By Mark Concannon
FOXSportsWisconsin.com
January 31,2011
Packers fans were lined up outside the team hotel in suburban Dallas Monday evening when a bus pulled in led by a police escort. It was our bus, the media bus shuttling in from downtown for the scheduled news conference. The Green Bay supporters, who wore different jerseys but the standard issue cheeseheads, didn't care. They started madly snapping pictures, no doubt instantly e-mailing them back home to envious friends who couldn't tell if the bus housed Mike McCarthy or Mike the radio guy.
The real football heroes arrived moments later, and like their fans, they were glad to be here.
"It was exciting to know we were finally getting here," said Aaron Rodgers. "It's been a long week. A lot of media, a lot of distractions as far as getting tickets for people, hotel rooms and all that stuff. It's nice to be here and hopefully after tomorrow, we can start focusing on football."
About 60-thousand people live in Rodgers hometown of Chico, California. Listening to Rodgers tonight, it sounded like half of the town's population asked him for tickets.
"The toughest word to say but the word most often used this last week was 'no,'" Rodgers said. "A lot of requests. I wanted to make sure my family was here. My grandma and grandpa were very important to me and some other close friends. But with the number of tickets we get, it's hard to get everybody you want there. Tickets are expensive too. There's a lot of friends who are going to be here who are on their own dime."
This is a new experience for Rodgers and virtually every Packer but veteran defensive back Charles Woodson played in Super Bowl XXXVII with the Oakland Raiders when some off-the-field issues before the game sent the Raiders down the wrong path and towards an eventual 48-21 spanking from the Buccaneers. Starting center Barrett Robbins was AWOL for most of the day before the game after not taking his depression medication, was incoherent and left off the roster the next day. Robbins later told his wide he'd spent most of the day partying across the border in Tijuana, celebrating a world championship that he thought the Raiders had already won.
