There's reason to believe that no team will benefit more from the NFL's international marketing efforts than the Green Bay Packers. While statewide fans might grumble about it, an expansion of the Packers' fan base into other countries can't help but benefit the organization in many ways if that turns out to be true.
Think about it.
In my mind's eye, for example, once the Irish learn more about Johnny Blood (aka John McNally), he could become a folk hero in the Emerald Isle. Who knows? The beer vendors in Croke Park might need to stock up on Johnny Blood Red.
Having traveled to Europe multiple times, including multiple trips to the three countries where the Packers have been awarded international marketing rights, it always strikes me how much Europeans know about and cherish their history.
From my experiences, that's certainly true of Ireland, Germany and the United Kingdom – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – where the Packers have been awarded rights by the NFL to build brand awareness and fan engagement.
I was just in Ireland for what was my fourth time with my wife and two daughters two summers ago that included stays in Dublin and Sligo, one of my ancestral homes. Previously, I biked Ireland on my first trip there and drove around the country on another with an Irish calendar as a tour guide. That time, my wife and I visited the 12 towns where the 12 pubs pictured on that calendar were located.
A little more than two years ago, we went to Munich for Oktoberfest. And in 2001, we spent time in Heidelberg, Germany, during a lengthy backpacking excursion through seven European countries. On that trip, we were tracing my late father's footsteps as a soldier in General George Patton's Third Army during World War II.
We also once toured by car England, Scotland and Wales, which included a several-day stay in London.
It just seemed like everywhere we went in those countries, people were proud of their heritage and enjoyed sharing it with visitors. Thus, my guess is it won't take long for overseas football fans to realize, if they haven't already, that no NFL team has a richer history than the Packers.
Let's start with the Irish and Johnny Blood.
If you're reading this from across the pond, the first thing you need to know about him is that his given name was John Victor McNally, but he adopted the persona Johnny Blood for his football life.
The Pro Football Hall of Fame concocted the ridiculous name Johnny (Blood) McNally when he was inducted as a charter member in 1963, and his name appears like that more and more as time passes. But, typically, the only ones who refer to him in that context are those who don't know his story or Packers history.
Back when he played, the writers who knew him well and covered his games never mixed the names. Blood himself never intertwined the two and couldn't have made it clearer as to why.
"I've seen it written that my real name is John Blood McNally and I just dropped the last part for pro football purposes, but that isn't so," Blood explained in 1936. "I was just John McNally until I decided to be Johnny Blood carrying a football."
Both of John Victor McNally's parents, John Victor McNally Sr. and the former Mary Murphy, were offspring of Irish immigrants. His paternal grandparents, William Myles McNally (1827-1914) and Honor McCormick McNally (1834-1916) were born in County Mayo in western Ireland, based on research provided by Todd Kittel, reference and information assistant at the New Richmond Community Library in northwestern Wisconsin. The New Richmond area was home for the McNallys.
Where John's maternal grandparents came from in Ireland – James Murphy (1832-1898) and Mary Ellen McGraw Murphy (1839-1908) – could not be verified.
McNally had adopted the name Blood several years before he joined the Packers in 1929, but then gained considerably more notoriety by playing on the NFL's first three-peat champions from 1929-31. In all, Blood played seven seasons with the Packers and gained such fame for his escapades on and off the field that 70 years after he retired, the 2008 movie "Leatherheads" was produced as a takeoff on his career.
It might have been the only time in history, too, when Hollywood under-dramatized a character in a movie.
What drew Blood, at least in part, to Green Bay was that Prohibition was the law of the land at the time, and the home of the Packers essentially ignored what was the 18th constitutional amendment. Its speakeasys and bordellos never shut down.
"Back about the time I came here to play, federal agents made a raid and arrested 60 or 65 barkeepers," Blood explained when he was honored at a banquet in Green Bay in 1965. "But when it came to court, all of the barkeepers went free and two of the federal agents were thrown in jail. That's what always has impressed me about the spirit of Green Bay."
It's a true story.
Mother Pierre, madam of the raided Green Mill Garden, was sentenced to two months in prison, a slap on the wrist similar to others who were arrested. Federal agents, Ben Finke and Henry Strawn, were sentenced by the same judge to serve three years in Leavenworth, then the largest federal penitentiary in the United States. The barkeeps they arrested banded together and accused them of taking their bribes in the years before the raids.
Blood was pro football's first playmaker, someone who could break a game open with a single play as he once did at Green Bay's old City Stadium.
Apocryphal or not, here was how one of those plays was described in the well-researched book, "The Pro Football Chronicle."
"Johnny Blood once checked into the Packers huddle with a pass play from coach Curly Lambeau. He made the call, then turned to quarterback Arnie Herber and said: 'Arnie, throw it in the direction of Mother Pierre's whorehouse.' Herber, no stranger to the Green Bay nightlife, knew Blood was heading for the goal post at the northeast end of the stadium. The pass was there, so was Blood."
As for John McNally, he, too, had a devil-may-care attitude, but also another side more in line with the Irish people's love of learning and love of words. Call him a scholarly renegade. In fact, if John McNally had not shared his life with Johnny Blood, he might have become another in a long line of famous Irish writers or poets.
"You know, Russ, Johnny is no football bum for all his wanderings," Oliver Kuechle, the sports writer who was maybe closer to Johnny Blood than any other, wrote to his boss Russ Lynch at the Milwaukee Journal in 1944. "I wish I were as well read as he. I wish I could quote poetry with him or discuss economics or philosophy. I had a little joust with him on the Machiavellian theory a short time before he went into the army, for instance, and he very properly put me in my place."
It was no secret among teammates and others that Johnny Blood was a frequent visitor to Mother Pierre's and other similar establishments. But those close to him also claimed that at times, at least, he went there simply to read Shakespeare to the women of the house.
