TOP HAT's POSTSCRIPT: With approaching draft day and minicamp beginning in another month for the '07 season, I post this timeless great article about Brett. As a writer & speaker touring the country speaking and listening to the people, I remember the great memories with the coming end of the BF era in Packer nation. The BF era was a remarkable successful run lasting as long as it did. The Pack returned to the glory days becoming America's team for over a decade. With the fall of dusk coming at the edge of the world across the Fox, the SI article with its ending hits the mark for all aging icons, including TOP HAT, in our celebrity culture. The difference is to know the genuine great ones. While the season will see a rhetorical rerun about "a 3rd year of rebuilding" and amusing rhetoric about "the plan", the nfl focus will be on BF too wondering, "All good things...."
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/pr...%2F11%2F28%2Fnfl.brett.favre1204%2Findex.html
Huck Finn's Last Ride. By Jeff MacGregor SI November 2006
For 15+ years Brett Favre has been the NFL’s answer to Mark Twain’s barefoot scamp – forever young and reckless. But nothing lasts forever, and the chattering heads think it’s time for him to retire. Pray that they’re wrong. Go north, to what seems the farthest reach of America, the topmost latitude of the world. It isn’t, but it can feel that way, even in the hot dazzle of high summer. Roll past the dairy barns red as bud roses and the storybook milk cows spattered black and white, and the U-Pik strawberry patches and the outlet-store billboards, and the hills swelling soft beneath them all. Drive north to Green Bay. That this is not the northernmost home of American professional football is merely geographical fact. In our mythology it remains the Fortress of Solitude—frozen in its ancient fame and its lonely arctic greatness—the holiest, most remote outpost in the NFL. Lambeau Field, the city’s heart and the first thing you see as you cross the Fox River, looms huge above the bridges and the tree line and the tidy homes strung along the tidy sidewalks.
In late July of a new football season the noise of joy and human struggle fills these streets. Before you’ve even parked the car, you’ll hear and feel the grunt and thud and the cheering. Packers training camp is under way. This little town, so distant from so many of us that it feels set at the edge of the world—as all small places not our own must—has again become the center of something. The practice field is just across from the stadium. There are hundreds of people here, families in from Appleton, Eau Claire, Racine and Fish Creek, Manitowoc and Wausau and Waukesha, the mothers and fathers and sons and daughters of Wisconsin standing five deep in the summer funk. On the field is the football team, scores of young men sweating and swearing and thundering back and forth in their iridescent green and gold. One of them stands at midfield, lofting passes with an easy motion and a rhythm like received grace. Each ball cuts a long, sharp arc through the air. “That’s it!” yells a woman as the footballs rise and fall. “Way to throw!” She yells this to the man most of them have come to see, and on whom their season, and their psychic fortunes, will rise or fall. He is slender in the fat shadows of the bellies and bull necks around him, slight and nearly boyish. With his three-quarter-length pants and low-cut socks and his shoes hidden in that deep grass, he appears to be playing barefoot. From the sideline the close-cropped hair still looks blond, and the freckled right arm is still loose and strong, and the smile and the smirk still say, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” Thus, with every attribute in place but the bamboo fishin’ pole, here is the NFL quarterback rendered as Huck Finn grown.
To read the dour columnists..., though, Huckleberry should be taking his first snap under center this season from the comfort and safety of his Medicare-approved personal scooter. Candy-apple red, perhaps, with a handlebar shopping basket, a bicycle bell, and an AARP bumper sticker that reads: I brake for grandchildren. Because, they say, Brett Favre—Huck Finn grown and now grown old—shouldn’t be playing football. Our heroes must never grow old. And yet here he is. The Bipolar Romantic Disorder gripping Wisconsin could be described thusly: We love Brett. But we love him in inverse proportion to the number of INTs he throws. We love him, but not at the expense of rebuilding the program. We love Brett, but not at the risk of another 4–12 season. We love him, but this is Titletown, U.S.A., after all. Business is business. They’d all be heartbroken if he left them, of course; he’s one of the best there ever was. He has brought them a decade and a half of winning, of honor and glory, of mostly wholesome excitement and family thrills and civic pride. A Super Bowl trophy. Three MVP awards. But that 4–12 season in 2005 was heartbreak of a kind too. And, well, sort of embarrassing.
So through the impatient winter and spring, wrestling the notion of retirement, he was cursed by anyone with a microphone or a keyboard for being, like Hamlet, indecisive or half mad; or worse, of feigning indecision or madness in service only of his own selfishness. Still others saw him as Lear, an aging king wandering the wilderness, trying desperately to remember whom and what he really loved; and who and what loved him in return. To interview Brett Favre in the basement at Lambeau is to sit awhile face-to-face with the phenomenon of American celebrity. There is the private person, of course, and there is the public persona. Often enough these two are utter opposites, even when each can fit the other like a second skin. Favre is, though, as he appears. In the chair across the table is a young man. Thirty-six, soon to be 37, he is certainly young, except as measured by the accelerated standards of professional sports. By the harsh arithmetic of the NFL, Favre is Methuselah. Off the field and out of the shadows of those double-wide linemen, he is, at last, large. Tall and broad, he is also gray-haired. He is wearing a forest green T-shirt, baggy gold shorts and flip-flops. On one thick wrist he wears a large dive watch. He sits back in his chair, relaxed but a little wary, alert, summer tan and easy in his body and ready to field questions. Never having seen him before, one might reasonably conclude that Favre was at a job interview for the position of assistant scuba instructor on a cruise ship. Upstairs, though, in the Lambeau Field Atrium, a cathedral of memory and commerce, the fans wander the shops and restaurants reverent as acolytes, knowing to their bones who and what Brett Favre is. They buy his autobiography and his autograph, his cookbook and his bobblehead with authentic game day stubble. They buy his jersey and his jacket and his pint-sized souvenir helmet.
