A Small Town in a Billionaire’s League

SilentPunt Podcast 224 / October 2, 2026

Being a Green Bay Packers owner won’t pay your mortgage. It won’t even get you season tickets. But it does give you a stake in one of the strangest arrangements in professional sports: a community-owned football team surviving in a league of billionaires. Tom Nelson, author of The Green and Gold Standard: A People’s History of the Green Bay Packers, joins me to talk about how a small Wisconsin city pulled that off - and the people who repeatedly stepped in when the team needed saving.

We get into Tom’s first trip to Lambeau, courtesy of a school janitor; the complicated Curly Lambeau; a coach whose film study required an investigation; and a franchise that occasionally confused honoring its past with hiring it. We also discuss Tom’s work helping save a Wisconsin paper mill, his approach to writing history, and why he believes private equity could present a serious challenge to the Packers’ future. Football provides the setting, but the questions reach well beyond it: what makes something belong to a community, and what does it take to keep it there?

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📚 Chapters

00:00 Introducing Tom Nelson and The Green and Gold Standard01:12 What Does It Mean to Own the Packers?03:34 Tom Nelson: Public Service and Saving a Paper Mill06:52 A Janitor, Season Tickets, and a Lifelong Packers Fan08:30 Lee Remmel and Maria’s Packers Connection09:58 The Thanksgiving Game That Helped Save the Packers13:54 Passing the Hat—and Passing the Football15:11 The Complicated Curly Lambeau18:15 Jack Vainisi: Laying the Groundwork for Lombardi22:06 When the Packers Couldn’t Let Go of the Past25:53 Dan Devine and the Toothpick Test27:51 Bob Harlan and the Reinvention of Lambeau30:55 Private Equity and the Packers’ Future37:03 Writing Books While Holding Down a Day Job40:08 Research Rabbit Holes and an Ice Bowl Dispute43:00 Closing Thoughts

🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬 🎥 🎬

You can also watch this conversation on YouTube, where, as far as I can tell, the audience mostly consists of my mother.

Come keep her company.