The Making of a Monster: The Brett Favre Story

It will happen Monday night. A man, ravaged by the elements and his guilty conscience, will sprint across a plane of ice, desperate for survival, wishing he could turn back the clock before the gears of his imagination created the monster that now hunts him. And, then, the beast that stalks him will appear; a desecration against the sanctity of life, relentlessly chasing his creator, his tormentor, until the ends of the Earth. The scene will take place in the Metrodome, but it's lifted from a Mary Shelley novel, as familiar as Adam's fall from grace, as painful as Prometheus' imprisonment, and taught to indifferent high schoolers everywhere.

Brett Favre was one of the greatest quarterbacks to ever play (I always slated him just after Montana and Elway), and, at times, he still appears to be one of the better quarterbacks in the game today. His sixteen years with the Packers marked him as not only the franchise's best player but as its most beloved figure--he was the favorite son, taken out of a reed basket in Atlanta and blessed as a prince in the palace of the pharaohs. This analogy is more than just figurative language. Brett Favre led Green Bay fans from being the lower class laughing stocks of the NFL to the Promised Land. He allowed fans of a small market team that was on the brink of ambivalence, after years of losing, to once again embody the dream of being at the center of the NFL universe. His success as a gunslinger was an attack against the NFL establishment, but because Green Bay had a long forgotten history of winning championships, going back to the days of Lombardi, the Favre era felt more like the reawakening of a sleeping king in Camelot, or Christ's return in Revelations--more than simple punk rock rebellion, Favre gave Green Bay spiritual redemption.

When one understands that we Green Bay fans viewed Favre as more than just an All-Pro quarterback or another face of the franchise, then one begins to understand just how strange and haunting this Monday night will be. When Ron Wolf began constructing the Green Bay team of the 1990's that would eventually win a Super Bowl and be on par with the great Niners and Cowboys teams of that decade, he built the team from spare body parts that could only be found buried underneath tombstones and six feet of earth. He dug Reggie White up from underneath the turf at Veterans Stadium, put him in a wheelbarrow, and pushed him in the night all the way from Philly to Wisconsin. Dorsey Levens' corpse was waiting to be cremated when Ron Wolf selected it, in the fifth round of the draft, from a mass grave of unknown talent, and the same can be said of the corpses belonging to LeRoy Butler and Antonio Freeman. Other than Favre, White, and maybe Butler, the Green Bay team that restored life to Lambeau Field was a collection of spare parts and shrewd draft choices that featured very few future Hall of Famers and was driven mostly by the risky decision-making of a Mississippi quarterback, who was handpicked by Wolf from the Atlanta Falcons bench, like Igor selecting a brain from off a laboratory shelf.

For sixteen years, Packer fans believed that Igor had brought us the brain of a genius. When in actuality, Igor brought us the specimen located in the "Abnormal" jar. Favre was always a quarterback who played on impulse and instinct. His play reflected raw human emotion and a basic drive to do whatever one needed to survive. His fourth quarter comebacks and consecutive games streak were the most basic operations of the human mind, not the works of finely tuned analytical processes. Watching Favre was as exhilarating as watching a lion take down a gazelle. The blood and gore of the visual image told the story, as opposed to the mathematical equations and theories of physics that go on during a Peyton Manning audible. Favre spoke to our primal needs and our memories of plays drawn up in the dirt that were really the shadows of cave paintings, depicting mankind's urges to hunt and kill. Favre was always a caveman, chucking his spear from any available angle, in order to slay the wooly mammoth. In other words, Favre's actions were deeply rooted in the evolutionary steps of all humanity.

The fact that Favre always made more plays by using his brain stem and cerebellum than his frontal lobe always meant two things would have to happen. First, the Packers were always at risk of over hunting, meaning Favre at any moment might get too greedy and throw an ill-advised pass in overtime or some other key moment of the game. Favre critics and haters of the Packers always pointed to these mistakes as reasons that should have caused Packer fans to hesitate at hoisting Favre up on a cross, but, instead, Packer fans accepted these lapses in judgement because we saw these mistakes as testaments to just how human Brett Favre was. These mistakes made him appear to be like us, and we drew inspiration from the fact that no matter how many interceptions he threw he would still come back and throw touchdowns. His stubbornness is what invented the wheel, discovered fire, and allowed humanity to develop skills beyond eating, breathing, and a need for shelter. Secondly, Favre's constant insistence that he was indeed just another human should have forewarned us that one day he would break our hearts, in a way that would make us numb to the fact that all he wanted to continue doing was to throw a pigskin around every Sunday. To understand the Favre with Jet green skin and purple stitches, one first has to recognize that all of his egotistical waffling for attention the last two years was born out of a passion for football.

In all the anger and rage I've directed Brett Favre's way over the last two years, I have never been able to shake the fact that he did not reject us first. Ted Thompson and Mike McCarthy are the ones that told Favre he would have to try out for a starting spot because, from their vantage points, Aaron Rodgers was ready. I believe they made the right choice. Aaron Rodgers was ready, and, the longer Thompson and McCarthy waited to give their quarterback of the future a chance, the more likely that future would take place somewhere other than Green Bay. Still, it was Thompson and McCarthy who "saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open" and "rushed out of the room," and that moment matters because it was that moment that showed Brett Favre that this world requires more than passion but an understanding of pragmatism and mortality. Thompson and McCarthy came to the conclusion that while Favre may still cry in press conferences over his love for the game his usefulness in the game had come and gone. Humanity never deals well with fate because it is out of our control and takes everything we hold dear from us, including the careers that define us. Thompson and McCarthy stripped Favre of his definition and, therefore, his usefulness, leaving him to deal with emotions he never knew himself capable of feeling, and the result was not beautiful to behold.