At Brett Favre’s Two Minute Grill, they buy his cheeseburgers. And as the video highlights unspool on the monitors hung from the ceiling, they tip their heads back, still chewing, and stare at his great moments on the field as if watching an eclipse. He is already memorialized, enshrined even as he sweats and groans through two-a-days. Q: There has to be a point for an older player, during the first couple of weeks of camp, when you’re shaking the rust off, and your passes are two feet too far or two feet short, that you ask yourself, Is this the new me, is this the new reality? A: Yeah—Is this the beginning of the end? I hear that all the time. When you’ve played 16 years you know that it’s just a matter of time before arm strength, or your legs, give out. You’re always wondering.... I come into camp now, my mind’s still telling me I can make that throw. But will my body tell me that? My game’s always been about throwing from awkward positions and making throws that other people wouldn’t make. He pauses. “And if I can’t do that, I can’t play.” Whenever Favre jogs onto the practice field with that delicate, slightly pigeon-toed gait, he looks like a man with a stone in his shoe. After starting 241 consecutive NFL games, he is as well-conditioned as he’s ever been, but he carries forward all the antique injuries, the catalog of his mortifications: right side, left side, top, bottom, feet, ankles, knees, hands, shoulders, hips, ribs, arms—sprained, sprung, pulled, bruised, broken, separated, cracked, torn, cut, shattered. Annually, if mostly lightly, concussed. By lore and acclamation, the toughest man in the game. Having admitted in 1996 that he was addicted to painkillers, it might take him a while longer to realize that what he may be addicted to is pain.
On Family Night at Lambeau, Aug. 5, more than 60,000 fans turn out to sizzle the brats and watch an intrasquad scrimmage. The Packers look good. But then, they’re only playing the Packers. Against his teammates, firing left, right and center, long and short, Brett Favre looks like himself. But is he? Against other teams, ominously, he goes 1–3 in the preseason. First game of the regular season, home at Lambeau against the Bears, and the stadium is ringed with the tailgating faithful. Inside, as part of the pregame ceremony, Reggie White’s name is unveiled, to great cheers, on the stadium’s upper deck. To lesser cheering are then introduced some members of the Packers’ 1996 Super Bowl–winning team. Don Beebe receives a polite round of applause. Mark Chmura is politely, but roundly, booed. Across the field, standing with his arms folded, as if waiting for a bus, is Brett Favre. He played with these guys. But rather than standing with them now in Dockers and sport shirts, 10 or 15 or 50 pounds overweight and looking forward to a Leinenkugel in the stands, he’s trying to calculate the likelihood 20 minutes hence of Brian Urlacher’s snapping his spine. The Bears are introduced to a chorus of well-mannered Lutheran booing. Nobody knows yet how good Chicago is, but before the jet exhaust from the F-18 flyover has cleared, the Bears score an easy touchdown on a 49-yard pass. Now they know. The hallmark moment for the Packers comes when Favre’s center steps on Favre’s foot and flattens him. Things get no better. Final, 26–0 Bears. The Packers’ first home shutout in more than 15 years.
At the postgame press conference, rookie Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy is asked if at any point he thought about pulling Favre for young Aaron Rodgers, the backup. “I didn’t consider Rodgers,” says McCarthy, his face sour, his answer final. Favre isn’t even out of the shower yet, and the columnists are agitating for a coup. Ten minutes later, Favre arrives. His hands on the podium are as raw and red as a fishmonger’s. “I was optimistic,” he says. “I thought we might surprise a lot of people.” He looks to the back of the room, and beyond it. “We can do better than that,” he says. But his eyes say he isn’t sure. The next week at Lambeau, the Saints roll in. Again, no one is sure how good they might be. For the game’s first 15 minutes they are awful, and the Packers take a 13–0 lead. Thereafter, however, the Packers ease themselves, mistake by mistake, out of the game. Later, in a sullen locker room, Favre says, “We’ve got to find ways not to lose.” On Internet message boards, posts like this begin to appear: Jury’s in. Favre’s out. But the truth, as ever, is more complicated. Favre, still mobile, smart and strong, is playing well enough to rank mid-pack among big-name quarterbacks. Surrounded by inexperience and playing behind an offensive line that starts three rookies most weeks, he is, by the hard evidence of the numbers, outplaying press box favorites like Vick, Roethlisberger, McNair, Plummer and Manning the Younger. Week 3 sends Green Bay to Detroit.
