Inside the World of a Super Packer Fan

If you catch Andrew Zimmerman any given Sunday between September and February, you know what kind of Packer fan he is.

Not just because he’s sitting in the same seats at Lambeau Field his family has had since the 1960s. And it’s not because he’s missed only one game in well over a decade, regardless of work, weather, holidays or birthdays. And it’s not even how he suits up on game day with articles of clothing that span just about every decade of the team’s existence, from his original ’70s era beanie, to his modern throwback vest.

It’s the fact that he knows that every jersey, every parking spot, every word of every true Packer fan creates a body of superstition that hits just as hard as the 250-pound linebackers on the field, and he’ll tell you the same.

“We call the Zimmerman family the jinx factor,” he says, following with a laugh.

“There’s a whole gamut of superstition amongst Packer fans in general and I think most die-hard sports fans. You see a lot of crazy stuff and gets it in your head so much that you get superstitious about things.”

“So for me, it’s usually the attire that I’m wearing. If they’ve had a good day, I try to wear the same jersey that I had on that day, or the same stocking cap, with the same shoes. My wife is still laughing about this but when they were losing at half time on Sunday, I changed my shirt and put on my Bart Starr jersey which I’ve worn to some games. It’s got an overall win record as the Zimmerman family likes to say.”

In a state of super fans where the Packers are almost a state religion, Zimmerman is a super-super fan. The die hard. To he and many others, the state’s pro football team has risen above mere sports. It’s become an identity.

And that’s just the beginning. The coin toss. The kickoff.

The man himself isn’t a far stretch from those you’ll find on the field. He’s got short dark hair that juts out from underneath his green and gold ball-topped beanie and facial hair that takes a 5 o’clock shadow into the evening. He’s 34, classically handsome by most standards, with all-black bicep and forearm tattoos that partially show when he pulls his sleeves back to his elbows. He’s taller, 6’2” maybe, and muscular, the kind of build that is normally a bit intimidating.

But he’s not.

In between bouts of casting out Don Majkowski’s 1989 season stats or win-loss records from the ’60s, like lines recited verbatim from some kind of unwritten team encyclopedia, and the myriad of jovial recollections from games past that make for first-class bar-side banter, there is an undeniable air of calm. The kind of poise felt in the suspended moments before a great feat by a man in his element.

He speaks with passion so thick it’s almost physically tangible, rolling around like a fresh ball of dough that he shapes as much with his words as he does with his hands. Even at the peak of an enthusiastic story or the depths of a frustrated rant, the intensity, the tone, it’s inviting.

Just about everyone who knows him seems to agree.

“He has a wide-eyed enthusiasm that I wish I could bottle and sell,” says Christopher Gold, a friend and bandmate. “And when he really gets going he gets very boisterous and loud.  He will very often end a joke (or a Packers rant) with his hands flailing.”

And yet, even with this unassailable magnetism, he is still raw, real, and honest. And more than anything else, he is unapologetic.

“I hate cheeseheads,” he says with a smirk, disapprovingly shaking his head.

“For some reason everyone seems to focus on them because they’re ridiculous and they think all Packer fans are like that. I’m not going to create a costume or a character just to use as an excuse. It’s more about utility and being able to support the Packers without focusing more on your attire and your persona than on the field.”

His views of the organization, the team, and the players are similarly pragmatic, but not unlike those who choose to address political issues instead of playing follow the leader, it is not without criticism.

“If the team is playing poorly, I’m not going to deny it. I’m going to talk about it. Sometimes I’ll talk about how bad they’re playing and people will get pissed and say ‘Oh, how can you say that?!’ and criticize me for saying so. Well, I can say it because it’s true.”

He’s always been this way. At least, as long as he can remember.

“Whether it’s my uncle and his kids or any of that, every single kid is brought up the same. We’re all ‘Don’t jinx it. Don’t count your eggs before they hatch. This is the Packers, they can screw anything up.’ We’re always the pessimistic, realistic Packer fans. We’re very superstitious. Ever since I’ve been watching games.”

Raised in Rosendale, a small anywhere-Wisconsin town that punctuates the route from Madison to Green Bay just about dead center, Zimmerman grew up a sports fan thanks to his parents. Akin to many other small high schools in Wisconsin, sports were the centerpiece of life. They provided opportunity, and entertainment, and with both parents working as teachers in this sports-centric environment, he played just about everything under the sun from elementary school until he reached college, including football.

This is where his love of the Packers began.

“My first memories of the Packers are probably the ’87 season. I was only 5 or 6 years old. I remember, and this is going to sound funny, but I remember every single Sunday the Packers played at noon because they were so bad that they never got a nationally televised game or a Monday night game, or anything like that. It was perfect. So I remember every single week, growing up from the time I can remember anything, my dad and I would sit and we would watch the first half of the game, we’d make sandwiches at half time, and then we’d watch the second half.”

