My most active group chat contains six people, all of whom have gone on many versions of a yearly road trip to see baseball games and other sporting events.
The crew leans heavily toward Minnesota sports, but one of the six is a Wisconsin native and therefore a Packers fan. We try to be supportive of his life choices and understand that sometimes you are just born into circumstances beyond your control.
In the chat Thursday, not long after it was announced that the Packers had made a big swing and traded for Cowboys pass rusher Micah Parsons, he perhaps got out in front of any heat coming his way by writing, “If Micah Parsons loses his shoe while running a recovered fumble back for a touchdown in his first game, I’m going to be worried.”
It was perfect, of course, in that it required the knowledge that Herschel Walker, in his first game after a blockbuster trade from the Cowboys to the Vikings in 1989 (against my friend’s beloved Packers, no less), [scampered 47 yards on a play in which he lost his shoe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1PcXvtUSmU).
That game unfortunately turned out to be the high water mark in the Walker era with the Vikings. The trade that sent a million players and draft picks to Dallas, laying the foundation for three Super Bowl wins for the Cowboys in the 1990s, is now considered one of the most lopsided in history.
Did Green Bay just make its version of the Walker trade, dealing two first-round picks and game-wrecking run-stuffer Kenny Clark to Dallas while giving Parsons the biggest non-QB contract in history?
* The short answer to the Walker trade question is probably not, though Packers fans are probably not soothed by Cowboys owner/GM Jerry Jones invoking the Walker trade in talking about the Parsons deal.