Garn Stackelberg left the world silently today, in his sleep, comfortably abed at home. It was how he would have wanted to go. Stackelberg wasn't one for dramatics or for drawing attention to himself. Yet perhaps more than anyone else, this quiet, unassuming man changed the tenor and tone of professional sports over the past 40 years.
It was in 1967, at 41 years of age, that Stackelberg (then a struggling political speechwriter) found he had come to the end of his rope. "Garn's stuff...it just wasn't incendiary enough for politics. Wasn't polemical, didn't rile people up," says Dick Wannick, a close friend of Stackelberg's from his political days. "Garn's gift was the exact opposite of that."
"He wasn't trying to blaze a trail or make a name for himself, he was just trying to make a living," says Joe Rotola, one-time head of publicity for the NFL Player's Association. "He was having more and more trouble landing gigs, writing speeches for more and more small-time politicos. Finally, I just said, Garn - why don't you give this a try?"
Jean Stackelberg, Garn's widow of fifty years, insists that the idea was all Garn's. "Oh, no, that Joe Rotola has been telling that story for years. He would tell that story right in front of my husband! Garn never cared. He didn't want any credit for himself. That was his style! But I assure you, the seed was planted years before he met Joe. We were watching the Packers win a game, Garn and I. It was a big game, I forget which one, but one of their receivers afterwards, well, he was pretty full of himself and he said some unfortunate things about the other team. Garn just shook his head and said, 'now that guy needs a speechwriter!'"
Soon, Stackelberg had struck out to become that speechwriter."You have to remember, when he first got into sports speechwriting, there was no such thing," Rotola laughs. "Guys would be saying all sorts of crazy things after games, causing all manner of brou-ha. It was funny on one level, but not for me in my position! When we brought Garn in, he really ignited. This was what he was made for, these were the speeches only he could write. He had a feel for that."
Stackelberg immediately made his mark with the bland, inoffensive style that has since come to dominate the world of pre- and post-game soundbites. Such phrases as, "We just need to play how we know we can play," "Well, they have a great team, you have to give it up for them," "It wasn't any one person's effort," "We knew that if we played our game, we had a good chance of coming off the field with a victory," "We need to take it up to the next level," and "We just didn't get it done out there today," phrases that today are part of the landscape, all are now widely-acknowledged as Stackelberg's work.
But the man himself was very humble about his pioneering work and huge influence. In a rare interview with SportsTime in 1997, Stackelberg was quoted as saying, "Well, I'm honored of course, but the credit really goes to the whole team. My editor, my agent, the players and coaches who really step up and deliver for me - where would I be without them?"
"I can't believe he's gone," muses Wannick. "But in a way, he'll never be gone. Every time I see a player step up to the microphone and say 'I knew that if we could dig deep, pull together as a team and play like we know we're capable of, good things will happen,' or when a coach says, 'We can't just keep beating ourselves with these stupid mistakes,' - that's Garn right there. He lives on in that."
Garn Stackelberg died in Ft. Leroy, Louisiana, December 19th, 2006. He was 81 years old.
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