Zimmerman’s passion came to fruition at a strange time in the team’s history. By 1987, the Packers had only seen three winning seasons in 20 years since winning Super Bowl II in 1968. His first memories are mostly of the Lindy Infante era, the head coach who acted as the last bastion of Packer fan suffrage. It was a particularly bad stretch of four years that saw no more than six wins per season only once. But it wasn’t a winning record that Zimmerman fell in love with.

September 4, week one of the 1988 season was the first game he ever saw at Lambeau Field. The Packers played the Los Angeles Rams. Zimmerman was with his father and uncle.

“I remember as we were walking to the stadium the LA Rams were walking in. I remember seeing Jim Everett and that core of receivers and that whole offense walk by me and thinking ‘Holy shit, Jim Everett is like eight feet tall!’”

“Randy Wright was the starter at the time and he had a terrible game. I think they were actually down close to 30 points in the 4th quarter and they put (Don) Majkowski in. And he ends up coming in and scrambling for a first down and scoring on a touchdown pass after that. It was just an unbelievable experience even though they got completely blown out.”

One of few highlights on a mess of a team at the time, “The Majik Man”,  as he was colloquially known, became the most logical place to find hope. But for Zimmerman, it was a bit more than that. Majkowski’s burgeoning talent, on-field persona and knack for comebacks signaled a change in the wind for the team.

“He was kind of like the changing of the guard at quarterback from Randy Wright, who was terrible, into the newer era where they started to get good again.”

More than all else, Majkowski ended up being the seed that helped to grow a legacy of superstition that grew exponentially as the years went on.

“It’s always been a running joke in my family. Majkowski was the first jersey I ever had. And he got hurt after I got the jersey, which is kind of how I think the jersey jinx started to manifest itself. You know, it’s so funny. Almost every jersey of every player I’ve ever gotten, they’ve gotten hurt. It’s unbelievable.”

He’s really not kidding though. Every jersey and every article of Packers-related clothing that he owns has a story, including injuries, bad games, bad seasons and all. Each with its own unique record. He’s even tried to challenge the jinx with Donald Driver, one of the Packers’ most tenured receivers.

“I went against my jersey-jinx strategy. And I thought, ‘Well, he’s at the tail end of his career.’ And I thought, ‘I love Donald Driver, great player, great representative of the Packers. He’s probably unjinxable at this point,’ which is the stupidest thing you can say. I bought this jersey and wore it for the game.”

“Everybody in our section of season tickets, they all know me and how our family is very superstitious with the jinx and the jersey jinx especially. None of us buy any jerseys of any players, in the Zimmerman clan. We just don’t. So I bought this and I was getting shit from it already, for buying it.”

“Driver drops two passes. So I take the thing off, and the very next play is the play where he catches the ball and breaks like six tackles and goes for a touchdown. And everybody in our section is laughing hysterically and pointing at me because I had literally just took off the jersey. I take it off and the next play is the highlight of his career.”

If there is something larger at work here, he knows it. As he narrates each story with the wild dynamic rise and fall of game-time announcers, color commentary and all, he predicates everything on knowing exactly how it works. It’s a system. There is logic. Logic that must look absolutely insane from an outsider’s perspective. And yet, at the same time, he frequently acknowledges that it really boils down to belief. A complex and universally pervasive belief amongst fans, and more importantly, his family, but a belief nonetheless. And the way he cracks a smile out of one side of his mouth when he concludes admitting exactly that, you can tell that he likes it that way.

“’Is that a new jersey?’” he says, mocking others’ questions and responding as himself. “’No, no, I’ve had it a while I just changed it up because it’s undefeated this year at home when I wear it.’”

“Everybody understands that. That’s a big part of the superstition. It’s really making sure that we’re all in sync mentally with the superstitious aspect of it, whether it’s what we wear, where we park when we go to Lambeau, getting the exact same spot, the same parking lot… We have the same CD that we listen to when we tailgate which is like a clip of all the ’90s Packer highlights. We’ve been doing that for a long time.”

And when he says a long time, he means it. His family has owned season tickets since the 1960s. He himself started going to games at just 6 or 7 years old.

As a boy, Zimmerman went to only about one game a year. By 14, he was attending multiple. By 18, he was at nearly every home game, playoffs included. His dedication is self-evident when you find out that he’s missed only one game in over 15 years between attending himself or watching them somewhere else. One might say it could be the body of the great equalizer. That maybe all that jinxing built up enough opposing force to allow him the luck to witness so many games. Or maybe he’s just good at scheduling. Or both.

What did it take to miss that one game? A wedding of close friends, planned a year in advance.

“I wasn’t even thinking ahead at all, to think of what the Packers schedule was like. It was a total fumble on my part. But of course we’re going to go, they asked us to be there for their wedding.”

He almost missed two, in fact. The first, Brett Favre’s second return to Lambeau Field after signing with the Vikings. It was a game that couldn’t be missed and it left him scrambling to find a sports bar in Mexico only hours after they arrived in town for the wedding.

