In France they kiss on main street. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, they wear large triangles of cheese on their heads. They like it that way. The Green Bay story is as hokey as Thanksgiving Day dinner for blind orphans on Walton mountain. Hokey, but proud of it.

You watch them glance at the front page of the newspapers which flood the lobbies of the hotels in San Diego. Clinton and Paula Jones. Clinton and his secretary. Clinton and Whitewater. Their body language emits a distinct tut-tut and they flick quickly to the sportspages to catch up on the Packers When the Green Bay Packers slam shoulder pads with the Denver Broncos here in San Diego tomorrow the affections of America will be cruelly divided. On a micro level America will be rooting for John Elway, the luckless Denver quarterback who is hoping to take his first winner's ring away from what will be his fourth Super Bowl. On a macro level, they will be cheering on the Packers, the latest and most genuine contender in a list of sports franchises to vie for the right to be called America's team.

They have solid claims to that title. Even the name Green Bay whispers softly of the American pastoral. The Packer fans taking the ocean breezes in balmy San Diego are little distillations of middle America; white, middle-aged, middle class and as wholesome as . . . well, as wholesome as cheese.

Through the sixties they were in their pomp and they stood as a bridgehead against the counter culture. New York and all its sinful trashiness might have revelled in the bed-hopping, nightclubbing, allswinging style of Broadway Joe Namath. In Green Bay, they still exalted order and discipline over unlicensed freedom.

The football field was the place where the virtues of order and discipline were most clearly demonstrated.

The Pack rats, with their cheese triangles on their heads and the neat green and gold windcheaters on their backs, are the moral and social inversion of the fifties rat pack. Being a cheesehead is like being a rotarian or a christian or a republican. That great yellow triangle of cheese announces your values.

Simple things like the Packer Backer Party which has been rolling for some 20 years. Len Liebmann, exiled from Green Bay down in Florida, started the party for Green Bay folk during their annual visit to Tampa. The tailgate party began with 120 people back then, now the limit has had to be set at 4,000.

It's a beer and hot dogs type of deal, with a special committee elected every year to select the polka band to play. It all takes place in the shadow of Houlihan Stadium in Tampa. One of the few times in the year when the Pack Rats get to tailgate in the sun, risking the melting of their millinery.

And what's with the cheese anyway? Well, Wisconsin is made of it. A state blessed with rich farmland attracted farming types from all over Europe throughout the last century. If you were a cheese maker or a dairy farmer immigrating to the US, Wisconsin was your mecca.

By 1922, there were over 2,800 cheese factories in Wisconsin. In 1945, this number had dipped to just over 1,500, but the production had gone to 515 million pounds of cheese. Today, with only 200 plants, cheese makers in Wisconsin produce over 2 billion pounds of cheese per year. Most of it is worn on the heads of Packer fans, the rest is used as press package fodder for journalists at Super Bowl time.

Football and cheese are inescapable in Green Bay. From Lambeau Field, to Lombardi Avenue, to Packerland Drive, the place is dedicated to the team and its heroes.

The history reads like a corny Frank Capra movie.

One evening in August 1919, a sportswriter for the local Green Bay Press-Gazette, George Calhoun, and his friend, the former Notre Dame footballer Earl "Curly" Lambeau, chatted on a street corner as usual about football and its possibilities in Green Bay. A week later, August 11th, George and Curly recruited "interested footballers" to a meeting at the editorial room of the Press- Gazette. Curly Lambeau was elected to captain the team. They were sponsored first by the Indian packing company, then by the Acme packing company. Hence the name.

The last game of their first season cost them their club. They ended the season with a game against Decatur Staley's (soon to become the hated Chicago Bears). This game was not part of the APFA schedule and, thus, not governed by APFA rules. Lambeau fielded a few college boy ringers in the game, a practice not uncommon in the fledgling NFL. In fact, APFA rules had no sanctions against the use of college players. Staley's also used a few ringers and a Staley ringer spotted Green Bay's top ringer, `Hunk' Anderson.

They blew the whistle to some Chicago papers and the franchise was lost. People in Green Bay have despised the Chicago Bears - and, indeed, the whole city of Chicago - ever since.

Curly Lambeau bounced straight back, however, and not long afterwards presented the NFL with $1,000. In turn they presented him with a franchise. The next year, 1923, the Green Bay Football Corporation was founded to finance and manage the team. That organisation, with a few revisions and name changes, has operated with Lambeau's 1922 franchise ever since. The Green Bay Packers became a publicly-owned, non-profit enterprise, wherein 5,000 shares of stock were divided among 2,000 people. No individual could own a majority of the shares, no dividends were to be paid.

The original Articles of Incorporation for the Green Bay Packer Football Corporation were filed with the Secretary of the State of Wisconsin on August 8th, 1923. It was decreed that all profits would go to the American Legion.