Not surprisingly, Blood – and McNally, when he was wearing his clothes – kept company with the likes of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States and another Irishman; and U.S. Supreme Court justice Byron "Whizzer" White, who was his presenter when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Kennedy once told Blood, "Your name was a household word in our home."
When McNally returned to St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and took over as head football coach in 1950, he also taught economics at the school for three years.
In truth, if not for two other Irishmen who came before Blood, the Packers might not exist today.
One was Cornelius Matthew Murphy, better known as Neil, and manager of the Indian Packing Co. football team in 1920. Murphy was a local sports buff who sold Underwood typewriters for a living.
In 1919, the Packers' maiden season, they played on an open field with no fence or bleachers. The only way they could make money was to pass a hat around the crowd at Hagemeister Park and hope fans would drop some spare change into it.
A year later, the sly Irishman that Murphy was, he somehow convinced the football fans of Green Bay to build a fence around the playing field so he could charge them admission to the games, and the Packers could become profitable.
"We can use anyone who wants to help us," was Murphy's plea in the Green Bay Press-Gazette under a story with a sub-head that read: "Murphy Issues Call For Volunteers; 'Bring Your Hammers Along.'"
Murphy got his fence built plus some bleachers a few weeks later, and the Packers made $6,049.52. Had there been no fence or bleachers constructed at Hagemeister and no profit shown – $6,050 in August 1920 would be almost $100,000 in today's money – it's almost a certainty Green Bay wouldn't have been granted an American Professional Football Association franchise – now the NFL – in August 1921.
Considering the Packers limited support in 1919 and for much of 1920 – some home crowds totaled no more than maybe 800 – one could also claim that it was Rigney Dwyer who more than anyone forged the lasting bond between the Packers and their fans.
Dwyer, whose grandparents traced their roots to County Limerick, Ireland, was a starting end for the Packers in 1919 and '20, when they were a semipro team, and players needed real jobs to make a living.
Nicknamed "Pig Iron" and a railroad worker just like his dad, "Rigs," as he was also called, was working the night shift as a switchman for the Milwaukee Road when he slipped and was crushed by a moving engine. Within 48 hours, doctors amputated his left arm and left leg.
His teammates also had their first Thanksgiving Day game to play against the Stambaugh (Mich.) Miners and dedicated it to Rigs. "Remember Dwyer" was the mantra of the day, and the score of the game was relayed to Dwyer's hospital bed after each quarter.
At the same time, fans dropped off flowers for Dwyer and swamped telephone operators at the hospital seeking updates on his condition. The Packers, in turn, planned a benefit game 10 days later and launched a fund drive to help defray Dwyer's medical bills.
Buddy Levitas, a grief-stricken 9-year-old who later became a friend of Vince Lombardi's, emptied his piggy bank and pitched in $4.35 to the Dwyer fund.
In the end, business manager Neil Murphy visited Dwyer, his fellow Irishman, in the hospital and presented him with a check for $4,053.02.
Dwyer wrote a thank you letter to the Press-Gazette three days later and told fans their "kindness and sympathy" had lifted his spirits. Murphy said, "It's cooperation of this kind that helps make life worth living."
Thanks to that Irish connection, that love affair between fans and their football team continues today.
Actually, several of the 25 original Packers in 1919 had Irish roots, including: William Jennings Gallagher, who was Curly Lambeau's equal as a star back; Clement Dwyer, Rigney's brother and the starting quarterback in the Packers' first-ever game; Orlo "Toody" McLean, starting quarterback in four other games; and tackle Andy Muldoon.
In fact, Willard "Big Bill" Ryan, the first coach of the Packers that year, was Irish.
Although he played in only two regular-season games with the Packers in 1925, one of the most famous names in their team history was another Irishman, "Sleepy Jim" Crowley. He gained greater fame before joining the Packers as the star left halfback in coach Knute Rockne's widely celebrated "Four Horsemen" backfield.
Crowley grew up in Green Bay and played high school football there under Curly Lambeau, who doubled as coach at East High early in his Packers career. Later, Crowley coached Lombardi, one of the "Seven Blocks of Granite," at Fordham University.
One of the best clutch players and biggest characters on the Lombardi teams of the 1960s was Max McGee. Katie Foust, archivist at the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame, found in an old press guide that he was listed as being Irish. Or maybe it was Scotch-Irish from what I could find, although I haven't been able to confirm that.
McGee was no Johnny Blood, but he also broke more than his share of rules and curfews.
The actual details are sketchy, but he was the center of attention after the first Super Bowl, when he reputedly sneaked out of the Packers' hotel in Los Angeles after bed check the night before the game to meet two stewardesses – now flight attendants – getting little to no sleep and then playing a starring role.
He was 34 years old and caught only four passes all season after being a starter for his first nine years. But when starting receiver Boyd Dowler went down with an injury, McGee stepped in and almost doubled his season total with seven catches for 138 yards and two touchdowns as the Packers crushed the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10.
Much like Blood, McGee had a knack for producing in big games, even when it entailed sleepless nights and hangovers. When Lombardi lauded Hornung for being "the greatest player I've ever coached," he also said of McGee after that Super Bowl, "He is probably the best clutch player in the history of pro football."
Hornung had two Irish grandmothers, both a paternal and maternal, but his dad was German.
More recently, former Packers team president Mark Murphy and former coach Mike McCarthy were Irish through and through.
In fact, I recently suggested to Mark that he might be related to Johnny Blood, whose mother was a Murphy. "That would be something," he responded. "Murphy is pretty common in Ireland, though."
For more on Johnny Blood, check this previous story at packers.com.
Editor's Note: In the upcoming weeks, there will be two more parts posted on former Packers with ties to Germany and the United Kingdom.
