Brett Frickin' Favre

Well, there’s a call from a longtime reader for my thoughts on the Brett Favre saga. For those readers who are European (or who have lives that are fulfilling enough on their own without requiring any input at all from professional American football), here’s the basic deal:

Brett Favre played his entire career, except for his rookie year, with the Green Bay Packers. He played something like 16 years for the Green and Gold, and broke all the career passing records that mean anything at all. He won a Superbowl in Green Bay, played in another, and last year took us to within a drive of a third. And at the end of the year, after a few months to think it over, he held a press conference and tearfully said farewell, saying he lacked the fire in the belly for another year on the gridiron. He had thought about retiring for a couple of years – the Packers had to all but beg him to come back for the last two, especially after failing to sign Randy Moss, a wide receiver who might’ve done for us what he did for New England this past year. But we didn’t sign him – our general manager, Ted Tompson, thought we could spend the money better somewhere else, since we already had a solid corps of very young wide receivers with huge potential. Brett didn’t like it, but he came back, and proceeded to have one of his best years ever with these youngsters catching his passes. But he was too mentally tired to go through it all again – the preparation, the training camps, the time away from family, all for another year that, given this year’s success, will be seen as a failure unless Green Bay were to win it all. He couldn’t face it any more, he said; he had no more to give, he said. So we all shed a tear, tossed back a Leinenkugel’s, and waved goodbye as he receded into the distance, bound for the backwoods of Mississippi whence he had originally sprung.

We moved on in Green Bay. The Packers have a young quarterback they’ve been grooming for a few years to be Brett’s successor, and they drafted young quarterbacks to provide him with backup (and a possible future should he not work out). We’ve got the youngest team in the league, even more so now that Brett’s no longer bringing our average up. (The guy is 38.) And we went 13-3 last year and almost made the Superbowl. There’s nervousness in Wisconsin, but a lot of excitement, too. After all, Brett left a crucial game this year with an injury, and Aaron Rodgers, his heir apparent (hey – just thought of his nickname: “Heir-on Rodgers”. But it only works in print…), came in and lit the place up. He scrambled like only a young, fast quarterback can, he threw well, he showed no fear of contact…People got excited about the future. And we’re still riding that nervous wave into the new year. Training camp’s just around the corner!

And then Brett called up in July – July! – after spending some time among the crawfish and the gators, and said, “Hey, I changed my mind. I want to come back and play again.”

The Packers are in a fix. He has two years left on his contract - if he plays anywhere, it must be in Green Bay.

Unless we were to trade him - but who would give up what he's worth, when he only has perhaps 3 years left?

We could bring him back to the team as our starter - and watch Heir-on Rodgers say, "OK, guys, at the end of this year I am gone. My contract is up, and I won't play where they jerk you around like that." Years of training and big-time salary down the tubes.

Or we could bring him back as a backup, paying him giganto-money (hey, he has a contract) to hold a clipboard.

Or we could unilaterally release him and allow him to sign anywhere he wants.

Like Minnesota? Like Chicago? Who are both in our division? Whom we play twice a year? Who are both a quarterback away from being really, really good? Why on Earth would we do that? We are under no obligation to do it.

There are no good options. All brought about because the petulant Favre cannot be taken at his word, arrives at life-altering decisions that are complete opposites of each other every six months.

How did this happen? How could this guy suddenly turn into such a psychotic infant? How could he be so willing to toss his legacy into the toilet, becoming the same laughing-stock as Reggie White was in his final year(s?) in Carolina? Or Joe Namath in - Where the hell did he play again? Or Johnny U in San Diego? Or (forgive me, Christian) Joe Montana in Kansas City...? Well, my brother Jim called me the other day, and he summed it up well. He blames it, symbolically, on Ricky and Rodney.

Ricky and Rodney are two of our cousins from Gays Mills, my home town. My uncle Judd’s boys. Judd and my own father are brothers, but they are very different. Dad got out of the Kickapoo valley a little bit, saw the world, preferred to bring home a salary from outside while trying to build up a land, cattle and timber empire based on the family farm. It didn’t all work out the way he would have liked, but he’s a real leader in the community, somebody people look up to and / or resent. But everybody respects him – he’s something of a force of nature. Dashing and athletic as a young man, sparkling eyes and a sharp wit…He is the aging King of the Ocooch Mountains. Think Little Joe from Ponderosa, then project him forward to age 80 and cross him with Theoden. Only grumpier.

