering from Bountygate-inflicted injuries, limping through his final season in the NFL, while Rodgers and the Packers swept the Vikings right back on their way to winning Super Bowl XLV.
This brings us to the crux of the issue with this rivalry of ours. Although it’s been pretty evenly matched over the years (the Packers lead 62-54-3) these games still prey on the inferiority complex we all carry within our collective psyche. On the one hand, the Vikings have been a worthy foil (unlike, say, the Lions, over whom the Packers hold a 78-42-5 lead since 1960) but on the other hand, the larger picture says the Packers have 13 league championships including four Super Bowl victories. The Vikings, of course, have zero, and haven’t even participated in a Super Bowl since the seventies.
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We all share the haunting knowledge that we might not play a bigger game this year, or next, or any year to come. That may be a bit irrational, but Viking fans often fail on the rationality test, particularly where this rivalry comes in. I’ve heard fans say many times that they would actually prefer to see the Packers lose than have their Vikings win. In a league that grants playoff entry to several wild-card teams each year, this is a wish that makes no sense whatsoever. I suspect many fans would consider the Packer game a bigger game than any of our occasional first-round playoff appearances. It’s almost like the Packer game here at home each year is our Super Bowl.
Maybe the most humbling aspect of this rivalry is the fact that our fiercest rivals don’t even consider us their fiercest rivals. The team that inspires the Packers’ most intense competitive fervor, the media, players, and fans in Green Bay would all tell you, is not the Vikings, but the Chicago Bears. In tiny little Green Bay (a.k.a “Titletown”) the view of the Minnesota fan base is scarcely different than the isn’t-that-cute, virtual-pat-on-the-head indifference that New Yorkers bestow on us when the Yankees roll over the Twins time and again, referring to Minneapolis as “flyover land” and our city as the “Mini Apple” (although we did that to ourselves). Green Bay, Wisconsin sees us basically the same way. It’s maddening, but we take it, because deep inside we understand it all and we’re powerless to change the storyline.
So when our football team can make the storyline fresh by handing defeat to the greatest rivals we have, we can forget all about how humbling and maddening it all is, and for a day or a week, we can revel in the victory in its own right, and dream that it’s just the start of something more, something really big, something that will permanently erase our inferiority complex and elevate us to some sort of legitimacy. We need our football team to do this for us, and don’t even want to think about how we’ll feel if they don’t.
This year, like every year, it all starts by beating the Packers.
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