Favre arrives at his team’s fancy hotel wearing a striped sport shirt, baggy khaki pants and scuffed walking shoes. Had he not stepped off the team bus, hotel management might have thought he’d come to skim the pool. Over one shoulder he totes a battered canvas bag. In that small olive-drab duffel are hunting magazines and crossword puzzles sufficient to thwart boredom until game time. His pregame meal is already on its way up to his room. Cheeseburger. Fries. Q: Is it tough being on such a young team? A: There was a time when I thought, I’ll play forever. This game’s easy. What are they worried about? Why study this play if I won’t ever run it? But sure enough, you run it. And so you learn to expect the unexpected. Be ready for any situation. It’s never as good as it looks; it’s never as bad as it seems. That said, I don’t know if we’re good enough, right now, to win a lot of games. Some people say, ‘Hey, in a couple of years, this team....’ Well, I’ll probably be cutting the grass by then. Q: What about the rumors you’ll be traded? A: There are those who say, ‘He shouldn’t have come back. Serves him right they’re losing. He knew what he was getting into,’ and those who say, ‘I wish he’d get with a good team and finish out his career right.’ And I guess there’s a third take too, of those who just don’t give a s---. All three, I guess, are fair. You know it’s game day in Detroit when the hometown fans pissing in the alley behind the old JL Stone Company building turn their backs politely to the boulevard. Just up Brush Street at Ford Field, the Packers are trading sucker punches with the Lions. Learning a new system, a new offense, Favre has new reads and new checkdowns and new routes and new teammates and a new head coach. There are rookies colliding everywhere around him and strange new diagrams from the immense playbook running together in his head and unlined faces of players he hardly knows looking back at him for the ball. There are moments in the pocket when it’s easy to see his frustration. Seven-step drop, quick, but then his feet stop moving and he stands briefly flat-footed. Who are these people? Then a short pump fake, a shake of his head—This has to be wrong, doesn’t it?—then the throw, almost angry, a recrimination, to a stranger running to the wrong spot at the wrong time. Walking back to the huddle, he’s still shaking his head. Was that him or me? he wonders.
And moments, too, like this: Favre drops back into a collapsing pocket, chaos everywhere around him, and sets up. Up on the balls of his feet, he stands very still while the noise and the violence grasp at him, then steps forward into a long throw. The ball sails and hangs and lands without a sound in the hands of rookie wide receiver Greg Jennings. He goes 75 yards for a touchdown, and hope gains a few yards on reality. Favre runs the length of the field to gather him up. It is Favre’s 400th career TD pass. Most of the second half looks like a pickup game. Over an afternoon riddled with bad choices and bad bounces, Green Bay clings to a thin victory, 31–24. “It’s just great winning,” Favre says outside a locker room smelling of Seabreeze and baby powder, and looks like he means it. “It’s a hell of a lot easier to lose a game than it is to win it. We gotta find ways to end these games. But, man, that was fun.” Then Philadelphia. A Monday night game, and down below the press box Eagles fans warm up by shouting pregame obscenities at ESPN’s pregame broadcast team. As the sun sets, Philly’s trademark vibe of imminent weirdness sets in. The home team comes pouring out through the inflatable Levitra tunnel for its introduction. For the first half, it’s mostly Packers. Favre is 15 of 26 for 126 yards. Five minutes into the third quarter, though, the momentum shifts. There is no tipping point, no clear instant in which the worm turns. The Eagles simply score 24 unanswered points and win going away. With 6:19 to play Favre gets planted hard and hobbles off with a shoulder stinger and a ringing head. “Man, that was a rough one,” he says 20 minutes later. “I’ve got a splitting headache. I just need to get in bed and get some rest.” In another too-quiet clubhouse, this one smelling of wintergreen and wet feet, he leans against a wall. He eats a hot dog. He keeps his back to the room. Questions, sound bites and sentence fragments float past him on the steam from the showers, the damp postgame catechism: “What happened out there?” “They just made some plays....” “Talk about what you do now....” “This team’s gonna do well this year....” “ ... game like that, you’ve got to be able to finish....” “ ... sure I made a mistake or two.”
Favre turns, still bleary, to survey the scene. The room, and his thoughts, are slightly out of focus. His bell has been rung, hard, tolling another game played, another battle fought and lost, another step toward the end of things. He sits gingerly on the edge of his locker. He bends but can’t reach to tie his shoes. He sits up slowly, waits, then puts his hands to his knees and pushes himself upright. He wobbles there a second. After midnight, laces flapping, he shuffles into the trainer’s room. In this age of corporate quarterbacking, wherein all directives come down from the head office, and the position is really no sexier or more autonomous than that of a regional operations manager, Favre remains a “gunslinger.” No Green Bay offensive series of more than four or five plays can be broadcast on television without the use of that word. “He’s always been a gunslinger,” the announcer will say after Favre completes another 27-yard slingshot off his back foot among four converging defenders, or launches a ball into the third row of seats. An evocative signifier of Old West courage, swagger, improvisation and marksmanship, gunslinger also implies a sort of willful and counterproductive recklessness. In an era of quarterbacks praised for their clock-management skills and their low-key willingness to meet the weekly yardage quota nine feet at a time, it’s a compliment that takes away as much as it gives. Swashbuckler is another chestnut of the broadcast booth. In fact, the nature and number of clichés Favre attracts would make for a potent drinking game. And since he himself has long since sworn off, hoist a few in his honor. Drink a shot of redeye when you hear gunslinger. A dram of rum for swashbuckler. A glass of wine whenever an announcer uses the phrase vintage Favre. Drink a mug of Ovaltine when you hear He looks like a kid out there. Chug whenever you hear He’s just trying to make something happen or He threw that one off his back foot. And if you’re a Packers fan, drink a double shot and turn off the television when you hear He tried to force that one in there. St. Louis beats the Packers the following Sunday. A bad loss. In the last minute the Green Bay pocket collapses deep in Rams territory, and the ball is batted from Favre’s hand. This is variously described by the sporting press as a “backside containment failure” or a “Favre fumble.” He walks off the field shaking his head.
