My colleague and Packer-fan-in-arms Michael Cade is through with Brett Favre, disgusted, after a long love affair. It’s a nice piece. If you haven’t been a Packer fan your entire life, it’s hard to imagine how some of us feel about what’s happened this year. Hatred, bitterness, disbelief, shame, despair — all of these; more. There are almost no parallels in sports — Luis Figo going from Barcelona to Real Madrid, maybe. We need a huge composite German adjective of Fassbinderian desire and soul-sickness to even start talking about this.
Brett Favre might have been the reason I stopped watching football. He was certainly one of the reasons I continued watching football for as long as I did. And now we’re the ex-boyfriend, and our girlfriend is fucking our estranged brother, and we can’t stop imagining his hands all over her, and what she does to him, what she stopped doing with us. That wasn’t supposed to happen — Brett Favre grew, and we didn’t? Are you kidding me? We can’t imagine ourselves without him. There are no Green Bay Packers anymore. He became us and then took our selves away.
It’s pretty to think, as Mike suggests, that there was once Good Brett, Our Brett, and then Daddy died and Brett lost his superego. Lots of people feel this way. It’s critical to think that we weren’t wrong about him, that he was once who we thought he was: Our son, our brother, too ingenuous to hide even the dollar he’d borrowed from our wallet, no more complicated than the mowing rows of the Mississippi tractor…almost see-through. It reminds me of Tiger, in a way.
Now he’s just an amazing ageless wonder — isn’t that the narrative? Sports narratives are so impoverished these days. The single salty tear so easy to conjure. I’m done with him, too, but I’m done with football completely. I watched the last quarter of the Packers/Steelers, and Roethlisberger threw that perfect pass at the end to beat us, and everybody could see it coming, and I thought: This game is too easy. Way too easy to score; way too easy to have my heart broken. No more.
(Image credit: Emery O/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)
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