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Catching Up With . . .
Bart Starr, Green Bay Packers Legend
August 25, 1975
Posted: Tue October 6, 1998
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(Heinz Kluetmeier)
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In
the seven years following the departure of coach Vince
Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers floundered. Hoping for
deliverance from a string of sub-.500 seasons, the team
hired Lombardi's best pupil, Bart Starr, to take over in
1975. Starr's only coaching
experience had been as Green Bay's quarterbacks coach in '72,
the season after he'd retired. What he did have, what he
has always had, was fierce loyalty and a sense of duty.
"I had a love affair with the Packers," says
Starr, now 64. "How do you say no when
they ask you to step
up?"
The Alabama-born son of an Air Force sergeant, Starr was
for 16 years Green Bay's on-field leader, a Hall of Fame
quarterback who guided the Pack to five NFL championships
and was named
MVP of the first two Super Bowls. Coaching was a different
story.
In nine seasons Starr went 52-76-3 and squeaked into the
playoffs once, in the
strike-shortened 1982 season. Some Green Bay fans even heckled their hero.
"It was rather easy for that to happen," Starr
says. "I
wasn't very successful." Starr was fired in '83, and
he and
his wife, Cherry, moved to Phoenix, where they joined a group
that was hoping to land an expansion
franchise.
A July 1988 tragedy took them back to Alabama. The younger
of their two sons, Bret, then age 24, was living in Tampa
and doing well in his recovery from a cocaine addiction.
But Bret, who had been in daily contact with his parents,
hadn't called in
three days. "I just had a gut feeling that something was
wrong," says Bart. He flew alone to Tampa and found
his son dead on the dining room floor. Police said that
Bret had died three or four days earlier from cardiac
arrhythmia, a complication from his
addiction.
Bart Jr., Starr's older son and an investment adviser in
Birmingham, called his parents as they were making funeral
arrangements. "He said, 'Dad, I think it would be a
good idea if you moved back, so we could be together as a
family,'" says Bart. He and Cherry moved to Birmingham nine
months
later.
These days Bart is chairman of a subsidiary of Healthcare
Realty, a real estate investment trust. His office is just
down the hall from Bart Jr.'s, and several times a week he
and Cherry see Bart Jr., 40, his wife, Martha, and their
three daughters,
Shannon, 15, Jennifer, 13, and Lisa, 9. "I tell you, they
are it," says Bart. "They are really our family.
We'll always be indebted to Bart Jr. for bringing us
back."
—Loren
Mooney
Issue date: October 12, 1998
Past Editions of Catching Up With...
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