Packers’ Jordy Nelson puts in 12-hour days back on the farm in offseason
Jordy Nelson is a bit like Larry Bird: You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.
The Green Bay Packers wide receiver hasn’t lost his roots, it appears, based on a fascinating revelation: Nelson works 12-hour days back on the farm, he told ESPN, during the offseason.
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Don’t forget this is a player who signed a four-year, $39 million contract and in theory doesn’t have to work another day — outside of football prep, of course — in his life. That’s just not Nelson.
“I probably identify more as a farmer [than a football player],” said Nelson, who has been driving tractor loads of wheat since age 12, well before he had driver’s license.. “Around here, I’m just the farm kid that they have always known.”
Here would be his family’s 4,000-acre farm in Kansas farm where, for five or six weeks a year, he drives a combine, cuts wheat or rounds up the family’s 1,000-cow herd.
(And for those seeking a quality fantasy-football team or country-band name, you could do a lot worse, we say, than “Thousand-Cow Herd.”)
“Working cattle is my favorite farm duty,” Nelson said. “It’s interactive, and you’re on your feet all day.”
This was Bird a generation ago. Just because he was one of the more famous basketball players in the world and a god-like figure in Boston, it didn’t stop him from mowing his own lawn (Celtics fans would come and watch him do it, too, no joke) and going back and work on his family’s farm in Indiana for the summer. A word to the wise, though for Nelson: Bird literally broke his back later in his career doing such work, so Nelson might want to dial it back the deeper he gets into his 30s.
Like with Bird, you get the idea that Nelson’s duties are just part of who he is — not some fun story he feeds to the media cattle to eat up as part of some kind of Rockwellian portrait. Our guess is that if the Lambeau Field grounds crew needed a little extra work, Nelson would be there to chip in.
And it’s just another reason why Nelson quickly is reaching folk-hero status in Green Bay, where the local folks can appreciate a blue-collar role model. Oh yeah, Nelson also is good at the football. That doesn’t hurt either.
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Eric Edholm is a writer for Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Eric_Edholm