Lambeau Field

• 1. Introduction

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  Lambeau Field sits in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a city of modest size in the north central United States, yet it holds a stadium that ranks as the second-largest in the entire NFL. On the 29th of September 1957, a capacity crowd of 32,132 people packed into a brand-new concrete bowl to watch the Green Bay Packers upset their longtime rivals, the Chicago Bears, 21-17. Vice President Richard Nixon dedicated the stadium at halftime. Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur was on the platform. So was Bears owner George Halas, on a brief leave from coaching. It was an opening ceremony that announced something: this was not just a stadium. It was a statement.

  That building, which started life as simply City Stadium, would go on to become the oldest continually operating NFL stadium in the country. It would outlast records set at Wrigley Field. It would earn a nickname born from an extraordinary cold. It would grow from 32,500 seats to more than 81,000 without ever losing the soul of a place built by a community for a community. And it would carry the name of a man who, two months before the rename, had just died.

• 2. Built from Necessity

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  Since 1925, the Packers had played at a 25,000-seat wooden stadium behind Green Bay East High School. By the 1950s, the locker room facilities were so poor that visiting teams often dressed before games at the Hotel Northland. There was no room to expand. East High's location blocked the stadium to the south, the East River blocked it to the north and east.

  Officials in Milwaukee, 120 miles to the south, saw the opening. The Packers had been playing part of their schedule there since 1933, and in 1953 Milwaukee built County Stadium at double the capacity of the old City Stadium, hoping to lure the team full-time. Then the other NFL owners applied pressure, threatening to force the Packers to relocate unless they built a new home in Green Bay.

  In August 1955, the Packers announced plans for a new 32,000-seat stadium. Green Bay voters responded decisively: in April 1956, a bond issue to finance it passed with 70.3% approval. The original build cost $960,000, an amount finally paid off in 1978. What went up was genuinely new: the first modern stadium built specifically for an NFL franchise, at a time when every other team in the league played in facilities shared with baseball or in pre-existing multi-use venues.

  The site was chosen partly because the land had a natural slope ideal for forming a bowl, with expansive parking nearby. That land had once been farmland belonging to Jacques Vieau. It was now bordered on three sides by the village of Ashwaubenon, which also hosts the nearby practice fields Clarke Hinkle Field and Ray Nitschke Field.

• 3. Growth and the Lombardi Effect

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  Demand for tickets began outstripping supply almost immediately, and the source of that pressure was not hard to identify: Vince Lombardi arrived as head coach in 1959. In 1961, just four years after the stadium opened, its capacity was lifted to 38,669.

  The expansions kept coming. By 1963 the bowl held 42,327 people. Enclosing the south end zone in 1965 pushed it to roughly 50,837. Enclosing the north end zone in 1970 formed a continuous oval bowl at 56,263 seats. Private boxes arrived in 1985, adding capacity and revenue. By 1995, a $4.7 million project adding 90 more boxes to the north end zone brought the total to 60,890.

  The waiting list became a kind of measure of the team's hold on its city. The Packers sold out every game starting in 1960, a streak that was still intact through the period covered here, with at least 150,000 names on the waiting list at any time. Between 40 and 500 names come off the list each year. That arithmetic meant a seat could take decades to arrive. Because of that streak, the team had not needed to black out a home game since a 1983 Wild Card Playoff game against the Cardinals.

  The nickname Titletown, USA spread through the culture around 1961, even before Lombardi had won any of his championships. At the 1961 NFL Championship Game against the New York Giants, which the Packers won 37-0, fans hung signs reading Welcome to Titletown, USA. Then-Giants quarterback Y. A. Tittle joked the honor was for him, that his name was just misspelled. Lambeau Field would go on to host seven NFL world championship seasons: five under Lombardi, one under Mike Holmgren, and one under Mike McCarthy.

• 4. The Frozen Tundra

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  On the 31st of December 1967, the Packers faced the Dallas Cowboys at a temperature of -15 degrees Fahrenheit, with sharp winds cutting across the field. The game would become the Ice Bowl, the most famous example of Lambeau Field's capacity to punish players with cold.

  Before the 1967 season, an underground electric heating system had been installed beneath the field. It failed. The field had been covered overnight with the heater running, but when the cover was removed into the sub-zero air, the moisture on the grass flash-froze. Journalist Tex Maule, writing about the Ice Bowl in Sports Illustrated, connected the word tundra to Lambeau Field. The specific phrase "the frozen tundra" is believed to come from The Greatest Challenge, the Packers' authorized highlight film, and also appears in the Cowboys' authorized version, A Chilling Championship, both written by Steve Sabol. In the Cowboys' film, narrator Bill Woodson used the phrase to describe the field.

  The underground system was rebuilt in 1997, replacing electric coils with pipes carrying a solution containing antifreeze. After the 2006 season, the surface itself was replaced again. From 2007 through 2018, the field used the Desso GrassMaster system, which weaves synthetic fibers into Kentucky bluegrass sod. In 2018, GrassMaster gave way to polyethylene-based SIS Grass.

