DALLAS — I count 13 different Cheeseheads. And that’s all in one hotel lobby.
There is Darth Vader Cheesehead. There is Abe Lincoln cheese hat. There is baseball-cap cheese, and football-helmet cheese, and goalie-mask cheese. There is a cheesy-themed blend of busts of Curly Lambeau, Vince Lombardi and Mike Holmgren (very bust homemade cheese!). There’s a conehead Cheesehead. There’s top-hat cheese. And hard-hat cheese. And fire-helmet cheese. And sombrero cheese. There’s necktie cheese. And earring cheese.
And, of course, there is the most popular one of all, the old-school wedge of cheese, as yellow as a school bus and as subtle as a Gallagher joke. It is three-sided, not unlike the lid worn by the patriots at Lexington and Concord, at Bunker Hill, at Valley Forge. Each side is 14 inches long. It is five inches high. Adult models cost $20. Kids sizes run $14.
“There are some people who think it’s a little silly, wearing slabs of cheese on your head,” said 49-year-old Ralph Bruno, who certainly does not think it silly because he runs Foamation, Inc., the company that invented the Cheesehead in 1987 (yes, believe it or not, it does not date to Don Hutson) and manufactures them in Milwaukee.
“But it’s like the Steelers fans who wave their Terrible Towels,” he said. “It’s a tradition. And it speaks to the people who root for the teams, I think. It’s unique.”
There is little question about that. The Packers are nothing if not unique. In baseball and hockey, Pittsburgh is considered a “small-market” team, the kind of team that inspired a salary cap in one sport and all but screams for the creation of one in the other.
In football? True, only about 311,000 people call Pittsburgh home. Small, sure.
But it’s three times Green Bay’s population of 101,025.
Nevertheless, that isn’t the most unusual part of the Packer Experience. To find that, all you need to do is find an owner of a Cheesehead who also happens to be an owner of the team, and there are only 112,015 of them at last count.
One of them, a fellow named Tom Smithson, was wandering the lobby of the Marriott earlier this week and he was downright unmistakable, as his Original Cheesehead also had the word “OWNER” in dark black letters on the front.
“Actually, that’s not technically true,” said Smithson, who lives in Wausau, Wis. “Me and three of my friends threw in $400 apiece so we could buy two shares each back in 1997, but the shares are all in one of the guys’ names. Not that it matters. We can’t make any money off it. We do it because, let’s face it, how many guys do you know who can say they own an NFL team and aren’t lying through their teeth?”
It’s true. The owners of the publicly owned team do have voting rights, but they can neither earn profitable residuals nor can they sell their shares at a profit. There are more than 41⁄2 million shares, though nobody is allowed to own more than 200,000 of them to make sure the franchise is never vulnerable to an avaricious takeover.
It seems perfectly hokey, perfectly sappy, perfectly Rockwellian, and it is.
“It would be corny if it wasn’t so cheesy,” Smithson said, with a practiced laugh that suggests he has used that line only a few thousand times before.
Though Dallas lies in state under a sheer of ice, the invaders from Green Bay have delighted in feeling perfectly at home as they settle in and prepare for the task at hand. The Packers have won 12 championships, more than any other NFL team, but they have won just once in the past 43 years. The Steelers have won six times since then.
“We’re ready to reclaim what’s ours,” Harry O’Laughlin said.
He was the one wearing the yellow Darth Vader helmet.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com