And so another love note to Favre from the Internet, the endless electronic American id: Knowing the team is so bad, why bother coming back? Is it ego or stupidity? The Packers’ bye week at last arrives. Favre visits Hattiesburg, Miss., to watch his eldest daughter, Brittany, a senior at Oak Grove High, play in a regional volleyball tournament. He spends most of the rest of his free time in a tree stand far out in the Wisconsin woods. The leaves fall and the deer come and go beneath him while he sits in solitude. His wife, Deanna, and his younger daughter, Breleigh, have errands to run, however, and plenty to do. Even in the midst of such a titanic struggle as an NFL season and the losing campaign against time itself, there’s school and the grocery shopping and, on a rainy autumn afternoon, gym class. Deanna Favre, tough, beautiful and practical, waits in the car while Breleigh tumbles and cartwheels. She keeps her hands on the wheel while talking about the decision that led them all back to Green Bay for another year. Q: How has this fall been for you, watching the Packers play? A: It’s been a little bit difficult, because I’ve been with Brett for so long, and we’re used to winning. Last year and this year have been stressful, seeing how frustrated he is from the lack of wins. Q: Any second thoughts about his playing this year? A: I think I’ve changed my mind as many times as he has. But in his heart he still wanted to play, and still believed he could. Q: Is he having fun? A: He has his moments. Q: Does the criticism of him bother you? A: I do take it personally. Breleigh’s in the second grade; kids come up to her at school and say, ‘Your dad stinks! The Packers stink!’ She comes home crying. Brittany, the day after the New Orleans game, walked into one of her classes and the teacher—the whole class is sitting there, the bell rings, it’s quiet—looks at Brittany and says, ‘Must be pretty bad if you let the Saints beat you.’ Hello?
The Favre’s live in a nice house in a nice suburb a few minutes from the stadium. Nothing special. Could be anybody living behind those pale bricks. Banker, lawyer, regional operations manager. And it is somehow heartwarming to see that neighborhood teenagers, in the runup to Halloween, or as a pointed comment on the season to date, have TP’d the tree in the Favres’ front yard. In Week 7 it’s a win at Miami, so surprising and joyful that after one touchdown Favre hoists wide receiver Donald Driver over his shoulder. And a week later, a win that surprises no one, at home against the Cardinals. Then a loss to woeful Buffalo, away, followed by a win against the Vikings indoors at the Hump. Down in the Packers’ locker room, as stylish and contemporary and transient-seeming as any first-class lounge at the Copenhagen airport, and where the Dupont Registry yacht catalogs sit side by side with the backgammon boards and the balls of discarded ankle tapes, they rally each week around Favre. Driver, who has played eight seasons with the Packers, many as the marquee wingman in Favre’s flying circus, distills the ideal of teamwork to its earnest essence when asked if he and Favre are, after all the yards and all the years, friends. “No,” he says empathically. “We’re brothers.” Then it’s the Patriots and another bad shutout at home. Favre goes out for the first time this year, with ulnar nerve damage to his throwing elbow. In other words, insult to injury, a hard shot to the funny bone. It was a game no one expected the Packers to win, but still.
So Favre, indestructible, and poised to break almost every career passing record in football, headed into the Monday-night game against Seattle with 2,368 passing yards, 13 TDs and seven interceptions. Playing in accord with the tip sheets, Seattle wins. Now 4–7 with five to play, there are hints and glimmers of the solid team they might one day become. And while their teeter-totter inconsistency is evident and their youthful progress slow, the ambivalence of Green Bay fans to their mythic quarterback hardens and softens from day to day and series to series and play to play. They can’t bear to see him go. Nor can they bear to see him falter. The Packers’ record is fittingly ambiguous in a season this crazy, in which none of the experts have been able to predict a thing. The Packers are a little better than anyone gave them credit for being. Only the talking-head handicappers and the Hawaiian-shirt radio talkers seem disappointed that they aren’t better. Or worse. The rest of us, like Brett Favre, try to take our joy in the play. The story of Favre’s incomplete pass at retirement this off-season, and the upset, confusion and outrage it caused among so many strangers has, for the most part, come and gone, overtaken by other, more urgent quarterback controversies. But that story will return, told in the same unforgiving way, in the next season or the next or the next. Because the story of Brett Favre’s end was never just about him. It is about us. We need our heroes and household gods forever young, forever strong, forever smart or beautiful. Because we ourselves are not. The end of an elite athlete’s career at 25 or 35 or 40 mirrors too perfectly the diminishments and compromises we will see all too well in ourselves at 55 or 65 or 70. The aches and pains and confusion, the missteps, the injury and illness and loss, the memories flown and the flowering of cowardice in the face of uncertainty, all the greatness so far behind you.
Young poets mock the inexorable unwinding of time, until, if they’re lucky, they become old poets. Old poets are smart enough to mock only themselves. Because maybe worse than bad eyes, bad ears, bad back, bad hair, bad heart, is bad faith. Doubt. The delicate stress fracture of the will and the hairline crack along the backbone. Do I dare to eat a peach? Mettle fatigue. This is how you calibrate your own descent, in the sad calculus of who you once were, but can never be again. Which is why the images of Unitas at the end, or Namath, or Ali or Joe Louis, or any of hundreds and hundreds of others, were too much for us. Not because we couldn’t muster sufficient sympathy, but because we had altogether too much empathy. To see their sad end warned us too vividly of our own. And now America is angry at Huck Finn for going gray. And for reminding us, yet again, of our own mortality. There will come a time when Brett Favre can no longer play. This is not that time.
But at the end of this season—or the next...he will step away at last, having earned the peace of an endless off-season. The cold and the snow will overtake Green Bay, and the stadium at this edge of the world will stand empty behind us, the last thing we see in the rear-view mirror as we cross that river, the light at last failing in the trees. But until that moment, Brett Favre will be throwing, in a way, for us all. Throwing hope forward, in a single clean step or with a motion as rushed and awkward as man falling out of the tub, as hurried and off-balance as the rest of us. Banking on the past while trying to read a second or two into his future, drilling clean arcs on our behalf into the weakening light and the rising odds, every stand he makes in the pocket another little long shot fired against the infinite and inevitable. Every throw a moment for hope, a defiant line, bright in the air, against chaos and diminishment and the final goodbye.
