Watertown attorney Rob Marchant is living a remarkable double life as he logs American sports history and maintains a family legacy.
On weekdays, Marchant is president of Michael Best Strategies LLC and senior counsel with Michael Best & Friedrich LLP in Madison, but on Packers home game weekends, he drives the two hours to Green Bay and assumes his role as head statistician for the fabled team, with his duties overseen by the National Football League.
Marchant, 50, grew up in De Pere, just south of Green Bay, and his late father was Packers’ statistics legend Jack Marchant. The elder Marchant was a high school math teacher who moonlighted on weekends for almost 30 years, keeping track of every play the Packers engaged in from the early 1970s into the Brett Favre years. He retired at the end of the millennium.
With his father so entrenched in the Packer organization, Marchant was able to gain insider access, as a boy, to the team. He went on to work in food service at St. Norbert College in De Pere from the age of 16 to his sophomore year in college. Since the 1960s, St. Norbert’s has been where the Packers’ players stay during their summer training camps.
A connection Marchant made with former Packers historian and public relations giant Lee Remmel as a youth lasted until Remmel’s death in 2015. In that time, Remmel noticed that the Marchant apple didn’t fall too far from the tree and Rob had similar skills to his father.
When Jack Marchant retired as Packers statistician around 1999, one of his colleagues did, as well, leaving a significant void for the team to fill. It was then that Remmel asked Rob if he would like to assume his father’s role as statistician for the Packers.
“So my brother, David, who has since passed away, and I, joined the crew,” Marchant said. “The job was part of the Packers’ public relations department under Lee Remmel and that’s when I started.”
And here Marchant is today, leading a team of 6 to 8 statisticians at each game the Green Bay Packers play at Lambeau.
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