  The nickname reached into the stadium's own infrastructure. The video boards installed in 2004 were named Tundra Vision; they measured more than 25 feet high by 46 feet wide. An artificial lighting system based on technology from Dutch rose-growing greenhouses was purchased for the 2011 season, running 24 hours a day from October into early December to extend the grass's growing season during the coldest months.

• 5. The 2003 Renovation

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  By the end of 1999, team leadership had concluded the stadium needed a substantial overhaul to keep the franchise financially competitive. Chairman and CEO Bob Harlan and President and COO John Jones unveiled a $295 million renovation plan in January 2000. Part of the funding came from a 1997-98 stock sale that netted more than $20 million. Most of the cost would be covered through a 0.5% sales tax in Brown County and personal seat license fees.

  The plan required multiple layers of approval. It passed the Wisconsin State Legislature, and then on the 12th of September 2000, Brown County voters ratified it by a 53%-47% margin. That same margin, 53% to 47%, had also passed a separate November 2000 referendum asking whether naming rights to the renovated stadium should be sold in order to retire the sales tax more quickly. The city and the Packers agreed they would sell the rights if $100 million could be realized, but no buyer emerged. At the 2015 shareholders meeting, team president Mark Murphy stated plainly: the stadium would always be called Lambeau Field.

  Construction began in early 2001. Turner Construction Sports managed the project, and disruption to the 2001 and 2002 seasons was described as remarkably minimal. The renovation was completed for the 2003 season, bringing capacity to 72,515. The sales tax created to fund it expired on the 30th of September 2015.

  The second major expansion, completed in the summer of 2013, added 7,500 seats to the south end zone, pushing capacity to 80,750 and making Lambeau the third-largest stadium in the NFL at the time. Those new seats included heated areas designed to melt snow as it falls, a concept tested on a small scale during the winter of 2010.

• 6. The Lambeau Leap

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  On the 26th of December 1993, safety LeRoy Butler scored after a Reggie White fumble recovery and lateral against the Los Angeles Raiders. Butler jumped into the end zone stands. No one had planned it. That spontaneous moment became one of the most recognized celebrations in professional football.

  Wide receiver Robert Brooks later popularized the leap. Broadcaster Al Michaels may have been among the first to name it, referring to the tradition during a Monday Night Football broadcast in September 1996 when Brooks leaped into the stands. When the NFL moved to ban excessive celebrations in 2000, the Lambeau Leap was specifically grandfathered into the new rules and allowed to continue.

  The tradition also attracted imitators who were not always welcomed. Minnesota Vikings cornerback Fred Smoot intercepted a pass and returned it for a touchdown, then attempted a Lambeau Leap; Packers fans threw beverages on him. During the 2007 NFC Championship Game, New York Giants running back Brandon Jacobs faked the leap after scoring, angering fans in the stands. In 2009, Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Johnson, then going by Chad Ochocinco, announced before a September 20 game that he would leap if he scored, then made good on the promise by jumping into the arms of pre-arranged fans in Bengals jerseys.

  In 2014, a statue was erected outside Lambeau Field to commemorate the tradition. It features a shortened replica of the end zone wall and four anonymous Packers fans, sized so that visitors can pose for their own Lambeau Leap photographs. The NFL Network program NFL Top 10 ranked the Lambeau Leap as the third greatest touchdown celebration of all time.

• 7. Name and Legacy

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  Curly Lambeau founded the Green Bay Packers in 1919, played for the team in its early years, and served as head coach for 31 seasons through 1949. He shares with George Halas of the Chicago Bears and Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots the distinction of having coached his team to the most NFL championships: six. He was inducted as a charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, in 1963.

  Lambeau died in the summer of 1965. Two months later, on the 3rd of August 1965, the Green Bay city council renamed New City Stadium in his memory.

  The stadium's street address was changed in August 1968, when Highland Avenue was renamed Lombardi Avenue to honor former head coach Vince Lombardi, the man whose arrival in 1959 had sparked the sell-out streak and multiple championships. The Super Bowl championship trophy, the Lombardi Trophy, also carries his name. A 50-foot-tall replica of that trophy was unveiled on the east side of the stadium on the 14th of November 2014.

  As of the end of the 2024 season, the Packers held a 264-133-6 regular-season record at Lambeau Field. Their playoff record at home stands at 18-7. The stadium has hosted six championship contests: three NFL title games in 1961, 1965, and 1967, and three NFC Championship Games after the 1996, 2007, and 2020 seasons. Only Fenway Park for the Boston Red Sox and Wrigley Field for the Chicago Cubs represent longer active home-field tenures in American professional sports, a record Lambeau surpassed in 2007 when the Packers completed their 51st season there, breaking the mark the Chicago Bears had set at Wrigley Field across the years 1921 through 1970.