:twocents: :twocents: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :jumpsmile: :jumpsmile:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/pr...%2F11%2F28%2Fnfl.brett.favre1204%2Findex.html
Huck Finn's Last Ride. By Jeff MacGregor SI November 2006
For 15+ years Brett Favre has been the NFL’s answer to Mark Twain’s barefoot scamp – forever young and reckless. But nothing lasts forever, and the chattering heads think it’s time for him to retire. Pray that they’re wrong. Go north, to what seems the farthest reach of America, the topmost latitude of the world. It isn’t, but it can feel that way, even in the hot dazzle of high summer. Roll past the dairy barns red as bud roses and the storybook milk cows spattered black and white, and the U-Pik strawberry patches and the outlet-store billboards, and the hills swelling soft beneath them all. Drive north to Green Bay. That this is not the northernmost home of American professional football is merely geographical fact. In our mythology it remains the Fortress of Solitude—frozen in its ancient fame and its lonely arctic greatness—the holiest, most remote outpost in the NFL. Lambeau Field, the city’s heart and the first thing you see as you cross the Fox River, looms huge above the bridges and the tree line and the tidy homes strung along the tidy sidewalks.
In late July of a new football season the noise of joy and human struggle fills these streets. Before you’ve even parked the car, you’ll hear and feel the grunt and thud and the cheering. Packers training camp is under way. This little town, so distant from so many of us that it feels set at the edge of the world—as all small places not our own must—has again become the center of something. The practice field is just across from the stadium. There are hundreds of people here, families in from Appleton, Eau Claire, Racine and Fish Creek, Manitowoc and Wausau and Waukesha, the mothers and fathers and sons and daughters of Wisconsin standing five deep in the summer funk. On the field is the football team, scores of young men sweating and swearing and thundering back and forth in their iridescent green and gold. One of them stands at midfield, lofting passes with an easy motion and a rhythm like received grace. Each ball cuts a long, sharp arc through the air. “That’s it!” yells a woman as the footballs rise and fall. “Way to throw!” She yells this to the man most of them have come to see, and on whom their season, and their psychic fortunes, will rise or fall. He is slender in the fat shadows of the bellies and bull necks around him, slight and nearly boyish. With his three-quarter-length pants and low-cut socks and his shoes hidden in that deep grass, he appears to be playing barefoot. From the sideline the close-cropped hair still looks blond, and the freckled right arm is still loose and strong, and the smile and the smirk still say, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” Thus, with every attribute in place but the bamboo fishin’ pole, here is the NFL quarterback rendered as Huck Finn grown.
To read the dour columnists..., though, Huckleberry should be taking his first snap under center this season from the comfort and safety of his Medicare-approved personal scooter. Candy-apple red, perhaps, with a handlebar shopping basket, a bicycle bell, and an AARP bumper sticker that reads: I brake for grandchildren. Because, they say, Brett Favre—Huck Finn grown and now grown old—shouldn’t be playing football. Our heroes must never grow old. And yet here he is. The Bipolar Romantic Disorder gripping Wisconsin could be described thusly: We love Brett. But we love him in inverse proportion to the number of INTs he throws. We love him, but not at the expense of rebuilding the program. We love Brett, but not at the risk of another 4–12 season. We love him, but this is Titletown, U.S.A., after all. Business is business. They’d all be heartbroken if he left them, of course; he’s one of the best there ever was. He has brought them a decade and a half of winning, of honor and glory, of mostly wholesome excitement and family thrills and civic pride. A Super Bowl trophy. Three MVP awards. But that 4–12 season in 2005 was heartbreak of a kind too. And, well, sort of embarrassing.
So through the impatient winter and spring, wrestling the notion of retirement, he was cursed by anyone with a microphone or a keyboard for being, like Hamlet, indecisive or half mad; or worse, of feigning indecision or madness in service only of his own selfishness. Still others saw him as Lear, an aging king wandering the wilderness, trying desperately to remember whom and what he really loved; and who and what loved him in return. To interview Brett Favre in the basement at Lambeau is to sit awhile face-to-face with the phenomenon of American celebrity. There is the private person, of course, and there is the public persona. Often enough these two are utter opposites, even when each can fit the other like a second skin. Favre is, though, as he appears. In the chair across the table is a young man. Thirty-six, soon to be 37, he is certainly young, except as measured by the accelerated standards of professional sports. By the harsh arithmetic of the NFL, Favre is Methuselah. Off the field and out of the shadows of those double-wide linemen, he is, at last, large. Tall and broad, he is also gray-haired. He is wearing a forest green T-shirt, baggy gold shorts and flip-flops. On one thick wrist he wears a large dive watch. He sits back in his chair, relaxed but a little wary, alert, summer tan and easy in his body and ready to field questions. Never having seen him before, one might reasonably conclude that Favre was at a job interview for the position of assistant scuba instructor on a cruise ship. Upstairs, though, in the Lambeau Field Atrium, a cathedral of memory and commerce, the fans wander the shops and restaurants reverent as acolytes, knowing to their bones who and what Brett Favre is. They buy his autobiography and his autograph, his cookbook and his bobblehead with authentic game day stubble. They buy his jersey and his jacket and his pint-sized souvenir helmet.
