THE GREEN BAY PACKERS ORIGINAL GOLDEN GIRL: Mary Jane Van Duyse Sorgel, Lambeau's Champ and the Voice of Go Pack Go - Hardcover

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Everyone knows "Go Pack Go." Almost nobody knows the woman who put it in the stadium.

On a frozen December afternoon in 1967, while Bart Starr plunged into immortality and coffee froze in paper cups, a squad of young women in skirts and tennis shoes held the Lambeau Field sideline in thirteen-below cold. They were the Golden Girls. The woman who built them, trained them, and led them — through the entire Lombardi dynasty — was Mary Jane Van Duyse, the Packers' drum majorette from the age of eighteen and the original Golden Girl of professional football.

She taught a stadium how to chant. She was courted by Curly Lambeau himself, who called her "Champ" in handwritten letters. She was a Jeopardy! question, a Letterman guest, a Wisconsin legend hiding in plain sight. And when the Packers Hall of Fame reopened in 2015 as a $10 million shrine to the Ice Bowl, her uniforms were folded into a box in storage. Her name was on no wall. She lived seven more years and never saw it go up.

Drawing on a private archive saved from oblivion by one of her own Golden Girls — letters on dance-studio stationery, a Governor's Commendation, fan mail from football coaches who never met her, and the never-before-told story behind the NFL Films documentary that almost didn't happen — author Nancy S. Lind reconstructs the sideline history football forgot.

This is the story of a girl from Sevastopol, Wisconsin, who dropped a baton at Wrigley Field, cartwheeled over it without breaking stride, and was christened "the Packers' golden girl" by the Chicago Tribune the next morning. It's a great American love story, a portrait of small-town stardom, and an unflinching account of how institutions decide whose history gets remembered — and whose gets boxed up.

The evidence is not in dispute. The titles are documented. The television is on film. The chant still rolls down out of the stands every autumn Sunday, exactly the way she taught it.

It's time to say her name.

For fans of Green Bay Packers history, the Lombardi era, untold women's sports stories, and anyone who has ever shouted three words at Lambeau Field.

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