vince
09-08-2007, 04:12 PM
Just about every Packer fan in the world has, at one time or another (some daily ;-)) characterized Ted Thompson - the man, the legend. Speculation about his ego, intelligence, motivations, and even his sexuality abounds. His unique, polarizing ways captivate Packer fans everywhere, but who is this guy really?
Here's a well researched article from yesterday (I don't think it's been posted yet.) that delves into WHO Ted Thompson really is, where he comes from, and what makes him tick. I thought it was a very interesting and enlightening article, but sometimes the truth isn't quite as exciting as the fiction...
Ted Thompson: Eye of the storm
JASON WILDE
608-252-6176
September 7, 2007
GREEN BAY — They're called takeouts in the journalism business, and the ultimate goal of these long, story-of-his-life tales is for readers, after the last sentence, to put down the paper feeling like they know the subject as well as they know their next-door neighbor.
You've written your share of these over the years, to be sure. Dozens on Brett Favre alone. As a writer, they're your opportunity to take a creative approach, to have some fun, engaging in storytelling rather than minutiae. To go beyond the numbers, beyond passer ratings and yards-per-carry averages and turnover ratios, and get inside, to try to understand the human condition a little better and share your findings with the world.
And now, your mission, should you choose to accept it — Accept it? This was your brilliant idea, genius, so there's no turning back now, you've got a deadline — is to write one on Green Bay Packers general manager Ted Thompson.
You share this idea with a few colleagues and friends.
"A personality profile?" one says snarkily. "I didn't know he had a personality."
"Hmmm," says another. "That'll be a pretty short article."
"Good luck with that," says a third.
Well, at least you know what you're up against.
• • •
Thompson is in his third year as the Packers general manager, and much of the sporting public sees him as the milquetoast, do-nothing leader of their favorite football franchise, a man they've never met but are convinced just the same that they could do a better job than, if only someone let them run the team from their barstool or office cubicle. In your inbox, you have a cache of e-mails from readers who think he's an idiot, and have decided that you, by extension, are too, since you haven't called for his immediate firing.
After all, others have. There are three Web sites — firetedthompson.com, firepackersgm.com and cantedthompson.com — devoted to the cause. Google "Ted Thompson" and "idiot" and you get 4,820 hits out in the blogosphere. "Ted Thompson" and "moron" gets you 4,170 more.
This is not to say that the man is universally despised. Some fans understand Thompson's build-through-the-draft approach, having seen it work in Seattle, where Thompson was the personnel chief for ex-Packers coach Mike Holmgren and built a team that reached Super Bowl XL a couple of years ago.
But others, the more vocal segment of the passionate fan base, want him run out of town for not spending lavishly on free agents and for hording $15 million in salary cap space. You find yourself fascinated that so many people can hate someone so much when they don't even know him.
And yet, the most remarkable thing about it is Thompson doesn't seem bothered in the least.
Oh, he was taken aback on draft day, when folks paid $25 to sit inside the Lambeau Field atrium and boo him for taking defensive tackle Justin Harrell with the 16th overall pick. But even then, he did everything he could not to let it get to him.
"I think the people I work with understand how I go about my business and why we're doing certain things," Thompson says now. "Yeah, from an organizational standpoint, I would like for the Packer fans to think the Packers are in good hands, quite frankly. Not necessarily everybody patting you on the back, but to kind of there be a little trust with the Packer fans (in) me.
"But at the same time, this is a big boy place, and if I get criticized, I'm OK with it. Personally, I can take it from an ego standpoint, but I would prefer it if it was more of a positive message, just because of the people out there who are getting up and reading that at the breakfast table or watching it on the nightly news at night. It might make them have a bad day thinking, 'Oh my gosh,' that sort of thing. I'm not immune to that. But I'm fairly thick-skinned about other things."
And so it begins.
• • •
You start by calling Jimmy Thompson, Ted's dad, down in Atlanta, Texas, where Ted grew up as the third of the four kids on the Thompson family depth chart. Jimmy answers on the second ring, his drawl as thick as the searing Texas sun is hot.
You tell him why you're calling and where you're from. "I see y'all been gettin' a whole lotta rain up there," Jimmy says. "Since the 31st of July, we haven't had one drop of rain. And about 100 degree temperatures. We had the rain earlier. Kept things growin' real good."
