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| In Favre, NFL Is Losing Fun-Loving Entertainer |
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| No matter his position on the field, Favre was always looking to throw. (Associated Press Photo) |
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Source: The Daily Fix, The Wall Street Journal online @ online.wsj.com/public/us
Mar. 5, 2008
Brett Favre’s retirement leaves behind an NFL that will be a lot less fun.
Favre, for 275 straight games the Green Bay Packers starting quarterback, was fun for neutral observers to watch even when his risk-taking hurt his own team. “On the list of quarterbacks, I’d pay to see, he’s first,” Jeff Jacobs writes in the Hartford Courant. “Give me the 50-yard line at Lambeau any time. He is Phil Mickelson. He is Reggie. He can make history. He can unravel history. If history is to record professional athletics both as sports and entertainment, Favre is a perennial Oscar winner.”
Fun was the top priority for Favre. “Brett Favre has all of the numbers now: most completions, most yards, most touchdowns and, yes, most interceptions. He retires at the summit of quarterback statistics, responsible for more than 35 miles of passing gains and a record 160 winning starts,” Tim Sullivan writes in the San Diego Union-Tribune. “But to dwell on Favre’s ledgers is like counting Leonardo’s brush strokes, like summarizing Hamlet as 32,241 words. The sum of his labors is not its soul. More than any of his famous contemporaries — Tom Brady, John Elway, Peyton Manning, Dan Marino — Favre played quarterback with a jazz sensibility and a transparent joy. He was always improvising, ever daring, like a kid drawing up plays on a sandlot and then inventing something entirely different as conditions changed or inspiration struck.”
The Miami Herald’s Armando Salguero recalls when the Favre family opened their Kiln, Miss., home to him and other reporters before the 1997 Super Bowl. Favre’s father said then, “Brett really has fun playing, sometimes too much fun. He’d rather have fun playing football than breathe. Having fun is that important to him.”
Wright Thompson, a fellow Mississippian, appreciates what Favre did for their state. “The things we’ve always valued about ourselves, the toughness, the wildness, the exuberance, those things were suddenly treasured,” Mr. Thompson writes on ESPN. “Brett Favre made it cool to be from Mississippi. He seemed small town, and the rest of the NFL seemed anything but. It’s sprawling, corporate. It’s a cubicle. Brett Favre is a farm, and I think, deep down, we all miss our agrarian roots.”
Favre left at the perfect moment, just one game removed from one of the most fun games of his career, SI.com’s Don Banks writes. That came against the Seattle Seahawks in the Green Bay snow, which was an unlikely favored venue for the Southern-born quarterback. “It was a holiday post-card come to life, with No. 4 playing and jumping around like the little kid he tended to be in such settings,” Mr. Banks writes.
No. 4 and the Packers won that game, 42-20, but lost the next week to the New York Giants in the NFC championship game. That loss, clinched in part by Favre’s final pass, an interception, “didn’t wipe out the glorious four-and-a-half-month magic carpet ride Favre and Green Bay went on in 2007,” Mr. Banks writes. Unfortunately for Favre fans, some Packers officials disagreed, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Bob McGinn: “There was a price to be paid for such a defeat. As Favre undoubtedly could sense, there was, perhaps for the first time, considerable sentiment within his own organization that a change should be made at quarterback.”
Chicago Bears fans should celebrate the biggest offseason boost they could have hoped for, David Haugh writes in the Chicago Tribune: “Favre’s retirement potentially has more impact at Halas Hall than any other personnel decision the Bears will make this month about their own roster. Favre owned the Bears as if he were part of the McCaskey clan.” But the Tribune’s Rick Morrissey says even Bears fans will miss Favre. “He was what Chicagoans want in their athletes. He was hard-working, fun-loving, daring, devilish, unblinking, unpredictable and opportunistic. He was as tough as a Chicago winter, which, admittedly, is a Green Bay winter with training wheels.”
Faced with the prospect of another Packer quarterback taking a game’s first snap, ESPN’s Pat Yasinskas flashes back to the last time that happened: Sept. 20, 1992, when Favre finished a game Don Majkowski started. Mr. Majkowski was no slouch: He had an All-Pro season and is enshrined in the team’s Hall of Fame. He’s also close friends with Favre. Mr. Majkowski says of Aaron Rodgers, the presumed new quarterback, that “he can’t go out there and try to be Brett Favre. There’s only one of those.”
Favre is leaving the team in good hands, Jim Trotter writes on SI.com: “Rodgers never groused. He went about his business, working and studying to get better. He showed Favre the ultimate respect this morning by declining through his agent to speak about his ascension to the starting lineup until after Favre has spoken publicly about his retirement.” However, in Sports Pickle’s fictional, satirical world, Mr. Rodgers, having learned from his mentor, is planning to announce in the next few weeks whether he will retire. |
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