Never Favre from the Madding Crowd

Favre following a late hit in last year's NFC championship

Sports Saturday

He’s baaaak!  The fabled quarterback who has played more consecutive games than anyone in the history of football, the prima donna who each offseason plays maddening games with the football world about whether or not he’s retiring, the holder of virtually every scoring record who last year had his best season ever, the 40-year-old maestro who plays football with the exuberance of a teenager, has (surprise!) returned to play “one last season” for the Minnesota Vikings. They begged him to return and magnanimously he agreed to take their millions for a final year.  At least he says it will be his final year.

To those football fans who make fun of women’s soap operas, I say look upon the Brett Favre drama–the courtship, the tears, the temper tantrums, the theatrics–and rethink your sense of superiority.

This past January I wrote a farewell to Favre after he lost a brutal National Football Conference championship game to the New Orleans Saints.  I rerun that column today.  If things keep going as they’ve been going, maybe I’ll run it every August for the rest of the decade.  In the post I compare Favre to Ralph Hodgson’s dying bull in the poem “The Bull.”  But maybe I should have quoted instead Mehitabel, the alley cat who is the friend of Archy the cockroach in Don Marquis’ early 20th century New York Sun column.  While she has been knocked around by live, Mehitabel refuses to go down.  “Tojours gai, toujours gai [always gay],” Mehitabel regularly says.  And also, memorably, “There’s a dance in the old dame yet.”

Well, there appears to be a dance left in this old dame as well.  Here’s my column from January 26, 2010:

I watched in amazement this past Sunday as 40-year-old Brett Favre, despite being pounded by the defense of the New Orleans Saints in the National Football League’s National Conference championship game, pulled himself off the grass time and time again to keep on playing. It was an extraordinary chapter in a career that has already proved remarkable.

Favre, after all, is playing at a time of life when virtually all players have retired. Additionally, 2009 was Favre’s best year.  A series of remarkable Favre touchdowns had taken the Vikings to the verge of the Super Bowl and, for the first time in his career, Favre was avoiding stupid interceptions, his major flaw.

At one point, however, the Favre story seemed to have come to an end. The quarterback was leveled by two players in a play that probably should have drawn a penalty flag. As he was carried off the field, an old Ralph Hodgson poem, The Bull, came to my mind.

The poems is a morbid account of an aged bull whose glory days are behind him and who has been rejected by the herd:

See an old unhappy bull,
Sick in soul and body both,
Slouching in the undergrowth
Of the forest beautiful,
Banished from the herd he led,
Bulls and cows a thousand head.

In the course of the poem, the bull thinks back to his youth, as I found myself thinking back to Favre’s early days. He awakes, however, to see the vultures circling overhead:

Pity him, this dupe of dream,
Leader of the herd again
Only in his daft old brain,
Once again the bull supreme
And bull enough to bear the part
Only in his tameless heart.

Pity him that he must wake;
Even now the swarm of flies
Blackening his bloodshot eyes
Bursts and blusters round the lake,
Scattered from the feast half-fed,
By great shadows overhead.

And the dreamer turns away
From his visionary herds
And his splendid yesterday,
Turns to meet the loathly birds
Flocking round him from the skies,
Waiting for the flesh that dies.

If this sounds melodramatic, well, Favre invites melodrama.  He is incapable of doing anything halfway.

My pessimism was premature, however. Favre dragged himself back on the field and proceeded to take his team to the cusp of victory. Suddenly he seemed to be Beowulf, heroically fighting the dragon of old age. At the end of the game, only a few yards separated his super reliable kicker from a comfortable, game-winning field goal try. Favre only had to make one last play.

And then a final twist turned the epic into tragedy. In a position to run the few yards needed, or even to dump the ball off to a nearby receiver, Favre instead reverted to his old bad habits and threw across the body (a no-no) and into traffic. The ball was intercepted, the game went to overtime, and Favre never saw the ball again as the Saints won on the first possession of the extra period.

Though the throw broke the hearts of long-suffering Minnesota Viking fans, however, it actually makes Favre interesting. He is like those tragic heroes whose flaws make them seem human.

Favre has the most touchdowns in football history but also the most interceptions. He inspires and he infuriates. He provides us with a far more fascinating narrative than does the man who will probably one day surpass him in touchdowns, Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. Unlike Favre, Manning will be playing in the upcoming Super Bowl.

A cerebral player, Manning would never throw a pass like Favre threw, and he would have calculated just how many yards were needed and the best way to achieve them. Favre is the brilliant athlete who operates instinctively and doesn’t bother to study his opposition (or even to train all that much), with the result that he is capable of both brilliant and boneheaded plays. Manning, by contrast, is the thinker who sees football as a chess match. He looks at the board before him, notes how defenses are attacking him, and then proceeds to carve them up. When he makes mistakes, he learns from them.

I remember reading an article many years ago about how Shakespeare’s successful characters are ones that we don’t have much affection for—say, his Henry V, the brilliant general of Agincourt. The heroes we remember vividly are those who end up failing, whether Hamlet, Romeo, or Macbeth. Manning is a Henry V, the admired general who will lead us on to victory. Favre is the flawed king who will get us all killed.  But oh what a story it will be.