“We arrived at the resort that day. And I was like, I love this place, this is great, but where’s a sports bar, I need to find the Packer game.”

He did find one, much to his delight, but on the way home from Mexico he wasn’t so lucky. After he ended up with food poisoning that made his flights back home abnormally brutal, he did his best to avoid everyone he was traveling with in fear of finding out the score.

“I successfully get home, I go to sleep, I wake up in the morning to find out we had a power outage, and the DVR never recorded the game. So I went through all that stuff to make sure that I could watch the game in a normal routine only to find that it didn’t record. And then I saw the 5 minute summary on NFL network and they won like nine to nothing on three field goals.”

And right in line with everything else, these are the penalties incurred by the power of the jinx. You missed the game? You pay for it.

He sits quietly after these moments, seemingly contemplating them all again in a matter of seconds.

Although luck, timing and coincidence are large factors in keeping this streak going, a nine-to-five Monday-through-Friday type of job helps. As an IT consultant, he has flexibility that allows him to book his own flights and maintain his schedule accordingly. But, of course, setting precedents with family and friends doesn’t hurt either.

“I think in the 2010 season, one of my best friends had his birthday party scheduled, and it was right during the Falcons-Packers playoff game, which of course, he wouldn’t have known when he scheduled it. But I told him, ‘Dude, that’s why you do it on a Friday night. During playoff season? Do it on a Friday night. There’s no games on Fridays, there are games on Saturdays and Sundays.’”

“So I had to miss his birthday because there was no way I could watch it in a party setting when I knew people there weren’t going to be watching. They were just going to be casually engaged in the game. And I’m a little bit psycho, so I didn’t want to make anybody uncomfortable or break anybody’s stuff or be an idiot.”

Zimmerman readily admits that his passion for the team might seem a bit obsessive to outsiders, but it seems that those who know him best know exactly why it works the way it does.

“His intensity about the Packers was only strange to me until I realized that he’s equally intense about most things he does,” says Gold. “He loves the things he loves, completely.  He loves Radiohead, which means he knows every word to every song from every record.  He loves “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” which means he can quote almost the entire series.  And that’s how he loves the Packers.”

“Andrew is, without a doubt, the biggest Packer fan I have ever met. And when they fail him he is able to find a little bit of humor in it. I might compare it to being a pet owner (which he is, joyously).  You love your dog, even when they poop on the floor.  I have seen Andrew’s reaction when the Packers poop on the floor, and it can best be summed up as, “Well, I still love ya.  I’m not happy, but I’m not going anywhere.”

And to date, he hasn’t. He attributes most of that largely to his family legacy, something he wears with a badge of honor every time he speaks of it. In fact, it is one of the few consistent family ties left, but one that holds all the more value because of it.

“Honestly, Packer games are the only big Zimmerman family-related event that we do all year. Because everybody’s families are so big, we don’t do Christmases or holidays anymore because it’s not realistic. But the way that we celebrate being a fan is pretty uniform across the gamut of all my relatives that are sitting in those seats and part of that tradition.”

And it’s a tradition that is shared with many Packer families. It’s something that is passed down from one generation of fanatics to the next. It’s something enriched with each family’s unique history. Something steeped in the great Midwestern work ethic, sweetened by undying devotion, cooled ever so slightly by patience, and sipped by every person laden in green and gold that enters the gates of Lambeau Field.

Maybe it tastes like tea or beer or soda, or something completely different altogether, but it’s something that has its root in tenure, in tradition, and it’s something that can be felt by everyone from once-in-a-lifetime game goers to those who have had season tickets since they’ve been offered. It makes Lambeau Field something special and it makes the fans even more so. Some share stories, some share gear, some just share the experience. The Zimmermans, they share it all, plus their own brand of superstition.

“I’m sure it’s a Zimmerman thing, as far as the psychotic nature of our passion and irrational jinx factor alliances that we have. But it also makes things super interesting. Only the Zimmerman family, as we say, understands the jinxing that we’ve done over the years to Packer games… The results are astounding. Of just the stuff that we’ve jinxed. Or at least we believe that anyway.”

And really, what else is there beyond belief? Belief is what gives order to chaos. Belief is what gives significance to randomness. It’s how we find substance. We are all pareidoliac creatures searching for something more meaningful in a world that quite honestly makes very little sense sometimes.

That’s probably why we all need equal parts of belief and relief.

“I think that it’s extremely important that in everybody’s lives they have something that they can shut off their work life and take themselves out and enjoy something. For a lot of people, sports is that outlet. I’m lucky I have two of those things. The Packers and music. Some people don’t have anything, they struggle with that kind of stuff. Or they like the Bears.”

So if you do run into him, especially during football season, offer to buy him a beer and ask him about Don Majkowski. Because the green and gold he wears are just colors, they’ll only tell you so much. But being a Packer fan like Andrew Zimmerman, that’s an identity.