You smile, because Ted has told you this is what his offseason visits home are like. "It's summertime," he'd said, "so you sit around and talk about the weather and whether you think it's going to rain."
Jimmy Thompson is a born-and-bred Texan whose father, Ted's granddaddy, died unexpectedly in the late 1940s, causing Jimmy to drop out of college at what is now Sam Houston State to run what would become a 400-acre ranch. Ted and his brother Frank, who's older by a year, worked the ranch with their dad as kids, although less so after Jimmy moved the family to Atlanta in 1966 and drove 20 miles to the ranch each day.
"It wasn't a big ranch. I had about 100 cows," says Jimmy, now 79. "Now, we got out of the cow business. I haven't had any cattle since 1984. We're in the pine tree business."
Sure enough, Jimmy planted all his pastures with pine tree seedlings, another topic of conversation when Ted visits every June or July. Business isn't necessarily booming, but Jimmy and his wife, Elta, are doing just fine.
You tell Jimmy how, despite talking to his son all the time, you don't feel like you know him all that well.
"He's pretty quiet, pretty reserved. He never has been a real big talker. I would say that," Jimmy says. "His disposition's not like me. I'd be bragging about what I'm doing. He's more like his mother."
Ted never was a braggart, Jimmy says. Even though he was a star athlete at Atlanta High School (Ted played football, basketball, golf and baseball) and a leader (he was the student council and class president), he was never overly impressed with himself.
"A lot of people who do pretty good in sports, they might have a lot of pride. He was always a pretty humble boy," Jimmy says.
"He wasn't never one to have a big ego. He just went about his business.
"I will tell you this: Our kids, I don't know, I might've been a little bit strict on 'em, but he was a good boy. He didn't need much correcting or anything. He always pretty well stayed on the right path. He never did give us any trouble whatsoever. He never did complain hardly, neither. He seemed like he was always pretty well satisfied. Didn't take a lot to please him.
"And, he wasn't afraid of work. With the Good Lord's help, he made it on his own. I never had any idea he'd have the job that he has now. I don't mean to be braggin', but I'm proud of him."
Of course, that doesn't mean Jimmy hasn't thought the same things as his son's critics.
"I don't know how they're going to come out," Jimmy says of the Packers. "I thought for a while that he ought to be spending more money on some of these high-priced fellas. But he's taking the approach with these young players, and I kinda think it may work out.
"Ted says a lot of these big-name free-agent players, they're on the decline but they still rank a big salary. He thinks the better way to go is to build."
• • •
Jim Thompson doesn't want to sound hokey, but he can't help it. What he's about to say is the truth.
"Most people have their heroes on TV," he says. "I had my hero in my house with me."
Jim is 41?2 years younger than Ted, and he still lives in Atlanta, working as a lawyer. He can see why Packers fans aren't sure what to make of his brother's always-calm demeanor.
"Obviously I grew up with him, so I know him pretty well. To me, he was always my big brother. Maybe around other people, it's different. I just don't know," Jim says. "He has a little fire in him, but you have to work through a few layers more than most folks, myself included, to get to it with him. He's got a point, like all of us. But I've seen the emotion kick in. In golf or football, I've seen him get to that point. If pushed, he can push back."
Like the time they were playing one-on-one on the family hoop. Jim was in seventh or eighth grade at the time, Ted a junior or senior in high school.
"Although he was bigger and stronger and the better athlete, I was always a pretty good basketball player," Jim remembers. "He normally beat me, but one afternoon, I was especially hot, and I beat him."
And the result?
"I got planted in the grass."
• • •
Meanwhile, Jim and Ted's older sister, Debbie Fortenberry, has spent three days trying to come up with a good anecdote or two about her now-famous brother. And she's failed.
"I was trying to think of something embarrassing," she says, disappointed. "I do apologize. I couldn't think of anything.
"I was going to say that I can't embarrass him too much or I might not get tickets. But there's just nothing. I'm sorry if I haven't met your expectations on that."
You tell her it's OK, that you're just trying to paint an accurate picture of him.
