I’m no stranger to the Green Bay Packers vs. Chicago Bears rivalry. Even within my own family, lines are drawn when it comes football's oldest rivalry.
“I actually blame a lot of our relatives for not converting me,” my cousin Zach Kronser says. “My parents are both from Milwaukee, and we have a huge family that lives mostly in Milwaukee, and they're all Packers fans. But I grew up in Rockford, Illinois.”
A Bears fan in a Packers family
Only Zach and my stepmom will actively root for the Bears around the family. And Zach will regularly show up at family events in a Bears sweater for the holidays, or sporting a blue and orange beanie. He’s committed, I’ll give him that.
“It's been complicated,” he says about keeping the fandom alive inside a Packers family. “I've tried to keep it pretty civil but it doesn't help that it's been a completely one-sided rivalry for almost my entire life. But, you know, it builds character.”
Zach’s remembers the 1985 Bears: it was a personality-driven, Super Bowl shuffling, nearly perfect team to latch onto as an impressionable grade-schooler. He lives in Oregon now, but says even that far west, he still runs into Packers fans every game day.
“I couldn’t escape you if I tried,” he says of Packers fans.
Embracing the conflict
But what if you were a Bears fan, from Bears territory, and moved to Wisconsin?
“I like the trash talk,” Bears fan Byron Thompson says. “I will put on social media, 'We are in complete control of this division.' And then I’ll get 20 messages from Packers fans.”
Byron has lived in Milwaukee for the past 25 years, but he’s a proud Chicagoan and maybe even prouder Bears fan. He says his friends here — Packers fans — are always trying to convert him.
"You get to the point where you lose a lot and you start to question, like, 'Man, maybe I can go and buy a green hat or something,'” Byron says jokingly.
Just to be clear: he wouldn't dare. Also, he might get disowned.
“The thing about it is all of my family and people I grew up with, I have to go home for Thanksgiving,” he says. “I just came back from there and it's a big party — everybody's so excited about the Bears.”
Byron loves his football. His friends have also taken him up to Lambeau a few times — a place he’s not very fond of.
“The last time I was there for the Bears game,” he says, “I swore I would never go back because they beat the Bears so bad. And it was like minus something degrees. All my friends were like, 'We’re gonna stay and watch the game to the end.' And I’m like, 'Can’t we go? We’re losing!'”
This Sunday, he’ll be at Lambeau with his nephew from Chicago, who is another Bears fan. Byron has warned him to expect plenty of trash talk, and plenty of cold.
When a rivalry takes on tradition
Rivalries also go beyond the personal, and become communal.
April Minniear is a longtime bartender at Hansen’s Tap in Racine, Wisconsin, which she makes clear is a Packers bar.
“We do have Bears and Packer fans [here] and we all yell at each other, but we all have fun,” April says about football Sundays at the bar. “They have their jerseys on and they're proud of it. But you'll see more Packers than Bears fans because we are a Packers bar.”
It’s not just patrons inside the bar that go back and forth. For a long time, Hansen’s had its own rivalry with a local Bears bar — The Shuffle Bear Inn just a few blocks down the road.
“If the Packers lost, we had to roll a barrel down to their bar down the street and vice versa. If the Bears lost, they'd have to roll all the way over here,” she says. “But not only that, they would have to paint their [front] doors their opponent's colors.”
April points to a few mirrored photos of each team's logos on the wall. She tells me that when the two teams play, whoever loses, that team’s photo is flipped upside down. It’s not fun to come into the bar when your team's frame is upside down, she says.
The Shuffle Bear Inn has since closed. The space was donated so the adjacent zoo could expand. Meanwhile, Hansen’s is still standing. So you tell me who won.
Blood is thicker than rivals
As communal as this rivalry is, it doesn’t get much more communal than family, and romance. That's something Sydney Bryant knows all about.
“So I grew up as a Packers fan and my dad was a huge fan,” Sydney says. “I would drive to school with him in the morning and he would always have the sports radio on.”
Sydney is also from the Racine-Kenosha area. The rivalry has always been present in her life: school friendships growing up, working in Illinois with coworkers, and then it got even closer.
“Once I met my boyfriend, he's also a huge Bears fan,” she confessed. “That's kind of where the rivalry started. When I first brought him home, I wasn't too nervous about myself, him being, like, a Bears fan — I knew that I could get over it — but I didn't know if my dad could."
She says she had simple instructions for her boyfriend Ariel when he finally met her dad, a diehard Packers fan.
“I was really nervous and I told him to not tell him he's a Bears fan," Sydney says. "Or maybe not say any jokes or anything like that. And he did not listen.”
He wanted to poke the bear, she said.
Now, two years in, her boyfriend and dad are buds, often sending memes of the other team back and forth. I had to ask her, after all this time — Bears boyfriend, Packers dad — where her allegiance lies.
“I feel like my instinct is to root for the Packers…But like, I want my boyfriend to be happy,” she says.
This Sunday, everyone here will be glued to the TV, or the freezing bleachers at Lambeau Field. Bears fans like my cousin Zach are optimistic. The team looks legit, he tells me. It’s a new day in Chicago.
“Every 40 years I hear the Bears want a chip,” I say.
“Well, I don't have another 40 years for them to get this turned around, so they have to do it,” Zach responds.
As we were getting off our video call before this weekend’s game, he had a parting message for Packers fans — the most annoying football fans, in his opinion.
“Every time they're going on and on about their community team, but the shares are not worth the paper that they're printed on," Zach says. "I'd like to see their dividends every quarter. What kind of money are you making on that? I've got some great crypto deals for all the Packers fans who own shares of this team or just some magic beans.”
More fuel to the fire for the longstanding rivalry.
