Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker won re-election Tuesday, but his quarterback sneak at the new Minnesota Viking Stadium where he autographed a steel beam and scribbled "Go Packers" got sacked.
While on the campaign trail, Walker had toured a steel plant in West Salem, Wisconsin, which just happened to be making beams for the roof for the new stadium where the Vikings will be playing during the 2016 season,
according to the New York Times. The Vikings and Wisconsin's Green Bay Packers are intense rivals in the NFL.
Standing next to U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan and and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch – and using the common cheesehead reference for Packer fans, according to the Times – Walker said: "(The beams are) being made by cheeseheads, how do ya like that? So me and Rebecca, we went up on that top beam and we wrote 'Go Packers' on it."
Then Walker got really nasty, needling the Vikings about their lack of championships compared to the Packers four Super Bowl titles and adding that the stadium saved $1 million dollars because "they decided they didn't need a trophy room."
Those comments brought loud applause and laughter from the crowd and generated stories across the political and sports worlds.
It didn't take long before John Wood, the senior vice president for Mortensen Construction, to say that his crew had successfully hunted down the signatures and eliminated them so they would not appear at the stadium,
according to Minnesota Public Radio.
"Governor Walker did sign a piece of steel that was in a fabrication shop in Wisconsin, but his signature and whatever else he wrote has been removed from that piece of steel," Wood told NPR, saying the signatures were removed with a power grinding tool used in steel fabrication. "I understand it was merely erased."
The stunt wasn't a first. The New York Yankees once used a jackhammer to extract a David Ortiz jersey that a Boston Red Sox fan had buried under two free of concrete at the site of the new Yankee Stadium.
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