"He's my brother, and I love him dearly, but he's a pretty guarded person," she admits. "I don't mean that in a negative sense. We're just quite different. When you see him in the media, he's not showing a lot of emotion. I think in his line of work, he has to be that way. But with his family and with his friends, he's a lot more open. The persona that's perceived of him is he only lets you in a little bit. But he shows his emotions. He's not a cold person at all. He very much has a lot of empathy and feelings."
A second-grade teacher in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite, she doesn't worry about Ted handling the criticism — "That's a job where you're going to be criticized. You wouldn't be human if you didn't feel a little of that, but he knows that comes with the job," she says — but she does worry about her brother being lonely At 54, he's never married, and probably never will.
"I do worry about him sometimes because he works so hard at that job. I know he has friends, but I couldn't work the way he does," Debbie says. "He's the one of the four of us that didn't marry and have children, and I think that's because he was pretty involved with his career and he saw different friends go through the life of being a professional ballplayer.
"He's had relationships through the years, and I know there were two situations where he was very close to making that commitment. He knows what kind of person he is about work, and I don't think he wanted to. It wouldn't be fair to someone else to have (to deal with) that kind of a schedule."
• • •
When Thompson makes his annual trek to Bum Phillips' horse ranch in southern Texas, the two men don't talk about such touchy-feely things. Most of the time, they talk football. Or don't talk at all.
"We'll sit around and sometimes not say somethin' for 30 minutes," Phillips says from his home in Goliad, Texas. "Ted's not a talker. He's a doer."
For much of Thompson's football career, Phillips says, no one did it better. The two met when Phillips became Southern Methodist's defensive coordinator during Thompson's sophomore year. Playing on the strong side, it was Thompson's job to handle the tight end.
"He was a great linebacker. Wasn't a big kid, maybe 188 pounds, but he was really, really good at locating the ball," Phillips recalls. "I'd just come from five years in pro ball, and one of the big things we stressed was that when you lined up over the tight end, you didn't take your eye off him. Well that little devil, he'd beat that tight end to the inside or outside all the time (to tackle ballcarriers), and he had to be looking at the ball to do that.
"I've always said the two kinds of football players you can't win with are the ones that never do what you say, and the ones that always do what you say. He'd listen, but he defied all the coaching techniques and did well anyhow."
By the time Thompson finished his career at SMU, Phillips had taken over as the Houston Oilers' coach and general manager. When Thompson went undrafted, Phillips signed him.
"In 1975, there were 17 rounds in the draft, not the seven we have today. And to show you what great players Ted and I were, neither one of us was drafted," says Mike Reinfeldt, Thompson's best friend who's now the Tennessee Titans general manager. "When I went to Houston from the Raiders, it was the middle of the season. Bum Phillips came up to me and brought Ted over and said, 'Help this guy get situated.' That tells you something about what he thought of Ted."
Thompson ended up playing 10 seasons in the NFL, as a nickel linebacker and special teams player for the Oilers, seeing action in 146 of a possible 147 games from 1975 to 1984. He only started eight games during that time.
"He was a good player. He just happened to be on a team that had two great players — Ted Washington and Robert Brazile," Phillips said. "He was an excellent football player; he just never got credit for it. He was sure somebody you could count on."
• • •
Ted Thompson is also someone who listens to country and Christian music ("That satellite radio, you can switch to a channel that's all Hank Williams!" he says in amazement), whose favorite movie is "The Princess Bride" ("Great movie"), who watches very little TV ("I like a good Simpson's episode. I think that's marvelous television.") and who enjoys playing golf ("If I can, one time a summer, play on a legitimate course and get a 78 or 79, I'm really happy.")
These are the tiny glimpses he'll allow into who he is. But get him talking about his approach to the game, which can be alternately maddening and euphoric, and you begin to understand the innerworkings of his personality, and how he approaches his job running one of the most storied franchises in sport.
"I'm a normal guy. I get happy if I hit a good shot, I get mad if I hit a bad shot. But even that is absolute, wasted emotion," he says. "It doesn't help your golf game at all. There are things, I value this job and how we do a lot, but I don't think I can do my job if I allow myself to be on a rollercoaster ride. I have to look at it as, 'OK, this has happened, what do we do now?'
