Brats & Beer

Barbarians At The Gates Of Lambeau Field

"Bring back Brett!"

Today the Green Bay Packers will be holding its annual shareholders meeting at Lambeau Field, an event that serves as a reminder of the team’s unique status as a community-owned sports franchise. Given all the brouhaha over Brett Favre’s potential return from retirement, I sure hope stadium security is prepared to fortify the gates against the angry mob that could turn up.

One of the perks of being a Packer fan is that we can lord over fans of other teams with our “community-owned” spiel, but as Patrick at The Fontenot noted last week, that ownership comes with some limitations. This year’s meeting, surrounded by the events unfolding over the past month, could put at odds our collective notion of what “ownership” means and the reality of what the non-profit charter says.

I hope that the 10,000 or more shareholders expected to attend this year’s annual meeting will remember that their one or two shares in the Green Bay Packers corporation does not grant them authority to dictate personnel decisions any more than owning shares in CBS gives anyone the power to decide if Two and a Half Men stays on the air or gets canceled. Even the board of the directors has little say in the day-to-day operations of the team, that power being limited to the hiring and firing of the CEO. (Speaking of, do you think Mark Murphy is regretting at all his recent career decision?)

None of this meant to take away from the team’s special form of ownership, because it is, I think, one of things that elevates the Green Bay Packers above the rest. Hopefully the shareholders at Lambeau Field today will elevate themselves and conduct the meeting in a civil manner without devolving into a mutinous rabble.