The original corporation went into receivership during the Great Depression and a new corporation, Green Bay Packers, Inc, was formed in January 1935. The original articles were restated in an expanded version, but the concept that it would remain strictly non-profit was retained.

"The undersigned," declared the articles of incorporation, "have associated and do hereby associate themselves together for the purpose of forming a corporation under Chapter 180 of the Wisconsin Statutes, and that this association shall be a community project intended to promote community welfare, and that its purposes shall be exclusively charitable." In other words, it's not Manchester United. Quaintly, if the team is ever sold, every single dollar of the proceeds must go towards the morally-uplifting purpose of raising a memorial for the war dead of Green Bay on behalf of the American legion. The Packers are worth about $200 million at present, which would make for quite a memorial.

The only way Green Bay can lose the Packer franchise in the National Football League is through bankruptcy. National Football League franchises are granted irrevocably. As long as the Packers are solvent, they must remain in Green Bay. Wisconsin statutes provide that a corporation cannot sell or dispose of its major assets without the approval of the stockholders. The stockholders of the Green Bay Packers, those pure Green Bay cheeseheads, would gain nothing and lose it all under such a circumstance. In Green Bay, the cornball cheeseheads have created the great sporting dream.

They had their third stock share back in 1950, when 1,940 shareholders paid $25 each to bail out a financially-struggling team.

Next season they plan another sell off. They have moved with the times. There will be 30,000 to 40,000 more stockholders who will pay out $200 a share to support a championship team that makes millions of dollars in profit, but decided to tap loyal fans for more money to improve its facilities.

The image of the only publiclyowned sports team in America won't even be slightly tarnished by the team's latest attempt to raise capital.

The Packers' current president, Bob Harlan, says that another stock sale just accentuates the feel-good story of fans in love with their team. "It is not a financial investment," he says. "It is a love-affair investment. The reason people are buying is to make sure the franchise exists for Green Bay in the future."

The team wants to use the money, which should reach $80 million, for improvements to Packers' facilities and to begin a fund for the eventual replacement of the stadium in 30 years' time. All the indications are that the stock issue will be over subscribed.

As such, the Packer are unique and always will be. In free enterprise America such developments are banned elsewhere in the National Football League, even in an environment whereby a handful of teams pack up their shoulder pads and helmets to leave town every year because they have got a better deal in another city. The Packers survive because the NFL divides its colossal TV and merchandise evenly between all teams, regardless of the size of their markets.

Other cities envy the Packers the blood ties to home. Los Angeles lost two NFL teams within the space of a year. Baltimore still mourns its beloved franchise. Seattle bridle to get somewhere with better tax breaks.

Green Bay has permanence, though. Great heroes are still listed in the Green Bay phone book. Fuzzy Thurston still has a bar there.

If you were from Green Bay that would be a big deal. Every second business in Green Bay has incorporated the word packer into its name. Five thousand people watching practice isn't unusual.

Vince Lombardi, the crusty old coach who led the Packers to victory in the first two Super Bowls ever played, is commemorated everywhere. They named the trophy the teams play for tomorrow after him. Green Bay kids go to a school named after him. Half the streets in Green Bay are called after him. They loved him for his old-fashioned fundamentalism, his simple values which he transfused into his teams.

He once started a training session with his hard-nosed pros by holding up a ball.

"Gentlemen this is a football," he said.

"Coach, could you slow it down a little," said a hulking tackle.

Green Bay is a place out of time. All year round they operate tours of Lambeau Field, or the frozen tundra as the locals call it. The old stories still circulate there, gaining moss and telling much.

When Curly Lambeau signed the great Packer receiver Don Hutson for $175-a-game, Hutson and Lambeau took the precaution of paying portions of his wage into different banks. Word would get around too quick otherwise.

Hutson, who died last year, would often remember the introduction to Green Bay life, the fact that the town's butcher would buy 15 minutes of radio time every Saturday night just to talk about the Packers and what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong.

Or Vince Lombardi looking in frustration at a tight end who whinged to him during a championship game that his wrist was broken. "They don't know it's broken, get back out there."

Green Bay isn't a triumph of diversity or progressiveness. They swear that the limit of difference is the man who wears a Packer logo stitched inside his yarmulke.

They worship quarterback Brett Favre for his redemptive comeback from a painkiller addiction and the veteran Reggie White, the Minister of Defence, for his uncompromising christian beliefs.

America in its heart roots for Green Bay because huge parts of the nation suffers from an aching longing for times and places which they believe to be lost and gone forever.

"Character is the perfectly disciplined will in action," Lombardi told them long ago. They miss him and that credo.

There is nothing so innocent as a cheesehead. There is nothing so American as innocence retailed, wholesaled, and patented.