Just Saying, Is All...The Final Word on Brett Favre

I tried, Bubba.

I really did try to resist.

I’d be lying if I said I’ve ever had a soft spot for Brett Favre. Maybe it was my conviction that real gunslingers don’t wear braces, or the fact that I spent most of the late 90s watching No. 4 abuse my 49ers. In any event, I could never quite bring myself to jump on the Favre bandwagon—and I certainly won’t feel any abiding sense of loss when the season rolls around in September.

But still:

Here I am, on bended knee before Him Our Great Lord Cheesehead.

Oh well. At least I’ve got plenty of company.

Word of Favre’s retirement hit the wires on Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, the sports world was awash in maudlin sentimentality. Children wept. Hound dogs wailed. The phrase “frozen tundra” got so much mindless play that John Facenda spit on his own grave.

Silly?

A little.

Vain?

Of course.

And he who can get by without either silliness or vanity is welcome to cast the first stone at his leisure.

It’d be easy to play the cynic here—to rant and rave about historical perspective, or career interception records. But let’s be serious Bubba: This is what we do. This is who we are. To wax hyperbolic about an overexposed and underscrutinized quarterback is—alas! hooray!—to wallow in one’s utter and irredeemable Humanness.

Some species seek their cosmic order in the rhythm of the sunrise, or the turning of the seasons.

We, on the other hand, were saddled with the gift of language.

One of these days we’ll figure out what exactly we’re intended to do with it.

It’s a curious thing, this Need to Comment. By any measure, it speaks a lot more pointedly about the Commenter than the Commented Upon. If we weren’t here to talk about him, Brett Favre would be just another aging assemblage of inanimate carbon atoms. And God forbid it should ever come to that.

In the beginning was the Word; in the end will be the Silence.

In between it’s up to you and me to fill the dead air as best we can—which I suppose means there are more odious sins than to be only just saying, is all...

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