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I played one year of organized football when I was in the 7th or 8th grade. I was small. In the first practice I got run over by the running back who was a good six or eight inches taller than me. I did tackle him, it’s just that I ended up at the bottom of the pile. I didn’t even have a mouthpiece yet and the coach came over to me, laughing, and said, “Son, let’s not do that again until we get you a mouthpiece. We don’t want you losing any of your teeth or biting your tongue off.”

Though I didn’t play much - if you hadn’t played before you got to spend the first year sitting on the bench; it was just an unwritten rule - we never lost a game. I think we only got scored on once. But I was proud to be a part of that team.

It was a city-wide league and we were the Packers. Green and gold. I grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan, but I moved to Dallas to go to seminary just before Jerry Jones bought the Cowboys, fired Tom Landry and Tex Schramm and hired that cocky former Oklahoma State coach Jimmy Johnson. Well, that was the end of my devotion to the Cowboys. Through most of those years I had divided loyalties. The Packers weren’t very good, but they had a long, storied history and I had been a Packer. I loved them as the perennial underdog. I suffered with them through two decades (the 70s and 80s) where they only won 35% of their games. But I remained a loyal fan. Once Jones bought the Cowboys my loyalties were no longer divided. There’s only one team in the NFC that I root for. The Green Bay Packers.

In the 90s things began to turn around. A new quarterback came on the scene named Don Majkowski, nicknamed “The Magic Man.” But seeing a little success, Majkowski left the Packers for more money and a career that would soon fade. That was 1992. That same year Packers GM Ron Wolfe brought in a young, brash gunslinger he’d gotten to know and drafted as the GM of the Atlanta Falcons.

After seventeen of the most storied years in the NFL, fifteen in Green Bay, Brett Favre retired from football holding the NFL record in nearly every significant passing category. That’s about football. What follows is

about faith. If you’ll click the link below you’ll find an article that recently appeared in Sightings, a newsletter published by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
There you will find a refreshing perspective on life and faith.

Brett Favre, Catholic Hero

– Joseph Kip Kosek

Earlier this month, legendary Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre announced his retirement after
seventeen years in the NFL. He walked away holding most of the major records at his position, and as
much as any athlete of his time he attracted not just admiration but
veneration, inspiring even a “Packers Prayer” (”Our Favre . . .
Hallowed be thine arm”). Favre has become a football deity, but he has
also achieved the status of an exemplary American Catholic. Indeed, the
website Catholic Online
(www.catholic.org) names him second among the “Top 10 Catholic Heroes of the Super Bowl.” For many
Americans, “Our Favre” is less a divine figure than a fellow believer. Favre, though, is a peculiar
Christian athlete whose career defies familiar evangelical optimism in favor of a darker, distinctly Catholic vision.

Brett Favre would never be mistaken for Kurt Warner, the born-again former St. Louis Rams quarterback
who accepted the Super Bowl trophy in 2000 with a “Thank you, Jesus.” Unlike his late Baptist teammate
Reggie White, Favre did not convene on-field prayers or claim to receive personal communication from
God. Green Bay’s gunslinger was never that earnest or, frankly, that devout. The product of a small
Mississippi town, his career brings to mind the fiction of Flannery O’Connor or Walker Percy, Southern
Catholics for whom faith was often occluded and salvation often arduous.

More than any public proclamations of devotion, Brett Favre’s well-publicized personal suffering marked
him as a model Catholic for those who cared to look. Early in his career, he struggled with addictions to
painkillers and alcohol. In December 2003, his father died unexpectedly. Ten months later, his wife
Deanna was diagnosed with breast cancer, only a few days after her brother had been killed in an ATV
accident. The next year, Brett’s mother’s home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Most of these
travails followed his lone Super Bowl victory, evoking not so much the generous God of prosperity
theology as a more inscrutable Almighty, intent on humbling the exalted. In her bestselling 2007 memoir
Don’t Bet Against Me!, Deanna Favre compared the couple’s ordeals to those of the biblical Job. Indeed,
Brett increasingly exuded a Job-like equanimity, remarking after his wife’s diagnosis that “if I asked why
my father died or why Deanna has breast cancer, I would have to ask why I throw touchdown passes.”

Contrast the Favres’ litany of grief with the high living of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady,
also raised Catholic. Brady had a child last year with actress Bridget Moynahan, and then took up with
supermodel Gisele Bündchen. Wisconsin’s Catholics, who include more recovering alcoholics and
cancer survivors than actresses and supermodels, may respect Brady’s skill on the football field, but they
understand much more deeply a religion of pain and loss. Brady, a three-time Super Bowl winner, is
conspicuously absent from the “Top 10 Catholic Heroes of the Super Bowl.”

Deanna Favre’s memoir offers a Catholic rebuff to the secular celebrity culture exemplified by Brady and
Bündchen. She and Brett were still in college and unmarried when she became pregnant with their first
child. Friends pressured her to have an abortion, but she insists that “there was no way I could destroy
an innocent life.” She told her friends that having premarital sex was “a bad choice, and for every choice
there’s a consequence.” When Brittany was born, Deanna writes, “I knew I’d made the right choice.”
Certainly this story holds appeal for Catholics and evangelical Protestants alike. Yet in narrating her
struggles, Deanna – a self-described “quiet Christian” – never quite manages an evangelical level of
effusiveness. Don’t Bet Against Me! begins with an unsettling account of its author in a hospital bed,
being prepared for breast cancer surgery; beneath its gaudy pink cover, the book brings readers into a
world of guilt, responsibility, and suffering bodies.

The Favres’ Catholicism became a somber counterpoint both to the joyous hedonism of sports stardom
and to the exuberance of the evangelical athlete. When Sports Illustrated asked Brett to recount his
favorite football memory, he seemed to channel Walker Percy, or Job: “If I were to make a list, I would
include the interceptions, the sacks, the really painful losses. Those times when I’ve been down, when
I’ve been kicked around, I hold on to those. In a way those are the best times I’ve ever had, because
that’s when I’ve found out who I am. And what I want to be.” As it happened, the last pass of Brett
Favre’s career was an interception late in the conference championship game, a bad choice of throws
that cost his team a trip to the Super Bowl. For every choice there’s a consequence. Wisconsin’s
Catholics understand this, and weep.

Joseph Kip Kosek is an assistant professor of American Studies at George Washington University.