"I guess I would classify myself as sort of reserved. I think it's my job in this role to be sort of a calm in an atmosphere that sometimes can get chaotic. Because right now, somebody could walk in here and give me some really bad news, and then it'd be my job to make everybody think that even though this is bad news, it's going to be OK.
"I think that's part of my job, but it's also part of my personality. There are things that I get worked up about, but I don't do them in public. If someone has done something I don't like, I'll speak to them, but I'll speak to them in private and there won't be a lot of ranting and raving."
You delve further, asking him what the worst part of his job is. His answer is simple: Cuts. He's just finished paring the roster from 88 players to the required 53, and while he tries to make the process as dignified as possible, there's no easy way to tell someone he's fired. Thompson knows, because that's how his career ended in 1984.
"Every player at some point in time will eventually have that knock on the door. And it's difficult because one day you're on the team and you're going as hard as you can and you like your chances and you think you're going to help the team, and all of a sudden ... it's devastating," Thompson says. "So I think those of us that know how that feels have a certain appreciation for what the players are going through.
"(In 1984), I had already made the final roster. I go through an entire practice on a Wednesday afternoon, and I come in and our head coach at the time was Hugh Campbell, and he's walking by my locker and he goes 'Ted, can I see you for a second?' We had a draft choice, I can't remember the guy's name, but he had been holding out all this time, and he had signed that day, so they released me to free up the roster spot for this new guy.
"So (Campbell) gave me the speech, and then the defensive coordinator came in and gave me a speech, and the linebacker coach, and everybody else came in, and by the time they got through talking to me, not only was I surprised I got cut, I'm surprised I didn't get a raise, because everybody was saying what a great guy I was and all that."
• • •
Despite that disappointment, Thompson eventually found his way back into the game. After his playing days ended, he spent seven years working in Houston's financial sector until Ron Wolf hired him to work in the Packers' pro personnel department in 1992. He rose quickly through the ranks after that, ascending to director of pro personnel after one year, to Wolf's right-hand man as director of player personnel in 1997, to the Seattle Seahawks' vice president of football operations in 2000.
"I like football. I like the process that we go through," Thompson says. "It's a very engaging job and it's time-consuming, but it's challenging. I like all that. I can't play anymore, so this is a competitive environment, so I get to try to be competitive."
As a result, he pours everything he has into his job, which explains his limited personal life. He calls himself the "oddball" in the Thompson clan for never marrying, although he says he came close twice — once as he was finishing up at SMU before his NFL career took off, and once early in his first tenure with the Packers.
"I had a couple times that it probably should've happened, but I probably messed it up and it didn't happen," he says. "There's not any deep, dark secrets wandering around behind me. What you see is kind of what you get.
"When I took this job in 1992, I was 38 or 39 at the time, and once you get in this, if you're not already married, it's difficult to carve out the time to do that. You also get set in your ways, too. I can get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and come in and watch tape and nobody cares. Or I can get home late or I can go home early, and nobody cares. To be my age and be single, it's been my own choice. It's the road that I travel."
Then, he pauses.
"Looking back," he says wistfully, "I would have liked to have been a father and a husband. I think I could've done OK with that."
Instead, the Packers are essentially all he has. And while fans can criticize his decisions, question which players he adds and which ones he lets go, they cannot question his commitment.
"The people here are very nice. They're not mean-spirited, they aren't necessarily mad, they just want the Packers to do good. And there's no animosity, no hatred or anything like that," he says. "Ultimately, that's all everybody wants, is the Packers to do good. That's what I want, too.
"Look at this place. This place is one of the most storied franchises there are, but Packers fans don't care. They want to win now. They want to win versus Philadelphia. And that's the reason I sort of fight against this we're-building-for-the-future thing. We're building to put the best team we can out there. Certainly we want to look at the big picture, but we want to win against Philadelphia.
"I am confident we're going to do everything we can to make this the best place to work and best place to play and give our players the best chance to win. Outside of that, that's all I can do. And then you see how that works.
"There will be surprises along the way, good surprises and bad surprises. But I think as long as we keep to the making sure we try to do things the right way, that we try to get the right character people on this team, then I think it gives you a chance. That's all you can ask for.