Before Brett Favre became the featured story on ESPN and the bane of football fans everywhere, he was the sports world's every man. He achieved great individual success, but he always seemed to enjoy every single one of his teammates, by running into their arms after a big reception, or carrying them, literally, on his shoulders. Juxtapose this image of a boy in his backyard with the merciless assassin that was Michael Jordan and how Jordan only seemed to openly appreciate Scottie Pippen and Charles Oakley, and one sees that Favre was always the more approachable Savior, even though both were forced to live out their personal pain within the public arena. He had more visible passion than Tim Duncan, his passion was less abrasive than Roger Clemens', his achievements appeared less corrupt than Barry Bonds', and his talents never came off as the by products of the people around him, a la a Steve Young or a Troy Aikman. He was an athlete that all of us wanted to be because his humanity was always visible, or, at least, the traits we admire were always visible: courage, passion, durability, and wit. However, given enough time in the spotlight, Favre began to show us less enviable human characteristics; the ones we are ashamed to admit we also possess, like jealousy, uncertainty, anger, and fear.

Favre never had a silver spoon in his mouth. One can point to times early in his career when he was a bit reckless and immature, but he never appeared to be a spoiled brat or above the system until recently, so how did he go from the sports world's everyman to a prima donna punch line in a Chad Ocho Cinco tweet? His beginnings were modest; he was born in Mississippi to a football coach. He did not attend a top flight football program in college, but went to Southern Miss. He was drafted in the second round by a floundering franchise--the Atlanta Falcons--where he rode the bench. Then, he landed in Green Bay, like a shock of electricity into cold, dead flesh, resuscitating life, and "Go! Pack! Go!" chants began to sound like Boris Karloff's "It's aliiiiiiiive!!!" Brett Favre and the Packers fanbase came alive simultaneously, in a way that can only be understood through analyzing the relationship between the Creator and His creation. In other words, how does man even exist without God, and what is God without man? It would appear that each gains their importance from the other's existence. Green Bay and Brett Favre each mattered because they appeared to be codependent on one another.

While Favre resurrected the Packer franchise, Packer fans simultaneously placed him and ourselves on a pedestal. We even had the gall to believe that we were the only franchise smart enough to recognize his talents, convincing ourselves through myth and propaganda that without us Favre's talents would never have risen to the surface, that without Green Bay he'd still be on the bench in Atlanta or sitting in some deer stand drunk. He was our Creation, and we were playing God. As he carried us to victory on the field, we thought to ourselves, "I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life...I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter." The nature by which Brett Favre came to the Packers made us pretentious as a scientist who attempts to defy mortality, but it also made him more dear to us (and us to him) than any other player because we saved him from nonexistence.

Humans do not just act; they act within a context. In one of Shakespeare's many tragedies, Iago makes Othello into a killer by playing on his human emotions. Anything that breathes and thinks as a human can fall prey to the emotions that transform a man into a murdering monster. Dr. Frankenstein, upon seeing the creature that he tried so hard to make beautiful was actually a hideous beast, notes, "The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature," or, in other words, our emotions are as unstable as the seas. They are at peace one moment and raging like a hurricane in the next. Dr. Frankenstein's creature is beloved for a second, and, then, in the blink of an eye fearfully hated. Frankensteins's monster never recovers from the rejection he receives at the hands of his Creator, and neither did Brett Favre when Ted Thompson and Mike McCarthy told him that he no longer was guaranteed a starting spot.

The moment Dr. Frankenstein rejects his creation, the two are sent into a downward spiral, where beauty and love no longer exist. This spiral eventually leads them onto the Arctic's frozen tundra, as they chase one another into oblivion. Dr. Frankenstein can be faulted for having the ego to play God, as well as ducking the responsibilities that come with creating life. Shelley uses his character as an indictment of both science and God; science should not be used by man to usurp God, and any entity that occupies the role of God behaves unjustly when it exacts judgement on a creature for the characteristics possessed by that Creature that are out of the Creature's control. The Creature can be faulted only for so desperately wanting to be loved, which is what makes Brett Favre so perplexing. Does Brett just love football this much that he can't let it go? Or does he just need the attention? Or is he driven strictly by vengeance now? What purpose now drives him?

The answer doesn't really matter at this point. He is already the walking dead, and it remains clear that Brett Favre never thought the Green Bay franchise would turn its back on him. But it did. And the Green Bay franchise never once thought that he would hunt them to the ends of the Earth. But, now, here we are on Monday Night Football: "...the miserable monster whom [we] created...and his miserable eyes, if eyes they may be called...fixed on [us]." He is back to lay judgment on those who judged him first. And the only thing between us and those wretched eyes is Aaron Rodgers, a quarterback that all of us Packer fans are too worn out and scared to love, yet he is the only person capable of resurrecting the faith of a franchise....

Have we not been here before?