Mike Holmgren's Legacy In Green Bay -- They Still Like Mike

-- AS MIKE HOLMGREN takes ove as coach and general manager of the Seahawks afte seven years in Green Bay, he leaves behind a specia. tradition unlike any in the NFL.

ASHWAUBENON, Wis. - There's a Hooters on Holmgren Way, rising bright and warm and new by the freshly built highway overpass. It caused quite a stir a few months ago when the building went up and the populace of metropolitan Green Bay blanched at the thought of the bug-eyed owl peering down on the avenue of its cherished coach.

"A few women were bothered by the name," Ashwaubenon Village President Ted Pamperin says. "Not so much the restaurant. It's not a strip bar, you know."

Inside, underdressed women prance about, shimmying in hula hoops and waving pompoms as they dance, ironically, past the framed jersey of Reggie White - perhaps the most God-fearing Packer of them all. It's enough to make small-town middle-America quiver in reproach.

But in Ashwaubenon, the community that completely engulfs Lambeau Field and is the official address of the Packer practice fields, Packer parking lots and Packer Hall of Fame, Hooters is progress. As are the Bay Park Square shopping mall, the Club Fit health facility and Bumper to Bumper Motor Parts West. All of them on Holmgren Way.

Because in 1997, when the village's most important people started talking about naming a road for the coach of the Super Bowl champions, Pamperin offered them this street, then called Gross Avenue. There were other lanes with more prominence or prestige that could have been used. But Pamperin wouldn't hear of it. This was going to be Ashwaubenon's highway of dreams. This is the road he wanted to bear Mike Holmgren's name.

His little town of some 20,000 people, a municipal airport and too many warehouses and auto parts stores to name, was pulsing off the atlas - as was all of Green Bay. Football had turned a nation's lonely eyes to northeastern Wisconsin and he wanted everyone to know just who was responsible.

"When he came in here and started winning, it was fun," Pamperin says. "Anytime you get into an area the size of Green Bay and you start to win, the atmosphere is so electric. Everyone is in a good mood. It's a euphoria. It's a good feeling. And it's been a hell of a ride."

Pamperin looks out the window of his office in the village's spacious new municipal building, which also is on Holmgren Way. Just a few blocks up the road, the great, hulking green shell of Lambeau Field looms several hundred yards from the intersection of Holmgren Way and Brett Favre Pass. A block beyond that is the heavily traveled Lombardi Avenue, which straddles the Ashwaubenon-Green Bay border.

Pamperin laughs dryly.

"You know, I get teased a lot these days. People keep asking me if we're going to change the name of the street now that he's gone," Pamperin says. "I say, as soon as we get another world championship, we'll name a street after that coach. Because if you think about it, there aren't many coaches who have won Super Bowls. Look at Bud Grant. He was a great coach who went four times with the Vikings and didn't win. It's a pretty exclusive club."

We know what Mike Holmgren can do as a coach. We know he can call plays, diagram offenses and build young, raw quarterbacks into gridiron Adonises. But what does it mean to live in the town where Mike Holmgren has coached?

"I think now when you go someplace else and you say you're from Green Bay, people go, `Oooooohh,' rather than, `Why do you live there?' " says Krissy Dunks, who works at the Stadium Steps in the Bay Park Square mall - just one of the dozens of Packer memorabilia stores in the Green Bay area.

Jerry Watson has seen the 500-square-foot sports bar he opened seven years ago in an old dress shop, on what is now the corner of Holmgren Way and Brett Favre Pass, blossom into a 30,000-foot sports and alcohol fortress with three banquet rooms. He sells more kegs of Miller beer than anyplace in Wisconsin. On game days, fans begin lining up outside the door of his Stadium View Bar-Grill at 3:30 a.m. He trips over them on his way in the door in the mornings.

Think his life didn't get better under Holmgren?

"I believe the Packers are losing one of the best coaches in the league in Mike Holmgren," Watson says. "Unequivocally, without a doubt, Seattle won by getting him. They won big time."

Packer President Ron Wolf, who hired Holmgren, says: "You have to understand, when we got here, there was only the Ice Bowl game in these people's minds. There had only been two playoff games after the two Super Bowls. Everybody wore jerseys with 15 (Bart Starr), 66 (Ray Nitschke) and 31 (Jim Taylor). Now you have a new generation of fans. Now you have Brett Favre and LeRoy Butler and Antonio Freeman."

But how much does Green Bay love Mike Holmgren? How much does it embrace him? And does it adore him?

