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"FacebookPinterest\n\n I realize that no one will remember this in ten years, or even one, because LOOK, BRETT FAVRE'S COCK SHOT!, but it's beautiful tonight in Minneapolis in the hours before the Vikings-Bears game. The snow is falling and the city buses are skidding on the roads to the stadium. I'm on one of the buses, jammed between Vikings fans in purple jerseys and blaze-orange hunting caps. The doors open with a blast of cold air and we walk down to the street in the dark. Off to the left is the stadium: Not the softly glowing Teflon balloon of the Metrodome, which imploded last week and spilled tons of snow onto the turf, but a different field, an outdoor field, stark and loud, all split open with white light and Jumbotron noise. Beautiful and weird\u2014like a portal opened and now we've got this throwback NFL.\n\n The weirdness has been building all day, actually. Partly it's the snow, and it's also the backup-stadium thing, and it's the fact that the Vikings are 5\u20138 and the game is therefore meaningless, freeing the fans to goof around. (Also, because the stadium belongs to the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers, it doesn't sell alcohol, so a lot of fans spent the afternoon getting a buzz on.) But the most potent dose of weirdness was delivered by Brett Favre. An hour ago the Vikings changed starting quarterbacks. They were all set to go with Joe Webb. Webb is a sinewy draft pick, largely untested but full of potential. \"Good kid,\" a heavyset man in a Santa costume tells me at the front gate. \"Big hands. And he was drafted 199th, same as Tom Brady.\" But now that Favre has apparently begged his coach for one last chance to play in front of his fans at the last home game of his 20-year career\u2014by the time you read this, he will have filed his official retirement papers, for the second time in his life\u2014well, who can deny him? \"Favre is Favre,\" shrugs a mustachioed Vikings fan in a #69 Jared Allen jersey. \"The guy can pull crap out of his ass.\"\n\n I head up to the press box to watch the kickoff. Vikings receive. On the first drive of the game, Favre rolls nimbly to his right and fires a crisp 11-yard completion to Percy Harvin. No hesitation. No apparent pain. This is a surprise, because two weeks ago, Favre, age 41, the only known grandfather in the NFL, was laid out like a box of puzzle pieces by Bills linebacker Arthur Moats, age 22. The hit sprained Favre's throwing shoulder and swelled his collarbone. He was inactive last week. But Favre is Favre. Two plays later he gets the ball to Harvin again, short left, on a bubble screen, Harvin breaking a tackle and running down the left hash to the end zone for the first score of the game. The fans scream and chuck snowballs straight up into the air, hundreds of them, making the stadium seem to fizz. Two for two so far. 34 yards and a TD. The veteran staggering to one last victory, in a blizzard, on some college field...\n\n And then come the interceptions. Two in less than a minute. The first, a deep floater to Sidney Rice, is underthrown, picked off, and nullified by an offside penalty. No play. Then Favre's next pass is tipped at the line of scrimmage, landing in the arms of a Bear at the Vikings' 15-yard line. The interception results in three points for the Bears, but more than that, it fatally wounds the blaze-of-glory narrative, which crawls along for 11 more minutes before a rookie Bears defensive end named Corey Wooton delivers the kill shot: Favre's in the shotgun. He takes the snap and steps back, looking to his receivers. He doesn't notice Wooton groping through to his blind side. Favre clutches. The rookie lunges. He wraps his arms around Favre's torso and spins him around 180 degrees and slings him with all of that extra centripetal force headfirst to the frozen ground in a terrible fluid gesture that seems, from my perch up high in the press box, to unfold in slow motion. Favre falling, falling. Favre crunched and splayed. Favre limp as a fresh-clubbed fish.\n\n Joe Webb relieves him. At halftime, a fresh buffet is laid out in the press box. Seventy reporters line up for steak fries. Down at field level, the fluid in Favre's brain is doing something unusual.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Brett Favre built the modern NFL. This is why his final moments matter. They throw a light backward and show us where we've been and what we may have gotten wrong. When Favre was a rookie, the league was one thing, a game and a business, and now it's something else. Now it's so seamlessly integrated into American life that it's hard to talk about as something apart from culture.