"Five years from now, I would hope that I do this job well enough that I'm still sitting here. I won't be here forever, but I'm healthy, I enjoy this job, and I think we have a chance to do some good things. I'd like to be here for a good long run and win tons of games and make everybody that cheers for the Packers happy."
Here's a well researched article from yesterday (I don't think it's been posted yet.) that delves into WHO Ted Thompson really is, where he comes from, and what makes him tick. I thought it was a very interesting and enlightening article, but sometimes the truth isn't quite as exciting as the fiction...
Ted Thompson: Eye of the storm
JASON WILDE
608-252-6176
September 7, 2007
GREEN BAY — They're called takeouts in the journalism business, and the ultimate goal of these long, story-of-his-life tales is for readers, after the last sentence, to put down the paper feeling like they know the subject as well as they know their next-door neighbor.
You've written your share of these over the years, to be sure. Dozens on Brett Favre alone. As a writer, they're your opportunity to take a creative approach, to have some fun, engaging in storytelling rather than minutiae. To go beyond the numbers, beyond passer ratings and yards-per-carry averages and turnover ratios, and get inside, to try to understand the human condition a little better and share your findings with the world.
And now, your mission, should you choose to accept it — Accept it? This was your brilliant idea, genius, so there's no turning back now, you've got a deadline — is to write one on Green Bay Packers general manager Ted Thompson.
You share this idea with a few colleagues and friends.
"A personality profile?" one says snarkily. "I didn't know he had a personality."
"Hmmm," says another. "That'll be a pretty short article."
"Good luck with that," says a third.
Well, at least you know what you're up against.
• • •
Thompson is in his third year as the Packers general manager, and much of the sporting public sees him as the milquetoast, do-nothing leader of their favorite football franchise, a man they've never met but are convinced just the same that they could do a better job than, if only someone let them run the team from their barstool or office cubicle. In your inbox, you have a cache of e-mails from readers who think he's an idiot, and have decided that you, by extension, are too, since you haven't called for his immediate firing.
After all, others have. There are three Web sites — firetedthompson.com, firepackersgm.com and cantedthompson.com — devoted to the cause. Google "Ted Thompson" and "idiot" and you get 4,820 hits out in the blogosphere. "Ted Thompson" and "moron" gets you 4,170 more.
This is not to say that the man is universally despised. Some fans understand Thompson's build-through-the-draft approach, having seen it work in Seattle, where Thompson was the personnel chief for ex-Packers coach Mike Holmgren and built a team that reached Super Bowl XL a couple of years ago.
But others, the more vocal segment of the passionate fan base, want him run out of town for not spending lavishly on free agents and for hording $15 million in salary cap space. You find yourself fascinated that so many people can hate someone so much when they don't even know him.
And yet, the most remarkable thing about it is Thompson doesn't seem bothered in the least.
Oh, he was taken aback on draft day, when folks paid $25 to sit inside the Lambeau Field atrium and boo him for taking defensive tackle Justin Harrell with the 16th overall pick. But even then, he did everything he could not to let it get to him.
"I think the people I work with understand how I go about my business and why we're doing certain things," Thompson says now. "Yeah, from an organizational standpoint, I would like for the Packer fans to think the Packers are in good hands, quite frankly. Not necessarily everybody patting you on the back, but to kind of there be a little trust with the Packer fans (in) me.
"But at the same time, this is a big boy place, and if I get criticized, I'm OK with it. Personally, I can take it from an ego standpoint, but I would prefer it if it was more of a positive message, just because of the people out there who are getting up and reading that at the breakfast table or watching it on the nightly news at night. It might make them have a bad day thinking, 'Oh my gosh,' that sort of thing. I'm not immune to that. But I'm fairly thick-skinned about other things."
And so it begins.
• • •
You start by calling Jimmy Thompson, Ted's dad, down in Atlanta, Texas, where Ted grew up as the third of the four kids on the Thompson family depth chart. Jimmy answers on the second ring, his drawl as thick as the searing Texas sun is hot.
You tell him why you're calling and where you're from. "I see y'all been gettin' a whole lotta rain up there," Jimmy says. "Since the 31st of July, we haven't had one drop of rain. And about 100 degree temperatures. We had the rain earlier. Kept things growin' real good."