There are long pauses.

"I don't know him," Watson says. "I'm not even sure he knows who I am. I've never heard anything bad, and he's done a lot of good. But he's definitely country club."

When Pamperin began the process of changing the name of Gross Avenue to Holmgren Way, he dealt with Holmgren's secretary, not the coach himself. In fact, it took Holmgren several months after the '97 Super Bowl before he acquiesced to having a street named in his honor.

And even when Holmgren did, Pamperin met him only at the two ceremonies they held for the street naming - when they first put up the signs in August '97 and last fall, when Ashwaubenon opened a new part of the road that had been under construction.

"I think he was pretty humbled that we wanted to name a street after him," Pamperin says.

In so many ways, Holmgren remains a mystery to Green Bay. It's a small place, but there wasn't the closeness found with other large figures in little towns.

When someone who knew Holmgren well was asked if he liked the coach, he seemed to mull the question.

"I would say I respect Mike Holmgren," he said.

This is the feeling of the town: It loved the winning and appreciated that Holmgren was a well-mannered family man, yet it really didn't know much about him. It came to respect him.

Then again, this is much the way this area felt 30 years ago about the Packers' last great coach, Vince Lombardi, who won the first two Super Bowls. Lombardi was not adored; people around Green Bay never felt a connection with him. He won, and they loved that. But he was a feisty man who demanded a lot from the people who worked for him.

But then Lombardi left to coach the Washington Redskins. He became ill, and two years after leading the Packers to their second Super Bowl title, he was dead. Only then was he revered. Only then did he get his own street.

And until Holmgren, Lombardi was the only piece of tradition people here could cling to.

Now Lombardi Avenue intersects Holmgren Way, which connects to Brett Favre Pass, and life here is good - at least for now.

Which is why there is no resentment for the way Holmgren left. They certainly would be justified in feeling forsaken. In a sense, he abandoned this place for something bigger, something better, as soon as he got important enough to leave. Now he's left everyone with a street in his name and memories of a glorious evening in New Orleans when he stood in a squall of glittering confetti and celebrated a Super Bowl victory.

Holmgren left for something Green Bay couldn't give - more power. He wanted to be a coach and general manager, and the team told him he could never be both. Lombardi left for similar reasons; he wanted to own a piece of a team. Since the Packers are publicly owned, this could never happen. He had to go to Washington to fulfill his dream.

So strangely, while another city would be wounded by the departure of its coach, this one doesn't mind. Holmgren had made it clear he would leave if an opportunity arose like the one Seattle offered. When the season ended, everyone expected he would be gone.

"It was pretty obvious he was going to leave," says Art Daily, a columnist retired from the Green Bay Press-Gazette. "We had heard rumors he would go someplace else."

When asked about Holmgren, most people here just shrug and give anHJ DONE, 2 LINES UNDERSETms to say, "You can't really blame him for leaving for $4 million a year."

You mention this to Jerry Watson and he bursts out laughing.

"There's an old saying: `No one knows what goes on behind closed doors,' " the bar-owner says. "But he got out of here quickly. I mean, come on, they put together a $40 million deal in three days?"

What can they do? Holmgren wanted to go, so they let him go. They aren't going to give back Holmgren Way, they aren't going to give back the Super Bowls or the warm feeling inside when they go to Minneapolis or Chicago or West Palm Beach, Fla., for that matter and tell people, "I'm from Green Bay." Because they know they're going to get the same "Oooooohh" they've heard the last three years. That doesn't change. They can live off these last three seasons for another few years.

Want to know what it's like to have Mike Holmgren as your coach?

It's having traffic pouring into your city for hours on Sunday afternoon. It's having to suddenly reassess an ages-old ordinance allowing scalping because suddenly people are wanting $300 and $400 a ticket. It's having thousands of people in Jerry Watson's bar and a line outside stretching as far as you can see. Nobody will trade it for a minute.

Pamperin reaches deep into his desk. He starts pulling things out: a replica of the yellow street sign with green lettering that reads "Holmgren Way"; some photos of Holmgren pulling a sheet off the sign, unveiling it for the first time; a stack of Packer trading cards. Finally, he tosses out a small yellow and green key chain. It is in the shape of a football.

"Village of Ashwaubenon, location of a lifetime," it says on one side.

On the other side it reads: "Home of Holmgren Way."

The highway of Hooters, the Bay Park Square mall and Bumper to Bumper Motor Parts West.

The avenue of a little town's biggest dreams.