Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

A lot has been written about how to select a good team. So you may well be wondering why would I blog about something like that. Well, the answer is that this post is not about what you expect.

Today is a Saturday, so I am not writing about business or Entrepreneurship.When you start watching a new sport, the game may entertain you. But things get really good when you choose a side, that is, you select a team and go from observer to fan.

For instance, in Argentina the big, big sport is Futbol (Soccer) and I was taught since very little to be a Boca fan, because my grand father was, and my father too. In a sense, I did not choose to be a Boca fan (even when I am thankful to my grand dad. When you get involved with a new sport, such as American Football, as a grown up it is unclear how you can choose who to root for.

Well, there are several ways to go about it, not all of them equally good from my standpoint.

1) Those who root for the Champion: this is the one I like the least. That fan starts watching and falls for the team that wins. That is how Dallas or San Francisco acquired the largest fan bases in South America in the 90s. I want to see them now. In this decade, Patriots fans proliferated for exactly the same reason.

2) Those who look for some quirky geographic link: I have a friend who is a fan of Atlanta, a small soccer team in the lower divisions in Argentina. When it came to choose a Football team, he became a fan of the Atlanta Falcons.

3) Those who select based on the colors or the symbols: Another friend who is a Boca fan selected the Rams because the colors are similar (Note to River fans: no city in the US has a team with a nickname such as “the Chickens”!).

4) Those who are as crazy as I am: I started watching Football some 15 years ago and since all teams are in large cities, all where based in places I knew about. Some I had been to, some not, but all sounded familiar and I had a vague idea of where they were in the map. All of them? No, not really. There was only one place I had never evern heard of and I bet most of you outside the US neither: the city of Green Bay. Since that moment, I am an unconditional fan of the Green Bay Packers.

Later came the knowledge that the team had a glorious past, a promising QB (who ended up being the best ever statistically) and an unparalleled fan base.

Some fascinating facts about Green Bay and the Packers:

- Green Bay is a city with 100,000 inhabitants. Something like Tandil in Argentina, Delicias in Chihuahua, México or Cáceres in Extremadura, España. Despite that, the City Stadium (the famous Lambeau Field) can seat 72,000. Even with some people coming to the games from nearby towns, almost the entire city is there when the Packers play.

- Tickets to attend the games cannot be bought for a particular game, since the Stadium is sold out as season tickets. That has been like that non stop since 1960. The waiting list has today almost 80,000 people and since season tickets can be inherited only about 70 are available every year. The estimate is that if you get on the waiting list today, you will get your tickets in the year 3,074.

- A good part of the City streets have names of players and coaches. That is as if in the Boca neighborhood you could stand at the corner of Maradona and Riquelme. Or in Nuñez in Alonso and Labruna.

- Green Bay is in the state of Wisconsin, a little North of Milwaukee, by the shore of Lake Michigan and is the 25° coldest city in all of the US, with an average low in January of -14°C (7°F).

- All US professional sports teams (Basket, Football, Hockey, Baseball) are privately owned and for profit. Except the Packers. The Packers are non-profit and have over 112,000 shareholders, many of them citizens on Green Bay. The last share subscription was in 1997 and I am still lamenting I did not get one.

I have now uncovered one of the secret and evil purposes of this blog. Not only I want to turn all the readers into Football nuts. I also want to make you all Green Bay Packers fans, or, as they are normally called, cheeseheads.

In a future post I will give a virtual tour of the City and the Stadium, based on the pictures and videos of my two visits to Green Bay.