At Brett Favre’s Two Minute Grill, they buy his cheeseburgers. And as the video highlights unspool on the monitors hung from the ceiling, they tip their heads back, still chewing, and stare at his great moments on the field as if watching an eclipse. He is already memorialized, enshrined even as he sweats and groans through two-a-days. Q: There has to be a point for an older player, during the first couple of weeks of camp, when you’re shaking the rust off, and your passes are two feet too far or two feet short, that you ask yourself, Is this the new me, is this the new reality? A: Yeah—Is this the beginning of the end? I hear that all the time. When you’ve played 16 years you know that it’s just a matter of time before arm strength, or your legs, give out. You’re always wondering.... I come into camp now, my mind’s still telling me I can make that throw. But will my body tell me that? My game’s always been about throwing from awkward positions and making throws that other people wouldn’t make. He pauses. “And if I can’t do that, I can’t play.” Whenever Favre jogs onto the practice field with that delicate, slightly pigeon-toed gait, he looks like a man with a stone in his shoe. After starting 241 consecutive NFL games, he is as well-conditioned as he’s ever been, but he carries forward all the antique injuries, the catalog of his mortifications: right side, left side, top, bottom, feet, ankles, knees, hands, shoulders, hips, ribs, arms—sprained, sprung, pulled, bruised, broken, separated, cracked, torn, cut, shattered. Annually, if mostly lightly, concussed. By lore and acclamation, the toughest man in the game. Having admitted in 1996 that he was addicted to painkillers, it might take him a while longer to realize that what he may be addicted to is pain.
On Family Night at Lambeau, Aug. 5, more than 60,000 fans turn out to sizzle the brats and watch an intrasquad scrimmage. The Packers look good. But then, they’re only playing the Packers. Against his teammates, firing left, right and center, long and short, Brett Favre looks like himself. But is he? Against other teams, ominously, he goes 1–3 in the preseason. First game of the regular season, home at Lambeau against the Bears, and the stadium is ringed with the tailgating faithful. Inside, as part of the pregame ceremony, Reggie White’s name is unveiled, to great cheers, on the stadium’s upper deck. To lesser cheering are then introduced some members of the Packers’ 1996 Super Bowl–winning team. Don Beebe receives a polite round of applause. Mark Chmura is politely, but roundly, booed. Across the field, standing with his arms folded, as if waiting for a bus, is Brett Favre. He played with these guys. But rather than standing with them now in Dockers and sport shirts, 10 or 15 or 50 pounds overweight and looking forward to a Leinenkugel in the stands, he’s trying to calculate the likelihood 20 minutes hence of Brian Urlacher’s snapping his spine. The Bears are introduced to a chorus of well-mannered Lutheran booing. Nobody knows yet how good Chicago is, but before the jet exhaust from the F-18 flyover has cleared, the Bears score an easy touchdown on a 49-yard pass. Now they know. The hallmark moment for the Packers comes when Favre’s center steps on Favre’s foot and flattens him. Things get no better. Final, 26–0 Bears. The Packers’ first home shutout in more than 15 years.
At the postgame press conference, rookie Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy is asked if at any point he thought about pulling Favre for young Aaron Rodgers, the backup. “I didn’t consider Rodgers,” says McCarthy, his face sour, his answer final. Favre isn’t even out of the shower yet, and the columnists are agitating for a coup. Ten minutes later, Favre arrives. His hands on the podium are as raw and red as a fishmonger’s. “I was optimistic,” he says. “I thought we might surprise a lot of people.” He looks to the back of the room, and beyond it. “We can do better than that,” he says. But his eyes say he isn’t sure. The next week at Lambeau, the Saints roll in. Again, no one is sure how good they might be. For the game’s first 15 minutes they are awful, and the Packers take a 13–0 lead. Thereafter, however, the Packers ease themselves, mistake by mistake, out of the game. Later, in a sullen locker room, Favre says, “We’ve got to find ways not to lose.” On Internet message boards, posts like this begin to appear: Jury’s in. Favre’s out. But the truth, as ever, is more complicated. Favre, still mobile, smart and strong, is playing well enough to rank mid-pack among big-name quarterbacks. Surrounded by inexperience and playing behind an offensive line that starts three rookies most weeks, he is, by the hard evidence of the numbers, outplaying press box favorites like Vick, Roethlisberger, McNair, Plummer and Manning the Younger. Week 3 sends Green Bay to Detroit.
Favre arrives at his team’s fancy hotel wearing a striped sport shirt, baggy khaki pants and scuffed walking shoes. Had he not stepped off the team bus, hotel management might have thought he’d come to skim the pool. Over one shoulder he totes a battered canvas bag. In that small olive-drab duffel are hunting magazines and crossword puzzles sufficient to thwart boredom until game time. His pregame meal is already on its way up to his room. Cheeseburger. Fries. Q: Is it tough being on such a young team? A: There was a time when I thought, I’ll play forever. This game’s easy. What are they worried about? Why study this play if I won’t ever run it? But sure enough, you run it. And so you learn to expect the unexpected. Be ready for any situation. It’s never as good as it looks; it’s never as bad as it seems. That said, I don’t know if we’re good enough, right now, to win a lot of games. Some people say, ‘Hey, in a couple of years, this team....’ Well, I’ll probably be cutting the grass by then. Q: What about the rumors you’ll be traded? A: There are those who say, ‘He shouldn’t have come back. Serves him right they’re losing. He knew what he was getting into,’ and those who say, ‘I wish he’d get with a good team and finish out his career right.’ And I guess there’s a third take too, of those who just don’t give a s---. All three, I guess, are fair. You know it’s game day in Detroit when the hometown fans pissing in the alley behind the old JL Stone Company building turn their backs politely to the boulevard. Just up Brush Street at Ford Field, the Packers are trading sucker punches with the Lions. Learning a new system, a new offense, Favre has new reads and new checkdowns and new routes and new teammates and a new head coach. There are rookies colliding everywhere around him and strange new diagrams from the immense playbook running together in his head and unlined faces of players he hardly knows looking back at him for the ball. There are moments in the pocket when it’s easy to see his frustration. Seven-step drop, quick, but then his feet stop moving and he stands briefly flat-footed. Who are these people? Then a short pump fake, a shake of his head—This has to be wrong, doesn’t it?—then the throw, almost angry, a recrimination, to a stranger running to the wrong spot at the wrong time. Walking back to the huddle, he’s still shaking his head. Was that him or me? he wonders.