\n\n I don't think it's a coincidence that for the bulk of 20 years, while this transformation was taking place, Brett Favre was the most world's most ubiquitous football player at the game's most visible and iconic position. Between 1991, the year the Falcons drafted him in the second round, and 2010, his final season, the league's revenue sextupled, from $1.3 billion to $7.8 billion. Team owners went from rich to stinking rich. Favre is important not merely because his career neatly brackets this explosion. He is important because his myth concealed the explosion's causes: The exorbitant TV deals, the cutthroat recruiting, the baldly Darwinian uptick in player size/speed/strength, the rise of fantasy football and ESPN, and generally the transmogrification of a simple game that any kid can play on a patch of lawn into a terrordrome league of zany mutants.\n\n Because here's the thing: When you watched Brett Favre play, the league didn't seem like what it was becoming. As football floated out into the stratosphere of freakdom, Favre was the tether. He kept the game grounded in the familiar. You knew this guy. Hell, with a couple of lucky breaks, you could have been this guy: The small-town jock, drawly/southern/white, large but hardly gargantuan, smart enough to read a defense but not all poindexterish about it, like Peyton Manning. Maybe you were some cracked-mirror version of Favre, a former high school athlete with your trophy from State framed on the wall of your cubicle. Maybe you were a woman and Favre was your dream boyfriend. Whatever the case, the crucial quality of Favre was the smooth projection screen of his personality. He had something for everyone, even if it was just an archetype to define yourself and your fandom against. He made it possible for the league to grow to a point where you could reap followers on Twitter for making fun of a boring guy who played, we were always told, like a kid out there.\n\n But in light of recent events, it seems worth questioning what we were always told. All these years, were we getting Brett Favre wrong?\n\n I tried to answer that question the obvious way, by asking Favre to talk to me, but he wasn't talking to any reporters (except the odd text message, the bulk of them to ESPN's Ed Werder), so I did the next best thing and went to Favre's hometown, to all the old hallowed places, to see if there was anything that other sportswriters had missed. And a lot of what I found in Kiln, Mississippi, on the bayou an hour northeast of New Orleans, is exactly what I expected: the bronze statue of Favre; the road named after his father and high school coach, Irvin \"Big Irv\" Favre; and the Broke Spoke, the world's last temple of Favre worship, a shack with plywood floors and walls festooned with biker regalia, Confederate flags, and the colors of every team Brett has ever played for. For twenty years, women have been coming here and removing their underwear and stapling it to the ceiling, scrawled with erotic messages to Brett (some more erotic than others\u2014a frighteningly large pair of panties reads, \"IF YOU LOVE THE PACKERS RUB MY G SPOT\"), and men have been writing in Sharpie directly on the walls: \"COONASS DON,\" \"GENTRY JANY,\" \"ROLAND SALTERS,\" \"NICK LACROSSE,\" \"WI.\" I watched a game or two at the Spoke, starting with the Saints-Rams game on December 12, the week prior to Favre's concussion. That day fifty of the locals, several of them former players of Big Irv's, drank lite beers and procured moonshine from bell jars stowed in their truck beds. And all afternoon I collected affectionate stories, possibly apocryphal, about Brett: about his drinking in the bad old days, before he went sober (\"If you thought you could drink more beers than him, all you had to do was tell him and he'd prove you wrong\"), his mythic freight (\"He is the symbol of all the men in this area\u2014to sum it up, it's Iron Man!\"), and his toughness vis-\u00E0-vis the new Packers QB and longtime Favre backup, Aaron Rodgers. (\"[Rodgers] is small, and he's got a glass jaw. Today Rodgers goes out of the game with a concussion. Did you ever see Brett Favre go out of the game with a concussion?\")\n\n What struck me wasn't so much the content of the stories as the way Favre was situated within them. The popular image of Favre right now is that of a narcissist, even a predator, thanks to the twinned Deadspin.com scoops you can't really help but have seen. Scoop one: The cell phone cock shots, allegedly sent by Favre when he was with the Jets to a Jets sideline reporter and former nude Maxim model named Jenn Sterger. Scoop two: The \"nasty\" text messages he (also allegedly) sent to a masseuse for the Jets, trying to arrange a threesome with her and another Jets masseuse who was married. This dude is out-of-control aggressive\u2014above all, a man of action. But the Favre that his friends portrayed is a curiously passive Favre\u2014a guy stuff happens to. Here's a sad one. Favre retires from the Packers; the Packers offer to retire his locker; Favre thinks that's nice; Favre signs with the Jets; next thing he knows, the Packers ship him his locker in the mail as a final fuck-you. (This story came from Rodney Ladner, a cousin of Deanna, Favre's wife: \"Brett couldn't talk about it, but I can.