I bet that you, like me, reasonably assumed the the “G” on the Green Bay Packers’ helmets stood for “Green Bay.” Makes sense right? Well you and I would both be wrong in that assumption.
Don’t feel too badly though. As the video below proves, a lot of the Packers’ own players did not know what the “G” stood for either.
But you know who did? The all-knowing Tiki Barber, that’s who.
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And now you know that the “G” on the Green Bay Packers helmets stands for “Greatness.”
Update 2/5/11: Thanks to the skepticism of commenters, which I always appreciate, I decided that I should dig into this claim by Tiki Barber further rather than simply taking it at face value. I cannot say with certainty whether he is right or wrong – that the “G” stands for “Greatness” – but I can say that I do not have any legitimate sources to cite that back him up. Also, I asked for Packers beat reporter Greg Bedard about this, and he’d never heard anything like this before. That gave me great pause.
I dug into this last night, and the claim was made on the Packers Wikipedia page, but the sourcing was dubious. I could not find any other source I trusted that corroborated. Then, when I checked the Packers Wikipedia page today, the claim that the “G” stands for “Greatness” is now actually sourced to Barber himself. See the circular nature of this? (For the record, I think Wikipedia is an excellent source for knowledge, but you do have to be careful and source-check.)
So, let me first say that I apologize for not presenting all of this information when I first posted this. I never should have taken anyone’s word at face value – especially a turd sandwich like Barber – and then presented it as fact without doing my own fact-checking first.
Conclusion: I am not saying that it’s not true, but the only proof that anyone seems to have is Barber saying it’s true above. So take that as you will. Personally, I no longer trust that this is true. I would think someone like Bedard would have heard about this if it really was.
TL;DR – click here and read this. Sums it up.
Update 2/6/11: The Packers’ Assistant Director of PR and Corporate Communications had the following to say: “There’s nothing in our history that suggests there’s any truth to this. The Packers Hall of Fame archivist said the same thing.”
Next question: why do the Steelers only have their helmet logo on one side of their helmets? Here is the answer.
Final thought: does anyone else think that Tiki Barber seems like the kid in elementary school who loved to know something that no one else did and loved even more running around saying “Na-na-na-na-boo-boo” and rubbing it in that he knew it and you didn’t? I think so. I also think this video sums up Tiki Barber quite well.
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