And moments, too, like this: Favre drops back into a collapsing pocket, chaos everywhere around him, and sets up. Up on the balls of his feet, he stands very still while the noise and the violence grasp at him, then steps forward into a long throw. The ball sails and hangs and lands without a sound in the hands of rookie wide receiver Greg Jennings. He goes 75 yards for a touchdown, and hope gains a few yards on reality. Favre runs the length of the field to gather him up. It is Favre’s 400th career TD pass. Most of the second half looks like a pickup game. Over an afternoon riddled with bad choices and bad bounces, Green Bay clings to a thin victory, 31–24. “It’s just great winning,” Favre says outside a locker room smelling of Seabreeze and baby powder, and looks like he means it. “It’s a hell of a lot easier to lose a game than it is to win it. We gotta find ways to end these games. But, man, that was fun.” Then Philadelphia. A Monday night game, and down below the press box Eagles fans warm up by shouting pregame obscenities at ESPN’s pregame broadcast team. As the sun sets, Philly’s trademark vibe of imminent weirdness sets in. The home team comes pouring out through the inflatable Levitra tunnel for its introduction. For the first half, it’s mostly Packers. Favre is 15 of 26 for 126 yards. Five minutes into the third quarter, though, the momentum shifts. There is no tipping point, no clear instant in which the worm turns. The Eagles simply score 24 unanswered points and win going away. With 6:19 to play Favre gets planted hard and hobbles off with a shoulder stinger and a ringing head. “Man, that was a rough one,” he says 20 minutes later. “I’ve got a splitting headache. I just need to get in bed and get some rest.” In another too-quiet clubhouse, this one smelling of wintergreen and wet feet, he leans against a wall. He eats a hot dog. He keeps his back to the room. Questions, sound bites and sentence fragments float past him on the steam from the showers, the damp postgame catechism: “What happened out there?” “They just made some plays....” “Talk about what you do now....” “This team’s gonna do well this year....” “ ... game like that, you’ve got to be able to finish....” “ ... sure I made a mistake or two.”
Favre turns, still bleary, to survey the scene. The room, and his thoughts, are slightly out of focus. His bell has been rung, hard, tolling another game played, another battle fought and lost, another step toward the end of things. He sits gingerly on the edge of his locker. He bends but can’t reach to tie his shoes. He sits up slowly, waits, then puts his hands to his knees and pushes himself upright. He wobbles there a second. After midnight, laces flapping, he shuffles into the trainer’s room. In this age of corporate quarterbacking, wherein all directives come down from the head office, and the position is really no sexier or more autonomous than that of a regional operations manager, Favre remains a “gunslinger.” No Green Bay offensive series of more than four or five plays can be broadcast on television without the use of that word. “He’s always been a gunslinger,” the announcer will say after Favre completes another 27-yard slingshot off his back foot among four converging defenders, or launches a ball into the third row of seats. An evocative signifier of Old West courage, swagger, improvisation and marksmanship, gunslinger also implies a sort of willful and counterproductive recklessness. In an era of quarterbacks praised for their clock-management skills and their low-key willingness to meet the weekly yardage quota nine feet at a time, it’s a compliment that takes away as much as it gives. Swashbuckler is another chestnut of the broadcast booth. In fact, the nature and number of clichés Favre attracts would make for a potent drinking game. And since he himself has long since sworn off, hoist a few in his honor. Drink a shot of redeye when you hear gunslinger. A dram of rum for swashbuckler. A glass of wine whenever an announcer uses the phrase vintage Favre. Drink a mug of Ovaltine when you hear He looks like a kid out there. Chug whenever you hear He’s just trying to make something happen or He threw that one off his back foot. And if you’re a Packers fan, drink a double shot and turn off the television when you hear He tried to force that one in there. St. Louis beats the Packers the following Sunday. A bad loss. In the last minute the Green Bay pocket collapses deep in Rams territory, and the ball is batted from Favre’s hand. This is variously described by the sporting press as a “backside containment failure” or a “Favre fumble.” He walks off the field shaking his head.