You smile, because Ted has told you this is what his offseason visits home are like. "It's summertime," he'd said, "so you sit around and talk about the weather and whether you think it's going to rain."
Jimmy Thompson is a born-and-bred Texan whose father, Ted's granddaddy, died unexpectedly in the late 1940s, causing Jimmy to drop out of college at what is now Sam Houston State to run what would become a 400-acre ranch. Ted and his brother Frank, who's older by a year, worked the ranch with their dad as kids, although less so after Jimmy moved the family to Atlanta in 1966 and drove 20 miles to the ranch each day.
"It wasn't a big ranch. I had about 100 cows," says Jimmy, now 79. "Now, we got out of the cow business. I haven't had any cattle since 1984. We're in the pine tree business."
Sure enough, Jimmy planted all his pastures with pine tree seedlings, another topic of conversation when Ted visits every June or July. Business isn't necessarily booming, but Jimmy and his wife, Elta, are doing just fine.
You tell Jimmy how, despite talking to his son all the time, you don't feel like you know him all that well.
"He's pretty quiet, pretty reserved. He never has been a real big talker. I would say that," Jimmy says. "His disposition's not like me. I'd be bragging about what I'm doing. He's more like his mother."
Ted never was a braggart, Jimmy says. Even though he was a star athlete at Atlanta High School (Ted played football, basketball, golf and baseball) and a leader (he was the student council and class president), he was never overly impressed with himself.
"A lot of people who do pretty good in sports, they might have a lot of pride. He was always a pretty humble boy," Jimmy says.
"He wasn't never one to have a big ego. He just went about his business.
"I will tell you this: Our kids, I don't know, I might've been a little bit strict on 'em, but he was a good boy. He didn't need much correcting or anything. He always pretty well stayed on the right path. He never did give us any trouble whatsoever. He never did complain hardly, neither. He seemed like he was always pretty well satisfied. Didn't take a lot to please him.
"And, he wasn't afraid of work. With the Good Lord's help, he made it on his own. I never had any idea he'd have the job that he has now. I don't mean to be braggin', but I'm proud of him."
Of course, that doesn't mean Jimmy hasn't thought the same things as his son's critics.
"I don't know how they're going to come out," Jimmy says of the Packers. "I thought for a while that he ought to be spending more money on some of these high-priced fellas. But he's taking the approach with these young players, and I kinda think it may work out.
"Ted says a lot of these big-name free-agent players, they're on the decline but they still rank a big salary. He thinks the better way to go is to build."
• • •
Jim Thompson doesn't want to sound hokey, but he can't help it. What he's about to say is the truth.
"Most people have their heroes on TV," he says. "I had my hero in my house with me."
Jim is 41?2 years younger than Ted, and he still lives in Atlanta, working as a lawyer. He can see why Packers fans aren't sure what to make of his brother's always-calm demeanor.
"Obviously I grew up with him, so I know him pretty well. To me, he was always my big brother. Maybe around other people, it's different. I just don't know," Jim says. "He has a little fire in him, but you have to work through a few layers more than most folks, myself included, to get to it with him. He's got a point, like all of us. But I've seen the emotion kick in. In golf or football, I've seen him get to that point. If pushed, he can push back."
Like the time they were playing one-on-one on the family hoop. Jim was in seventh or eighth grade at the time, Ted a junior or senior in high school.
"Although he was bigger and stronger and the better athlete, I was always a pretty good basketball player," Jim remembers. "He normally beat me, but one afternoon, I was especially hot, and I beat him."
And the result?
"I got planted in the grass."
• • •
Meanwhile, Jim and Ted's older sister, Debbie Fortenberry, has spent three days trying to come up with a good anecdote or two about her now-famous brother. And she's failed.
"I was trying to think of something embarrassing," she says, disappointed. "I do apologize. I couldn't think of anything.
"I was going to say that I can't embarrass him too much or I might not get tickets. But there's just nothing. I'm sorry if I haven't met your expectations on that."
You tell her it's OK, that you're just trying to paint an accurate picture of him.
"He's my brother, and I love him dearly, but he's a pretty guarded person," she admits. "I don't mean that in a negative sense. We're just quite different. When you see him in the media, he's not showing a lot of emotion. I think in his line of work, he has to be that way. But with his family and with his friends, he's a lot more open. The persona that's perceived of him is he only lets you in a little bit. But he shows his emotions. He's not a cold person at all. He very much has a lot of empathy and feelings."