His kids are smart-alecks who didn’t grow up on the farm, but near it; we know it well, but we didn’t get submerged in it, and we all left the Valley for careers elsewehere. To the rest of the world, we may seem like rednecks, or like members of a lost tribe - people who know their way around the woods, have known what blood on our hands feels like, and aren't afraid of large animals. Someone exceptional out there in the concrete jungle. But to Ricky and Rodney, we’re the soft cousins they think of and shake their heads, smiling at our citified ways.

Uncle Judd is Hoss, only far less jocular. He ran the farm while Dad worked outside the state. He’s a big, big man, with a lantern jaw and a voice as gravelly as Clint Eastwood’s and as deep as James Earl Jones’. He’s quiet, brooding; he stayed on the farm his whole working life, except for some time in WWII. (The thought of Judd at war makes me shudder. It would be a lot like that Iron Man movie.) He is permanently dressed in overalls and engine grease, and his jaw has only gotten bigger with age. As Dad put it, when asked to describe a young Judd: “That was a hell of a man.”

His son Ricky is probably fifteen or twenty years older than I am, and if he and I were to drop the gloves, the result would be laughable. He is, according to Dad, hands-down the strongest human he’s ever known. He has a handlebar mustache and walks like a lion, muscles absolutely everywhere – none any bigger than they need to be, all hard as iron. As far as I know, though, he’s all but never done any exercise on purpose. He gets a truck out of the mud and fixes a tractor and wrestles a steer to the ground before breakfast. He dances on pool tables and breaks pool cues over people’s heads; he walks the hills deerhunting at the age of 55, carrying a rifle and smoking a cigarette, as fast as I could run them in gym shorts at the age of 19. He may have graduated high school – I would wager that he himself isn’t even sure. He stood in the parking lot of Michael's Pub and watched his son get beaten bloody in a fair fight. he took no action at all, standing honorably by. And when the worm turned, and his son started to get the upper hand and lay it on the opponent, and the opponent's relatives moved in to stop it, Ricky shook them by the collar and said "It was alright to watch him deal it out, so why don't you stand back and watch him take it. Unless you want me to bring the fight to you." He is as redneck as they get – so redneck that he would never think to call himself one.

Rodney has the same face, the same mustache, the same endurance. He’s a more sardonic and sarcastic shadow of Ricky. He builds fences through the woods in the summer for a living; he is immune to briars, burrs, blackflies, mosquitoes, and the charms of women. He’s made completely of leather, but with Dad’s twinkle in the eyes. He knows the Kickapoo Valley, and that’s about it; he makes jokes about the outside, keeps it at arm’s length, shakes his head in disdain at the stupidity of the world beyond Crawford County.

They are fiercely loyal to their family, protective of those they care for, unafraid to speak their minds on anything at all, unaware of any reason why the fact that their opinions might be less than completely informed should temper the enthusiasm with which they hold them. They brood over beers and reach decisions that are immutable, hold tight to them until their dying day. They might not know much about the subject at hand, but they know what they think about it. And if their cousin Joe tries to argue with them, they laugh and slap a hand like a catcher’s mitt on his back and say, “Does everybody who goes to Madison come back a weirdo?”

And this is what Jim said about Brett Favre’s decision to come back:

“Brett goes back to Mississippi and gets all his career advice from Ricky and Rodney.”

ADDENDA:

Naught to do with Brett, but two things I also want the world to know:

I was reading "Stina's Visit" to Tess yesterday. There's a part where one character says of another, who is content to be where he is: "He says it's like living in Paradise." Tess usually says at that point, "Yo quiero vivir en Paradise." (I want to live in Paradise.)

I usually respond, "Sabes, yo creo que mas o menos ya vivimos en Paradise." (Y'know, I think we pretty much already do live in Paradise.)

Yesterday she screwed up her face when I said that, recoiled and looked at me like I was crazy. "Nosotros no vivimos en Paradise! Esto no es Paradise!" (We don't live in Paradise! This isn't Paradise!)

A moment of thought - then: "Tal vez Wisconsin es Paradise..."

(Maybe Wisconsin is Paradise...)

And the other:

The birds living on our front porch mean that we go in and out through the garage door. At night, I walk the dogs, then come in, and let them into the kitchen; then I stand there in the kitchen doorway, with the garage light on, and hit the button to close the garage door against the night. Often it's the first time it's been closed all day. And I stare through the garage at the door coming down, wait through the ten or so seconds it takes, and when it touches the floor, finally completely closing out the darkness, I do something.

The question, to those of you about my age, is this:

What do I do?

First one to guess wins a prize!