GREEN BAY, Wis. — Once upon a time, Packers defensive line coach Greg Blache was the only assistant coach/team barber in the NFL. It was the late ’80s, and it didn’t take long for Green Bay’s new defensive line coach to realize that the team’s African-American players were regularly driving 120 miles south to Milwaukee just to get lines and fades unavailable in Titletown. So Blache, who’d made extra cash cutting hair in college at Notre Dame, began plying his second craft at the Packers facility. Occasionally players who neither trusted Blache’s skills nor wanted to make the drive south could turn to a barber from Milwaukee who made semi-regular trips to Green Bay. He was there, Blache remembers, to cut the hair of inmates at the local prison.
“We had black guys on the team, but it was still the whitest community in the NFL,” Blache, now retired, says from his home outside of Green Bay. “If you were black in Green Bay, they just thought you were a Packer.”
In the first version of NFL free agency, players only moved on to a new locale when the teams that drafted them wanted nothing more to do with them, and the Packers were getting the dregs of the dregs. In 1992 a man nicknamed “the Minister of Defense” led an antitrust lawsuit against the league that resulted in true free agency. That was great for players—after their rookie contract was over, they could now offer their services to any team in the league, choosing the team and the town in which they wanted to play—but it sent a chill through the scouts and personnel men employed by the most successful NFL franchise of the league’s first seven decades. Thanks to free agency, the task of assembling a competitive roster in small-town Wisconsin was about to get significantly tougher.
“Among players, Green Bay was depicted as some Russian place where you go and no one ever hears from you,” says former NFL tight end Keith Jackson, a first-round draft pick of the Eagles in 1988 who would go on to play for the Dolphins and the Packers.
Then something unprecedented happened. Upon becoming an unrestricted free agent in 1993, a player who had been named to six consecutive All-Pro teams in Philadelphia made a shock decision that would change the course of a franchise and the tenor of a town.
“Before that decision guys would say, ‘if Green Bay drafts me, I don’t want to go.’ It was Siberia,” says Jackson. “But Reggie White saw something different about it.”
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