When Bob Cook, Wisconsin’s representative in the “Never Miss a Super Bowl Club,” was asked last year when he thought the Packers would make it to a Super Bowl with him, he said, “Next year. I guarantee it.”
Three days before the kickoff of the Steelers vs. Packers in Super Bowl XLV, Cook had to admit he’d been wrong.
Cook, the 79-year-old Brown Deer, Wis. native, took ill last Thursday morning and watched the game from a hospital bed, not only breaking the guarantee he’d made the year before but also his perfect attendance streak at Super Bowls.
Cook’s granddaughter, Lakeland freshman Mali Urpanil, said he has been in and out of hospitals lately with heart and lung problems.
“He’s just really falling apart,” Urpanil said. “They were all about to leave for the airport and he just couldn’t go. He’s just really ill and has a lot wrong with him that they can’t do very much with anymore.”
Cook’s wife, Sarah, told the Associated Press before the game that being bedridden for a Super Bowl featuring the Packers was particularly depressing for her husband.
“To have the Packers go to the Super Bowl, we were just over the moon about it,” she said.
But some who heard a member of the “NMSBC” would miss the game thought it was good for him to come down to earth.
When ESPN.com posted a story Saturday on Cook’s hospitalization, many readers commented scathingly, posting expletive-laced rants about how spoiled the members of the club must be.
Urpanil said she knows differently.
“On the websites people would say, ‘Oh, he’s just some rich guy who goes to every Super Bowl and they need to let someone else go.’ He’s not this huge rich guy because if he was he wouldn’t live in the normal town that I live in,” she said.
In fact, no one in the club made it to games because he was a “huge rich guy.” A recent ESPN.com article paints pictures of men scrambling into stadiums fresh out of jail, hospital beds, or near-crashes in friends’ airplanes: they’re antitheses of the corporate types sipping champagne in a skybox.
Sarah Cook recalled a Super Bowl her husband nearly missed in Pasadena, Cali. They were outside the stadium forty minutes before kickoff and still didn’t have tickets.
“A scalper said, ‘I have a ticket but you have to follow me to the parking lot. We were afraid but we went with him and he said. ‘As much money as you have in your pocket, that’s what I want.’ Bob had $900 in his pocket and that’s how much he gave him,” she said.
But even though Cook’s persistence in situations like the one in Pasadena led to his fame, Urpanil said supporting the Packers is his true passion.
“He taught us the ‘Packer Fight Song.’ Literally, once we were all able to talk, we were not exactly forced to sing the ‘Packer Fight Song,’ but every touchdown and every win the Packers had we’d have Packer parties and we’d sing it,” Urpanil said.
Urpanil said she admires her grandpa’s dedication to the game.
“Now, knowing that it’s such a big deal, it’s really cool to say that my blood, my family, has been to every Super Bowl,” she said. “I’m proud of him that he could do that and that he’s fought it out so many times.”
And not everyone who read about Cook’s hospitalization responded with such bitterness. Scattered throughout the comments are calls for the Packers to bring the Lombardi Trophy to Cook’s hospital.
One reader, ‘The-Triple-R,’ commented, “After the game, it is my desire that BOTH teams come to visit you…You are such a devoted and loyal fan of the Super Bowl, they should show their appreciation to you by doing this.”
You have to admit, it would be right.