A second-grade teacher in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite, she doesn't worry about Ted handling the criticism — "That's a job where you're going to be criticized. You wouldn't be human if you didn't feel a little of that, but he knows that comes with the job," she says — but she does worry about her brother being lonely At 54, he's never married, and probably never will.
"I do worry about him sometimes because he works so hard at that job. I know he has friends, but I couldn't work the way he does," Debbie says. "He's the one of the four of us that didn't marry and have children, and I think that's because he was pretty involved with his career and he saw different friends go through the life of being a professional ballplayer.
"He's had relationships through the years, and I know there were two situations where he was very close to making that commitment. He knows what kind of person he is about work, and I don't think he wanted to. It wouldn't be fair to someone else to have (to deal with) that kind of a schedule."
• • •
When Thompson makes his annual trek to Bum Phillips' horse ranch in southern Texas, the two men don't talk about such touchy-feely things. Most of the time, they talk football. Or don't talk at all.
"We'll sit around and sometimes not say somethin' for 30 minutes," Phillips says from his home in Goliad, Texas. "Ted's not a talker. He's a doer."
For much of Thompson's football career, Phillips says, no one did it better. The two met when Phillips became Southern Methodist's defensive coordinator during Thompson's sophomore year. Playing on the strong side, it was Thompson's job to handle the tight end.
"He was a great linebacker. Wasn't a big kid, maybe 188 pounds, but he was really, really good at locating the ball," Phillips recalls. "I'd just come from five years in pro ball, and one of the big things we stressed was that when you lined up over the tight end, you didn't take your eye off him. Well that little devil, he'd beat that tight end to the inside or outside all the time (to tackle ballcarriers), and he had to be looking at the ball to do that.
"I've always said the two kinds of football players you can't win with are the ones that never do what you say, and the ones that always do what you say. He'd listen, but he defied all the coaching techniques and did well anyhow."
By the time Thompson finished his career at SMU, Phillips had taken over as the Houston Oilers' coach and general manager. When Thompson went undrafted, Phillips signed him.
"In 1975, there were 17 rounds in the draft, not the seven we have today. And to show you what great players Ted and I were, neither one of us was drafted," says Mike Reinfeldt, Thompson's best friend who's now the Tennessee Titans general manager. "When I went to Houston from the Raiders, it was the middle of the season. Bum Phillips came up to me and brought Ted over and said, 'Help this guy get situated.' That tells you something about what he thought of Ted."
Thompson ended up playing 10 seasons in the NFL, as a nickel linebacker and special teams player for the Oilers, seeing action in 146 of a possible 147 games from 1975 to 1984. He only started eight games during that time.
"He was a good player. He just happened to be on a team that had two great players — Ted Washington and Robert Brazile," Phillips said. "He was an excellent football player; he just never got credit for it. He was sure somebody you could count on."
• • •
Ted Thompson is also someone who listens to country and Christian music ("That satellite radio, you can switch to a channel that's all Hank Williams!" he says in amazement), whose favorite movie is "The Princess Bride" ("Great movie"), who watches very little TV ("I like a good Simpson's episode. I think that's marvelous television.") and who enjoys playing golf ("If I can, one time a summer, play on a legitimate course and get a 78 or 79, I'm really happy.")
These are the tiny glimpses he'll allow into who he is. But get him talking about his approach to the game, which can be alternately maddening and euphoric, and you begin to understand the innerworkings of his personality, and how he approaches his job running one of the most storied franchises in sport.
"I'm a normal guy. I get happy if I hit a good shot, I get mad if I hit a bad shot. But even that is absolute, wasted emotion," he says. "It doesn't help your golf game at all. There are things, I value this job and how we do a lot, but I don't think I can do my job if I allow myself to be on a rollercoaster ride. I have to look at it as, 'OK, this has happened, what do we do now?'
"I guess I would classify myself as sort of reserved. I think it's my job in this role to be sort of a calm in an atmosphere that sometimes can get chaotic. Because right now, somebody could walk in here and give me some really bad news, and then it'd be my job to make everybody think that even though this is bad news, it's going to be OK.
