In
a sly attempt to renew interest in a little team called the Green Bay Packers,
Get Wry contacted Perry Dale, high school classmate of former quarterback Don
Majkowski and photographer of the poster above. Initially bothered by someone
tossing pebbles at his bedroom window, Dale’s mood got better and he wound up
telling his story over wine coolers on the stoop of his apartment building.
Perry Dale:
There’s
only word to describe how it feels to be invited into the inner circle of Don
Majkowski: Enchanting. No! Scratch that. Bedazzling.
Whenever the Majik Man made it known that he trusted me enough to wiz in a cup
for him or taste his food for poison, I’d fall under the spell of his
bedazzling ways.
We
grew up in Buffalo, cheering for the Bills and their star player OJ Simpson. “Heck
of a running back,” we used to say. “No way he could ever murder someone— let
alone two people.” Turns out maybe we
were wrong about that, but not all of our youthful optimism went awry. We believed
that someday Don was going to play in the NFL and never once murder somebody,
and that’s exactly what happened.
Whereas
Don was a natural-born athlete with golden locks slicked back like Richie Rich
with attitude, I was a dumb nobody who got kicked off the Space Invaders Club
at what was then called Orenthal James Simpson High School. Thankfully, my
fortunes improved the day of the school talent show back in ’82. Wearing a
black top hat and carrying a football and a can of RC Cola, Don took the stage
last to a thunderous applause.
“Get
a load of me,” he said. “I’m the Pigskin Magician.”
He
asked for a volunteer from the crowd and my hand shot up. I’ll never forget the
enchantment in his eyes when he gestured to me and said, “OK, shit or get off
the pot.”
I was
so excited I nearly tripped rushing onto the stage. Don finished his can of
soda, set it on my head, and stepped back ten yards. A mighty cheer filled the
auditorium when he fired a tight spiral to knock the can off my head—on the
third try, after breaking my jaw and erect penis on his first and second
attempts. Paramedics arrived, and after Don had signed autographs for them, he
sauntered over to me as I laid on a stretcher.
“You
wanna be my lackey or what?” he asked.
It was
an easy question to say yes to, and so after graduation, I followed him to
Charlottesville, where Don quarterbacked the University of Virginia Cavaliers,
I cooked at a Chuck E. Cheese’s, and together we got bombed on wine coolers
more times than I can recall.
The
Green Bay Packers liked what they saw in Don. On the night before the draft in
1987, they called to tell him they wanted to pick him, but on one condition:
That he change his nickname from the Pigskin Magician to the Majik Man. It was
a long night of contemplation as I sat with Don and polished off a fridge-full
of Bartles & Jaymes Raspberry Cosmopolitans, debating the pros and the cons
of the nicknames. At dawn, he uttered the words that would indeed cement him as
the Majik Man:
“Fuck
it,” he said with a shrug.
We
moved to Green Bay, where one of my chief duties was being his wingman whenever
he wanted to bedazzle folks at the local taverns. Before Don made his grand
entrance, it was my job to play the Heart song “Magic Man” on the jukebox. Boy
howdy, did that make the ladies swoon! I can recall a night when just ten
minutes after “Magic Man” introduced the Majik Man, he got down to smooching a
gal in a men’s room stall. The guy even had an unbeatable pickup line:
“Know
what the best part of a touchdown is? It’s when I touch down there.”
With
that kind of swagger, success was inevitable, and indeed, in 1989, he threw for
over 4,000 yards and got to play in the Pro Bowl. He was a cocksure superstar who
told countless tales of his conquests—all the gals he’d vertically dry-humped
in public toilets—but when I told him he had everything, he told me I was wrong.
There was still one thing missing in his life: A poster to reflect how awesome
he was.
Before a Sunday night game in 1990, Don threw
his weight around and got me on the sideline under the official title of Majik
Man’s Lackey/ Photographer. The Pack took an early 14-0 lead, and with 32
seconds left in the first quarter, he decided it was the perfect time to
immortalize himself in poster form.
Sure,
his teammates and coaches were outraged when he burned a timeout to stage our
epic photo shoot, and some of the Vikings cried, but the second I laid eyes on
the sleek magician getup he dug out of his duffle bag, I knew it’d be worth the
trouble. And granted, many fans were upset when he ordered them to vacate a
section of the stands because he didn’t want them to "ugly up the shot,” but the
man had just thrown for over 4,000 yards, so what could anybody do about it? We
may have ruffled some feathers, but we got results. Poster results. Just look
at it! How he got that pigskin to levitate beneath his magic wand baffles me to
this day.
It was the defining moment of his career, but he
was ostracized for it. Suddenly everyone was branding him a prima donna just
because they were jealous of his radical poster. Some meathead who called
himself Tony Mandarich vowed to do a lousy job blocking for him, and so the
Majik Man took some wicked hits. When he left a game with an injury in ’92, an
upstart hillbilly whose name I can’t recall took over at QB. By throwing
touchdowns and promising that he would never call a timeout and change his
wardrobe to get his picture taken for a poster during a game, whatshisname won
the starting job and never gave it back to Don.
Things were never the same for Don and me after
that. We bounced around, from Indy to Detroit, him backing up jagoffs with
inferior posters, powerless to stop the declining popularity of both the Majik
Man as well as Bartles & Jaymes. He had to retire. We moved to Hollywood in
an effort to make the Majik Man Batman’s new sidekick in the movies, but had no
such luck. In time we settled back in Green Bay. Better than Detroit, I guess.
 | ||||
| Perry Dale |
Dale then offered to give
us another perspective on the story by waking up his roommate Don Majkowski,
who it turns out had been passed out on the futon the entire time, but it was
getting pretty late. And so a source from Get Wry called it a night and stumbled
home, pleasantly bombed on wine coolers and mumbling “Go Pack Go.”
