For a guy who’s given up on Brett Favre, I sure am trawling for schadenfreude about him now. Maybe I will start blogging GBP after all, Mike Cade.
Anyway, MacGregor references the Fates, seven-layer salad (no capitalization, Jeff – it’s not patented), Sisyphus, Tithonus and Quixote — and neatly skeweres Urban Meyer, hiding behind the curtain of his own vanity — in the course of framing the Favre phenomenon as something like Nietzsche’s eternal return. A piece built on a simple idea, but still brilliant. Money quotes:
In Hell, Brett Favre is doomed for all eternity to short that throw.
And I am consigned, century upon century upon century, to watch him do it. And then condemned — forever — to read and write about it.
We all get what we deserve, apparently.
and
Anyway, by comparison [to Meyer's hypocrisy], Brett Favre is as reliable as a German bicycle and his blindered devotion to his own ambition is appalling but refreshingly honest.
Thus does our NFL industrial complex have its narratives inscribed for the Super Bowl fortnight. The Saints will play for the 9th Ward and Bourbon Street and redemption, for le bon temps and love and loss, and the Colts and Peyton Manning will play for vindication or validation or in spiritual service of the Midwestern recession or rectitude or something.
Whatever. It doesn’t matter.
The cliché could just as easily have been the Jets’ four-decade resurrection, or Favre’s un-aging grace. The stories don’t even register in the face of all that spectacle.
Come the great moment two weeks from now, some of you will be happy and some of you will be sad.
This, thanks in some unknowable measure to Brett Favre, and to his myopic selfishness and his awful ambitions, his single-mindedness and his stubborn arrogance, his passion and his fortitude. Think of him then, we owe him that, in the moment of your joy or sorrow, his armor clanking and on the run, as old and foolish and beautiful as Quixote.
I didn’t say it made any sense. But it is nice for somebody else to call bullshit on the Whole Thing — not just Favre, but Favre as the metaphor and simulacrum for the perpetual motion machine of hysteria and amnesia and false drama that is sports today. Even if the next click just takes you right back to Rick Reilly.
(Image: Google search volume for the term “Brett Favre” by state, 2008-09. Graphic credit: DavidErickson/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
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