"I think that's part of my job, but it's also part of my personality. There are things that I get worked up about, but I don't do them in public. If someone has done something I don't like, I'll speak to them, but I'll speak to them in private and there won't be a lot of ranting and raving."
You delve further, asking him what the worst part of his job is. His answer is simple: Cuts. He's just finished paring the roster from 88 players to the required 53, and while he tries to make the process as dignified as possible, there's no easy way to tell someone he's fired. Thompson knows, because that's how his career ended in 1984.
"Every player at some point in time will eventually have that knock on the door. And it's difficult because one day you're on the team and you're going as hard as you can and you like your chances and you think you're going to help the team, and all of a sudden ... it's devastating," Thompson says. "So I think those of us that know how that feels have a certain appreciation for what the players are going through.
"(In 1984), I had already made the final roster. I go through an entire practice on a Wednesday afternoon, and I come in and our head coach at the time was Hugh Campbell, and he's walking by my locker and he goes 'Ted, can I see you for a second?' We had a draft choice, I can't remember the guy's name, but he had been holding out all this time, and he had signed that day, so they released me to free up the roster spot for this new guy.
"So (Campbell) gave me the speech, and then the defensive coordinator came in and gave me a speech, and the linebacker coach, and everybody else came in, and by the time they got through talking to me, not only was I surprised I got cut, I'm surprised I didn't get a raise, because everybody was saying what a great guy I was and all that."
• • •
Despite that disappointment, Thompson eventually found his way back into the game. After his playing days ended, he spent seven years working in Houston's financial sector until Ron Wolf hired him to work in the Packers' pro personnel department in 1992. He rose quickly through the ranks after that, ascending to director of pro personnel after one year, to Wolf's right-hand man as director of player personnel in 1997, to the Seattle Seahawks' vice president of football operations in 2000.
"I like football. I like the process that we go through," Thompson says. "It's a very engaging job and it's time-consuming, but it's challenging. I like all that. I can't play anymore, so this is a competitive environment, so I get to try to be competitive."
As a result, he pours everything he has into his job, which explains his limited personal life. He calls himself the "oddball" in the Thompson clan for never marrying, although he says he came close twice — once as he was finishing up at SMU before his NFL career took off, and once early in his first tenure with the Packers.
"I had a couple times that it probably should've happened, but I probably messed it up and it didn't happen," he says. "There's not any deep, dark secrets wandering around behind me. What you see is kind of what you get.
"When I took this job in 1992, I was 38 or 39 at the time, and once you get in this, if you're not already married, it's difficult to carve out the time to do that. You also get set in your ways, too. I can get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and come in and watch tape and nobody cares. Or I can get home late or I can go home early, and nobody cares. To be my age and be single, it's been my own choice. It's the road that I travel."
Then, he pauses.
"Looking back," he says wistfully, "I would have liked to have been a father and a husband. I think I could've done OK with that."
Instead, the Packers are essentially all he has. And while fans can criticize his decisions, question which players he adds and which ones he lets go, they cannot question his commitment.
"The people here are very nice. They're not mean-spirited, they aren't necessarily mad, they just want the Packers to do good. And there's no animosity, no hatred or anything like that," he says. "Ultimately, that's all everybody wants, is the Packers to do good. That's what I want, too.
"Look at this place. This place is one of the most storied franchises there are, but Packers fans don't care. They want to win now. They want to win versus Philadelphia. And that's the reason I sort of fight against this we're-building-for-the-future thing. We're building to put the best team we can out there. Certainly we want to look at the big picture, but we want to win against Philadelphia.
"I am confident we're going to do everything we can to make this the best place to work and best place to play and give our players the best chance to win. Outside of that, that's all I can do. And then you see how that works.
"There will be surprises along the way, good surprises and bad surprises. But I think as long as we keep to the making sure we try to do things the right way, that we try to get the right character people on this team, then I think it gives you a chance. That's all you can ask for.
"Five years from now, I would hope that I do this job well enough that I'm still sitting here. I won't be here forever, but I'm healthy, I enjoy this job, and I think we have a chance to do some good things. I'd like to be here for a good long run and win tons of games and make everybody that cheers for the Packers happy."