\") You almost never hear about Favre getting mad. You hear about him cracking wise or retreating into some private oblivion. (A particularly telling detail from his autobiography, Favre, is that Deanna only discovered that Brett was addicted to Vicodin after she noticed him staying up all night, night after night, playing video games.)\n\n Listen to enough of these stories and it's impossible not to wonder about Big Irv\u2014described by Stevie Haas, co-owner of the Broke Spoke, as \"one tough sumbitch\"\u2014and what it must have cost his kids, emotionally, to survive him. Big Irv was half Choctaw. Big Irv didn't bench you if you were bleeding. Hell, welcome to football, boy. Big Irv whipped his kids with a black rubber hose. He was a classic small-town tyrant\u2014a brick wall for some, a catapult for others. Either way, ineradicable as God. Which is why my favorite stories from Kiln were about how Brett got the better of his daddy: Brett casually flipping the ball to a red-faced Irv unhappy with Brett's throws, saying, \"Here, big boy, if you can do it better, you do it\"; Brett refusing to take a knee before halftime of one game and instead running the option, faking the pitch and keeping the ball himself, sprinting down the sideline for a TD and screaming back at Big Irv when he comes rebel-yelling down the sideline, \"I told you to kneel down!\" The difficulty and poignancy of Brett Favre's childhood is that he manages to overcome the man who must be overcome, and he does it through the only means available in his daddy-dominated redneck town: football. In later years, Favre came to appreciate and forgive Big Irv, famously playing his finest game on the day after Big Irv dropped dead in his car from a heart attack. But this doesn't change the ridiculousness of interpreting Favre's contentious childhood as some kind of American ideal. (And this isn't even getting into the recent arrest of Brandi Favre, Brett's younger sister, for allegedly cooking meth in a condo about nine miles from the Broke Spoke.)\n\n On my final day in Kiln, the Monday after the Saints game, I returned to the Spoke to watch the Vikings play the Giants. The Vikings had already listed Favre as inactive. He would be sitting out for the first time in 297 straight starts, breaking his historic streak. I figured that Favre's hometown fans would want to mark that occasion together. But when I opened the Spoke's front door a few minutes before kickoff, the place was desolate. The only people sitting at the bar were the ones who either didn't hear the news or didn't believe it when they heard. Mabel Haas, Stevie's wife and fellow Spoke proprietor, a purple ribbon in her raven hair, looked up at the screen and saw a black guy under center\u2014backup QB Tarvaris Jackson. \"Did Brett suit up?\" she asked.\n\n \"Nope.\"\n\n \"Hmmmm.\"\n\n \"Brett's not playing?\" said a blonde in a Favre jersey. \"Unbelievable.\"\n\n \"Dang dang dang,\" said bartender Derek Peterson, another of Deanna's cousins. He shook his head. \"This ain't worth shit.\"\n\n \"He shoulda stopped at 250,\" said the blonde.\n\n On TV, the sideline camera was zooming in on Favre's right hand, obscenely swollen, the color of borscht.\n\n \"Way-ell,\" said Stevie, \"we may have seen the last of Brett Favre.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n A week later, Brett Favre suits up against the Bears.\n\n He takes the sack that smashes his helmet against the ground, his skull against his helmet, and his brain against his skull.\n\n Bears win, 40\u201314, in snowy Minneapolis.\n\n After the game, I try to locate Favre in the locker room. But I can't see him. I don't normally cover the NFL, so it takes my eyes a few minutes to notice any patterns in the chaotic flickers of towels and blasts of steam. There are easily one hundred people roaming around\u2014the players, of course, most still in their purple jerseys or white towels. But also: Vikings PR guys with hunted looks; an old wizened coach in dark jeans and a parka and a knit cap pulled down almost over his eyes, leaning gingerly into a locker; forty or fifty journalists in scrums around Visanthe Shiancoe and Percy Harvin; and a Catholic priest with a white collar. As I scan the room, my eyes keep returning to the old coach. He represents a disturbance in the flow of bodies, an awkwardly jutting rock in a pond. No one touches him or talks to him. A thought occurs to me that I immediately dismiss: The coach is Brett Favre. Of course, I knew that Favre was old. Is old. It can't be Favre, though, because not a single journalist is trying to ask him a