Chilly Reception for Packers Fan

0

Donald Bizub is such an avid Green Bay Packers football fan that he purposefully seeks out advisory clients in cities where the Packers will be playing in a given season.

But while attending a home playoff game this month in frigid Green Bay, Wis., not far from where he grew up, Bizub, 49, suffered a momentary lapse that cost him in Packers fan cred.

After successfully using his contacts to score a field pass, an elated Bizub posed with the team’s cheerleaders. But while they were bundled up in traditional green outfits, Bizub had on a bright blue ski jacket with a small Green Bay scarf.

Bizub, a Pasadena securities brokerage executive, had decided to wear the ski jacket because of the forecast for bitter cold. Back in 2008, he attended a Packers home playoff game where the kickoff temperature was minus 1 degree with a wind chill of minus 23 degrees; it was so cold that when he took off a glove to briefly handle a cup, he got frostbite that hurts him to this day.

“I was determined not to repeat that, hence the ski jacket,” he said.

Bad move. For the Packers were playing the Dallas Cowboys, whose road colors, of course, are blue and white.

“I posted a few pictures on Facebook and my account traffic blew up with friends dissing my blue jacket,” Bizub said. “So I bought some Packer swag at halftime to cover it up.” That swag included a jersey that he put on over the jacket.

The irony: The kickoff temperature turned out to be a much warmer than expected 25 degrees.

All was forgiven in the end as the Packers defeated the Cowboys to move on to the conference finals, although the Packers lost that game to the Seattle Seahawks.

Travel Hits Home

Ryan Espinoza, a tax manager in the L.A. office of global accounting firm Ernst & Young, spent seven weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this fall as an adviser to an Airbnb Inc.-style company called Segundo Hogar, which means “Second Home.”

Though his trip was part of a company program in which employees act as advisers for promising entrepreneurs in emerging markets, Espinoza said the trip impacted his personal life, too.

The 28-year-old said he appreciated the close bonds Argentines share with their family and friends, which are characterized by long, intense conversations at late-night cafes in which the tables spill out onto the sidewalk.

“You have dinner between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m.,” Espinoza said. “After that, you’ll go out to a café and further the conversation.”

He spent hours talking with groups of people from work and his apartment community.

During one of those midnight chats, he discovered how much value his co-workers and Argentines in general place on traveling outside their city and country. Now, he and his wife are hoping to take their two kids on an extended trip at least once a year.

“We want to get outside our comfort zone,” he said.

Another highlight of his trip was watching a soccer match at the raucous home stadium of Boca Juniors, Argentina’s most-well-known team.

“They were chanting and cheering and banging drums for the full 90 minutes,” Espinoza said. “You can literally feel it.”

Staff reporters Howard Fine and Omar Shamout contributed to this column. Page 3 is compiled by Editor Charles Crumpley. He can be reached at [email protected].

No posts to display