Brett Favre retires after 17 seasons
I know I don’t talk too much football and usually when I do it’s restricted to Lions football, but I’ve been a lifelong Brett Favre fan so I wanted to make a post in honor of him announcing his retirement after 17 great seasons.
When I was a little girl, I remembered cheering on Steve Young and the 49ers, Brett Favre and the Packers, and of course the hometown Lions. Aside from his first season in the league, the rest of his career was spent with the Green Bay Packers. Similar to Steve Yzerman, Favre was the one player who stretched his playing time over the 90s and into the millenium. Like Yzerman, he played through his fair share of injuries. He even struggled with personal problems off of the field. But that’s why we loved him, he seemed human and then would go out on the field and play an amazing game despite the fact his father had just passed away the day before.
ESPN.com writer Wright Thompson wrote an online article about what he’ll miss the most:
I’ll miss the picks. I’ll miss them even more than the touchdowns, though he holds the all-time records for both. For it was in failure that we saw how much Favre wanted to win. He wanted to win so badly he was willing to lose. Not just lose. He was willing to be the goat for a shot at being the hero. So many quarterbacks are poor timid souls who’ve known neither victory nor defeat. Game managers. Not our man. He knew defeat 288 times. There is something poetic about his last pass as a professional ending up in an interception.
I’ll miss the pills, and the drinking, and the stories about rehab. Favre wasn’t perfect. None of us are. But in his imperfections lay his humanity. He was capable of failure like any of us, and therefore his successes seemed even more amazing. He was real, in a league that often seems anything but.
Brett, here’s to a happy retirement!
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2 Responses to “Brett Favre retires after 17 seasons”
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March 5th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
It really makes me smile when I see fans of other teams talking about how much they enjoyed watching Favre play. The guy was amazing and football got a lot less fun to watch. I’m still not used to Yzerman being gone, now I gotta deal with someone else under center for Green Bay? Getting old sucks.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Yeah, it’s still hard not to watch Yzie out on the ice. I think the only reason that I’m handling his retirement so well is that I see him a lot around the Joe (not that I really talk to him or anything), but it’s not like I never see him anymore.
But who knows, maybe Favre will pull a Hasek and come back halfway through the season? And I think it’s easy to root for a divisional rival’s player when your team is the Lions and they haven’t been very good since you were born. People like to associate with winning teams so perhaps that’s why I latched on to Young and Favre when I was little.