SIDELINE CUT:American Football legend Brett Favre has finally retired after an amazingly long and fruitful career as quarterback with the Green Bay Packers
OVER SEVENTEEN years, Brett Favre endeared himself to millions of American Football fans around the world and probably learned to accept there would always be an element of confusion over the pronunciation of his surname. Although it contains a mere five letters, the Mississippian's name looks more complicated than it sounds - a simple "Farv" is sufficient - and over the years caused countless stumbles for broadcasters on television. "Favh", "Favour" and "Far-ve" have all been attributed to the grinning roughneck from the bayous who became a cult figure for his performances on the often-frozen Lambeau Field in Green Bay.
It all meant that when the quarterback appeared in a cameo role as one of the suitors chasing Cameron Diaz in the 1998 comedy There's Something About Mary, Ben Stiller was able to deliver one of the best lines in the film based on the star's tricky last name. Realising that he, and not the macho, mannerly sporting hero was going to get the girl, Stiller's character, Ted, shakes his head disbelievingly and says with a stammer, "But what about Brett Fav. . . ruh?"
Needless to say, Favre's crossover into Hollywood was predictably wooden but it was about the only dodgy move he has made in almost two decades as a sports star. And his athletic career has been so rich and full of novelistic twists it will be a surprise if Favre's life story doesn't get the Hollywood treatment before too long. On Thursday, he announced his retirement after 17 years of throwing for the Packers without missing a single game, turning out for 253 regular-season games between 1992 and 2007.
Regardless of one's interest in the gridiron game, it can easily be appreciated this is reflective of an almost insane combination of bravery, fortitude, commitment and plain good luck. Remarkably, Favre's streak doesn't even lay claim to a record: he stands second in consecutive appearances to Jim Marshall, who played for the Minnesota Vikings throughout the 1960s and 1970s. But Marshall was a defensive end, one of the cogs in the violence machine that makes up a gridiron unit.
As quarterback, Favre was his team's architect-in-chief and the one man players on the opposition teams wanted to hit as frequently and as hard as possible. American Football is so culturally ingrained, so expensive and so fundamentally strange it is hard to ever imagine it becoming a globally popular sport. Detractors regard it as a form of scarcely disguised violence, warfare disguised as sport. Others decry it for being too stop-start and technically burdened.
But regardless of how one feels about the sport's quality, even an outsider has to recognise the sublime skill - and courage - a quarterback displays in flinging the ball with often absurd pinpoint accuracy while all around him human juggernauts scramble like wild animals to try and hammer him to the ground with as much violence as possible.
I remember conversing one day with a friend about when American Football was first broadcast on Channel Four and RTÉ 2. My friend was about 12 then and had never seen the game before and was appalled by the helmets and massive shoulder pads the players wore, accoutrements he considered to be irrefutable proof of their softness. Needless to say, this lad was from Kerry.
But for all the padding and the fancy helmets, there is something venomously mean and dark at the heart of American football and the possibility of seeing the quarterback downed is one of the blacker thrills of the game. The stories of quarterbacks suffering amnesia and constant headaches are legion. And it makes Favre's achievement all the more remarkable.
It is not surprising Favre had to go through rehabilitation sessions twice for developing an addiction to painkillers and, ultimately, alcohol as he went season after season of playing through pain. He did nothing the easy way, almost destroying his career before it began by wrecking his car in an accident close to his home but emerging from hospital to lead his college, Southern Mississippi, to a famous victory over their prestige neighbours from across the state line, Alabama.
Mississippi was the only college that recruited Favre and he was seventh-choice quarterback when he began his career there. Nor was he highly esteemed in the NFL draft; he was the 33rd pick in all by Atlanta in 1991 and threw just four passes in his first year, completing none. When he was traded to Green Bay a year later, he fumbled four times in a row and provoked jeers from the crowd before mounting a spectacular end-to-end attack with a minute remaining to thieve a win against the Cincinnati Bengals with 13 seconds remaining. With that, a love affair between the sports idol and his public began.
It helped that Favre had a rugged frontiersman demeanour and an uncomplicated outlook on life that was reflected in the plain number four he wore on his uniform and in the classic, unaffected design of the Green Bay jersey; playing in the snow and on frozen afternoons, Favre looked the way you imagined a quarterback should look. He went on to record the ultimate highs, winning his Superbowl ring in 1996 and breaking many records.
But he broke into Oprah Winfrey country in 2003, leaving an indelible impression on people by putting in an astonishing performance that included four touchdown passes against the Oakland Raiders the night after his father and high school coach, Irv, died - suffering a heart attack while driving home, his car stopping at the precise spot where his son had totalled his car 13 years earlier. That emotional gesture and the tears that followed consolidated Favre's place as a favourite son.
There were other setbacks: his wife, Deanne, fought breast cancer, his family home was destroyed during the Hurricane Katrina storm and his brother-in-law died while riding a dune buggy on Favre's home. These common tragedies and Favre's battle to quit boozing gave him an everyman appeal that eclipsed the vast wealth he accumulated from the game - in 2001, he became the NFL's first $100 million player. As late as last December, he was still performing miracles on the field at Lambeau, landing an 81-yard pass to beat the Denver Broncos in an overtime game.
His decision to retire, at the age of 38, was hardly surprising but nonetheless, and not for the first time, the man who could not be felled in the toughest game of them all broke down in tears at the prospect of leaving.
But in a period when it is becoming hard to identify with the remoteness of the best players in the world, when so many sports have been contaminated by athletes who have abused their talent through greed or cheating or pure personal neglect, the way Brett Favre conducted himself seems all the more impressive and significant.
It wasn't just his superhuman resolve to start every single game for his team; it was the gratitude he retained throughout those seasons, a kind of childlike delight in being "allowed" to play sport for a living. He wasn't joking when he queried the likelihood of ever finding anything to match the adrenaline rush of his Sundays in Green Bay. "I doubt it. I'm not even going to try - I'm no fool," he said.
He now faces the difficult decision of what to do with the rest of his life, but it almost certainly won't include acting.
