Green Bay Packers

Bart Starr: Green Bay Packers great aims for Lambeau visit next season

Updated Mar. 5, 2020 2:04 a.m. ET

Fansided, Raymond Rivard/FanSided via Lombardi Ave

A recording of Bart Starr plays to those at Lambeau Field prior to the start of a game in 2012.
Raymond T. Rivard photograph

Bart Starr never ceases to amaze.

The Packer great, say members of his family, has been stable since November and they hope to get Bart back to Lambeau Field sometime early next season – September or October.

That according to Pete Dougherty, who wrote about Starr today.

Though Starr didn’t make it to Lambeau this past season, the family said they are hoping Bart’s health shows improvement in the coming months.

Dougherty quoted Bart Jr.: “Just being around the Packers and in the city they called home for more than three decades. All that was to his benefit. Those were just a few of the reasons we’d love to get him back.”

He spoke of November 2015 when Bart visited Lambeau for the halftime program to honor Brett Favre. That appearance was shortly after he had undergone stem cell treatment that is hoped will help him recover from his heart attack and strokes.

Bart Starr.
Raymond T. Rivard photograph

All this is great news for Starr and for the many across Packers Nation who remember the man with a number 15 across his chest calling the signals for championship team, after championship team, after championship team.

We also remember Starr, without any previous experience, taking the helm of an NFL team and struggling to find success. The coach who hung around for nine years had some pretty good teams in the early 1980s. If you remember James Lofton, Lynn Dickey and Paul Coffman, you remember a Packers team that could score points, but also had difficulties in keeping the other team out of the end zone.

The best Starr’s teams could post was an 8-7-1 record in 1978 and twice had 8-8 records.

But those transgressions were quickly forgotten and Starr, the ever-present Packer Ambassador, soon regained the love of Packers fans.

That’s the types of thing that can happen when you’re around for eight decades. We’ve grown up with Bart Starr and it’s difficult watching him fade.

Watching Starr grow older only reminds us of our own battles with gravity. His health is important to everyone who honor the men who built the league. It was the work of Starr and his contemporaries who made Sundays a little different.

Turning on the television to watch the Packers became the Sunday ritual that has evolved into a way of life.

We should be honored they still walk among us.

As we mourn the end of the Green Bay Packers 2016 season, we stop to remember Starr and the men of an era gone by.

Each day Starr is still with us is a good day.