question, and he is the biggest story in football, and he is utterly alone in the middle of his own locker room while all around him reporters are harvesting anecdotes from his teammates about how amazing it has been to play football with Brett Favre. He puts two hands on the small of his back and extends his knees until he has achieved a standing position and bares his teeth from the ertion. He begins to inch diagonally across the locker room toward the priest, his steps comically tiny, the players standing ten feet clear. I approach him to ask a question. It's then that a man in a sweater intercepts me. Without introducing himself\u2014I learn later that this is Tom West, assistant director of Vikings PR\u2014he starts scolding me for violating Vikings policy. (\"We have a\u2014a certain way of doing things at the Vikings, a certain way.\") The whole time I'm arguing with West, Favre never turns around.\n\n Fifteen minutes later, I'm next door in the press-conference room with the rest of the journos when Favre walks in from a back door, takes the podium, shoves his hands into his pockets, looks out as us, and nods gravely, like: Well, yeah, this didn't work out too well, did it? No snark in it, no pride or defensiveness. It's disarming and sets the tone for what feels, for a couple of minutes, like an actual conversation between decent human beings. The first question is, \"How's your head?\"\n\n \"Um,\" Favre replies in a froggy voice, jaw barely moving, \"it's one of the few times I kinda went blank there for a while, in my career.\" He shakes his head. \"Jus' the way I, I guess I was, slung around on the turf.\"\n\n There may have been a point where Brett Favre played football because he loved it. But he kept playing it long after it made sense, because he doesn't know how to do anything else. He never bothered to create another identity. The fact that others conspired to bestow this shallowness with meaning and virtue isn't Brett Favre's fault. I use my one question here to ask him about \"life after football.\" He instantly shoots back, \"Is there?\" It functions as a laugh line in this room of reporters\u2014and Favre is indeed quite funny in other parts of the presser (\"I think my stubbornness, my hardheadedness, and stupidity at times has enabled me to play for twenty years\")\u2014but when Favre says the thing about life after football, he isn't smiling. \"I don't know exactly what that means,\" he adds. \"What I will do... I look forward to a little free time, and spendin' it with the family. And cuttin' a little grass. And, um.\" Which is completely consistent with what Favre's friends told me in Kiln, who must have been repeating Favre's own words when they shrugged and said, \"You can only cut so much grass.\" I think reporters misread Favre because they assume a depth and ulterior motive that isn't there; they assume a guy comfortable with his fame, a guy who knows what to do with it, even when he's telling them to their face in pretty bald terms that he hates his life. (Favre to Playboy in 1997: \"Maybe that's how I got in trouble with pain pills. When the game ends, you have to go back to thinking about all the damn things in your life. The pills help you not think.\") He agonizes about whether to take the field with a sprained sternoclavicular joint, and the guy up in the cozy TV box calls him a \"drama queen.\"\n\n The media absurdity ratchets up several notches in the final two weeks of the 2010 season as two lingering uncertainties suddenly become clear: the consequences of Favre's penis and the status of Favre's brain. After apparently refusing to cough up his alleged cock-shot phone to the NFL's investigators and generally being \"not candid\" in several respects, Favre gets fined a mere $50,000, not for the harassment of Jenn Sterger but for obstruction of the investigation. So that's over. And then Favre fails a series of concussion tests, forcing him to sit out the last two games. The moment it becomes official that Favre won't play in the season-ender against the Detroit Lions, at Ford Field, analysts on multiple networks, convulsing with sheer gratitude that they don't have to pretend anymore that the athlete-dong story, which they never really addressed, is illegitimate and beneath them, slap up the video tributes they've had in the can for two years. On the NFL Network, Steve Mariucci, Favre's old coach in Green Bay, starts to cry. On ESPN, Chris Berman says that his lasting memory of Favre will be the shot of him on the sideline last week against the Eagles, \"just hangin' out, joshing, 'I'm not even playing this game in Philly, but I'm here, having a good time, being with the fellows, right?' \" Berman's comment is the apotheosis of getting Favre wrong, a little tumor of misunderstanding that opens like a blossom, until Favre has become not merely a graceful, instinctive athlete or a pillar of the game but an emplar of maleness, of how men should act and be.