I recently completed reading Wayne Larrivee and Rob Reischel’s new book If These Walls Could Talk: Green Bay Packers. The book is a chronicle of recent Green Bay Packers history, with insight and opinion sprinkled in by the voice of the Packers, Wayne Larrivee.
I had always wondered what it was that led Mr. Larrivee from his multi-pro sports team gig in Chicago to Green Bay. Wayne reveals that he had a vision to broadcast for the Green Bay Packers since boyhood and even though the career move was not well understood by folks in Chicago and Green Bay alike, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I have enjoyed listening to Wayne on the radio calling the Packer games, and now that I know the story of how he came to be part of the Green Bay Packers organization I have even more respect for the man.
Wayne does not hold back with his assessments of the character of key people in the Packers organization, from Ron Wolf to Ted Thompson and Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers. Wayne’s biting opinion of former coach and GM Mike Sherman was very revealing to say the least. I was mildly surprised with how much good he had to say about former coach Ray Rhodes, and not surprised at all about how much respect he has for current coach Mike McCarthy.
The parts of the book I found most interesting were about Wayne’s career path to Green Bay, the origins of “the dagger”, and the entire chapter about Mike Sherman.
The tone of the book was in the same candid manner you are used to hearing when listening to Wayne on the radio. You can almost hear him reading the book to you in his familiar voice as you go.
To be perfectly honest, the book fell short of my expectations. I say it fell short, only because I had hoped there would be many more stories known only to Green Bay Packers insiders, as the title implies. Most of the book, however, was just a lot of retelling and reflecting on Packers history from the past 25 or so years.
If you have read the book, I’d be interested in hearing what you thought of it in the comments below.