And so another love note to Favre from the Internet, the endless electronic American id: Knowing the team is so bad, why bother coming back? Is it ego or stupidity? The Packers’ bye week at last arrives. Favre visits Hattiesburg, Miss., to watch his eldest daughter, Brittany, a senior at Oak Grove High, play in a regional volleyball tournament. He spends most of the rest of his free time in a tree stand far out in the Wisconsin woods. The leaves fall and the deer come and go beneath him while he sits in solitude. His wife, Deanna, and his younger daughter, Breleigh, have errands to run, however, and plenty to do. Even in the midst of such a titanic struggle as an NFL season and the losing campaign against time itself, there’s school and the grocery shopping and, on a rainy autumn afternoon, gym class. Deanna Favre, tough, beautiful and practical, waits in the car while Breleigh tumbles and cartwheels. She keeps her hands on the wheel while talking about the decision that led them all back to Green Bay for another year. Q: How has this fall been for you, watching the Packers play? A: It’s been a little bit difficult, because I’ve been with Brett for so long, and we’re used to winning. Last year and this year have been stressful, seeing how frustrated he is from the lack of wins. Q: Any second thoughts about his playing this year? A: I think I’ve changed my mind as many times as he has. But in his heart he still wanted to play, and still believed he could. Q: Is he having fun? A: He has his moments. Q: Does the criticism of him bother you? A: I do take it personally. Breleigh’s in the second grade; kids come up to her at school and say, ‘Your dad stinks! The Packers stink!’ She comes home crying. Brittany, the day after the New Orleans game, walked into one of her classes and the teacher—the whole class is sitting there, the bell rings, it’s quiet—looks at Brittany and says, ‘Must be pretty bad if you let the Saints beat you.’ Hello?
The Favre’s live in a nice house in a nice suburb a few minutes from the stadium. Nothing special. Could be anybody living behind those pale bricks. Banker, lawyer, regional operations manager. And it is somehow heartwarming to see that neighborhood teenagers, in the runup to Halloween, or as a pointed comment on the season to date, have TP’d the tree in the Favres’ front yard. In Week 7 it’s a win at Miami, so surprising and joyful that after one touchdown Favre hoists wide receiver Donald Driver over his shoulder. And a week later, a win that surprises no one, at home against the Cardinals. Then a loss to woeful Buffalo, away, followed by a win against the Vikings indoors at the Hump. Down in the Packers’ locker room, as stylish and contemporary and transient-seeming as any first-class lounge at the Copenhagen airport, and where the Dupont Registry yacht catalogs sit side by side with the backgammon boards and the balls of discarded ankle tapes, they rally each week around Favre. Driver, who has played eight seasons with the Packers, many as the marquee wingman in Favre’s flying circus, distills the ideal of teamwork to its earnest essence when asked if he and Favre are, after all the yards and all the years, friends. “No,” he says empathically. “We’re brothers.” Then it’s the Patriots and another bad shutout at home. Favre goes out for the first time this year, with ulnar nerve damage to his throwing elbow. In other words, insult to injury, a hard shot to the funny bone. It was a game no one expected the Packers to win, but still.
So Favre, indestructible, and poised to break almost every career passing record in football, headed into the Monday-night game against Seattle with 2,368 passing yards, 13 TDs and seven interceptions. Playing in accord with the tip sheets, Seattle wins. Now 4–7 with five to play, there are hints and glimmers of the solid team they might one day become. And while their teeter-totter inconsistency is evident and their youthful progress slow, the ambivalence of Green Bay fans to their mythic quarterback hardens and softens from day to day and series to series and play to play. They can’t bear to see him go. Nor can they bear to see him falter. The Packers’ record is fittingly ambiguous in a season this crazy, in which none of the experts have been able to predict a thing. The Packers are a little better than anyone gave them credit for being. Only the talking-head handicappers and the Hawaiian-shirt radio talkers seem disappointed that they aren’t better. Or worse. The rest of us, like Brett Favre, try to take our joy in the play. The story of Favre’s incomplete pass at retirement this off-season, and the upset, confusion and outrage it caused among so many strangers has, for the most part, come and gone, overtaken by other, more urgent quarterback controversies. But that story will return, told in the same unforgiving way, in the next season or the next or the next. Because the story of Brett Favre’s end was never just about him. It is about us. We need our heroes and household gods forever young, forever strong, forever smart or beautiful. Because we ourselves are not. The end of an elite athlete’s career at 25 or 35 or 40 mirrors too perfectly the diminishments and compromises we will see all too well in ourselves at 55 or 65 or 70. The aches and pains and confusion, the missteps, the injury and illness and loss, the memories flown and the flowering of cowardice in the face of uncertainty, all the greatness so far behind you.
Young poets mock the inexorable unwinding of time, until, if they’re lucky, they become old poets. Old poets are smart enough to mock only themselves. Because maybe worse than bad eyes, bad ears, bad back, bad hair, bad heart, is bad faith. Doubt. The delicate stress fracture of the will and the hairline crack along the backbone. Do I dare to eat a peach? Mettle fatigue. This is how you calibrate your own descent, in the sad calculus of who you once were, but can never be again. Which is why the images of Unitas at the end, or Namath, or Ali or Joe Louis, or any of hundreds and hundreds of others, were too much for us. Not because we couldn’t muster sufficient sympathy, but because we had altogether too much empathy. To see their sad end warned us too vividly of our own. And now America is angry at Huck Finn for going gray. And for reminding us, yet again, of our own mortality. There will come a time when Brett Favre can no longer play. This is not that time.
But at the end of this season—or the next...he will step away at last, having earned the peace of an endless off-season. The cold and the snow will overtake Green Bay, and the stadium at this edge of the world will stand empty behind us, the last thing we see in the rear-view mirror as we cross that river, the light at last failing in the trees. But until that moment, Brett Favre will be throwing, in a way, for us all. Throwing hope forward, in a single clean step or with a motion as rushed and awkward as man falling out of the tub, as hurried and off-balance as the rest of us. Banking on the past while trying to read a second or two into his future, drilling clean arcs on our behalf into the weakening light and the rising odds, every stand he makes in the pocket another little long shot fired against the infinite and inevitable. Every throw a moment for hope, a defiant line, bright in the air, against chaos and diminishment and the final goodbye.
:twocents: :twocents: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :jumpsmile: :jumpsmile:
