For football fans in the Upper Midwest, Brett Favre's retirement is an earthquake. Suddenly the landscape looks crumpled and a big chunk of the terra firma has disappeared.
Tuesday we learned that a voice echoing somewhere under Favre's bristly buzz cut accomplished something no hulking linebacker ever could -- made him want to stop playing football.
This is a blow to the mythicism if not the business of the NFL. There are better quarterbacks than Favre in football history and in the NFL today, but few since Johnny Unitas quit lacing up his black high tops have channeled such disparate muses as Forrest Gump and Horatio Alger, and no quarterback has ever so effectively embodied the traits that sports fans want to see in their stars.
Favre is and ever shall be the populist quarterback. He became a pitchman for Wrangler Jeans, not Rolls Royce. He gave us a humble back story that started in the backwater of Kiln, Miss. He played at Southern Mississippi and prompted his first NFL team, the Atlanta Falcons, to trade him because he partied harder than he practiced.
He was the funny kid with the funny drawl until the Green Bay Packers inserted him into a game on Sept. 20, 1992. The kid threw a game-winning touchdown pass that arrived faster than a text message, and he ran downfield celebrating like a game-show contestant.
Soon Favre was receiving accolades that would become all too familiar -- he loves football, he's like a little kid out there, he throws so hard his receivers' hands hurt.
The words became clichés. The guy never did.
While the sports world turned ugly and self-referential, while wide receivers started celebrating 5-yard catches, safeties thumped their chests, and even rich, champion athletes cited their foremost motivation as proving people wrong, Favre kept showing the face of sporting joy.