\n\n The Lions-Vikings game itself, which I watch from the Ford Field press box, is hardly worth mentioning. The Vikings lost. Look up the details on Wikipedia if you want. I'm here as a Favre completist; I'm here to witness the absolute end, which Favre today, uncharacteristically, is trying to hurry along. He tries to leave the field while his teammates are still desperately lateraling. When the clock reads zero, he is one of the first Vikings to jog into the tunnel. By the time the media is let into the locker room, he has already changed into blue jeans and a white T-shirt, and he's standing at his locker surrounded by a classic press gang bang. I count more than a dozen cameras. No one speaks. \"Hey, Brett ain't got nothin' to say, man,\" shouts wide receiver Greg Lewis. \"He's gonna go home and ride his tractor.\" Favre walks past us into the bathroom, and we stand there mutely, idiotically, watching him brush his teeth.\n\n Then PR man Tom West bleats, \"Press conference. Next door.\"\n\n So here they are\u2014the last of the last of the last words of the Last American Quarterback, who lived and loved and fucked and did drugs and drank and had kids and a grandkid and survived rehab and a mean old cuss of a daddy and endured to see his brother-in-law die in a mishap with his own fucking ATV on his own fucking own property, and who granted the identical dying wishes of sixty-two terminally ill Make-a-Wish children (personal visit from Brett Favre), and who threw for 508 touchdowns with a career passer rating of 86.0. What did he learn? What did it all mean?\n\n \"Um, I just wanta, um, thank the NFL, want to thank the Vikings, um, my teammates, um, the fans.... I don't regret comin' back.... It goes without saying, ah, the fans have been absolutely wonderful... a wonderful ride for me....\n\n \"...One game, one season, does not define me....\n\n \"...I got a chance to play this game and play it at a high level.... For a kid who always dreamed of just playing in the NFL....\"\n\n Tom West stands to Favre's side wearing the expression of a murderer on Law Order whose scheme is about to be unraveled.\n\n \"...That's what you miss is the guys. Fellowship. Bus rides. Locker rooms....\n\n \"...It's time. I'm okay with it.\"\n\n The questions are as soggy as the answers. Ed Werder asks two generic questions about feelings and emotions; no one, to my mounting amazement, asks about the NFL ruling, which seems to me like the only way to crack the yolk before West returns the egg to the carton. It's all so unbearably anticlimactic. If this were the third act of a tragedy, the story of a rise and a fall, we would at least get the consolation of a piercing soliloquy. All Favre gives us is the rickety roller-coaster track of a tragic arc that we never get to ride. No catharsis, no redemption. He's the same fucked-up guy today as he was twenty years ago. He's not some tragic figure. He's just a flailing goof. It may make for a boring press conference, but it's the truth. And isn't this what should ultimately make Brett Favre real to us? And yes, sympathetic? Willful stasis is more common in this life than enlightened transformation. How many of us can honestly say that our wins and losses, our own years' worth of surges and subconcussive insults on our own home fields, have made us wiser, better people?\n\n And really, what were we expecting, anyway? Some wounded-animal howl from a dude his teammates used to call \"Brett Fart\"?\n\n He pushes away from the podium and takes a step into the aisle. Exit Favre, forever.\n\n \"Brett,\" I shout, \"what's your reaction to the NFL's ruling against you?\"\n\n Looking back on it, I think he would have kept walking, but too many people were looking at him too intently. So what he does is he freezes. This part won't be included in any of the transcripts of the presser, or in the video posted on YouTube. He throws his hands to his sides, palms downturned. He glances at me.\n\n Tomorrow, the two masseuses who talked to Deadspin will file a sex suit against Favre, the Jets, and the Jets' massage coordinator. (The Jets have said the suit is \"completely without merit,\" and that the team was previously unaware of the accusations.) The complaint's most unintentionally hilarious line? The defendant Brett Lorenzo Favre... is currently believed to be a quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings.\n\n \"I'm,\" he stammers.\n\n I think, for a split second, he's going to lose it. But he maintains composure. I'm the one who craves catharsis. Brett Favre is the one who craves the hum of his tractor and the smell of cut grass, and a vast lawn as peaceful as the dead. \"I'm done,\" he says."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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