Huck Finn's Last Ride

The Bipolar Romantic Disorder gripping Wisconsin could be described thusly: We love Brett. But we love him in inverse proportion to the number of INTs he throws. We love him, but not at the expense of rebuilding the program. We love Brett, but not at the risk of another 4--12 season. We love him, but this is Titletown, U.S.A., after all. Business is business. They'd all be heartbroken if he left them, of course; he's one of the best there ever was. He has brought them a decade and a half of winning, of honor and glory, of mostly wholesome excitement and family thrills and civic pride. A Super Bowl trophy. Three MVP awards. But that 4--12 season in 2005 was heartbreak of a kind too. And, well, sort of embarrassing.

So through the impatient winter and spring, wrestling the notion of retirement, he was cursed by anyone with a microphone or a keyboard for being, like Hamlet, indecisive or half mad; or worse, of feigning indecision or madness in service only of his own selfishness. Still others saw him as Lear, an aging king wandering the wilderness, trying desperately to remember whom and what he really loved; and who and what loved him in return.

To interview Brett Favre in the basement at Lambeau is to sit awhile face-to-face with the phenomenon of American celebrity. There is the private person, of course, and there is the public persona. Often enough these two are utter opposites, even when each can fit the other like a second skin. Favre is, though, as he appears.

In the chair across the table is a young man. Thirty-six, soon to be 37, he is certainly young, except as measured by the accelerated standards of professional sports. By the harsh arithmetic of the NFL, Favre is Methuselah.

Off the field and out of the shadows of those double-wide linemen, he is, at last, large. Tall and broad, he is also gray-haired. He is wearing a forest green T-shirt, baggy gold shorts and flip-flops. On one thick wrist he wears a large dive watch. He sits back in his chair, relaxed but a little wary, alert, summer tan and easy in his body and ready to field questions. Never having seen him before, one might reasonably conclude that Favre was at a job interview for the position of assistant scuba instructor on a cruise ship.

Upstairs, though, in the Lambeau Field Atrium, a cathedral of memory and commerce, the fans wander the shops and restaurants reverent as acolytes, knowing to their bones who and what Brett Favre is. They buy his autobiography and his autograph, his cookbook and his bobblehead with authentic game day stubble. They buy his jersey and his jacket and his pint-sized souvenir helmet. At Brett Favre's Two Minute Grill, they buy his cheeseburgers. And as the video highlights unspool on the monitors hung from the ceiling, they tip their heads back, still chewing, and stare at his great moments on the field as if watching an eclipse. He is already memorialized, enshrined even as he sweats and groans through two-a-days.

Q: There has to be a point for an older player, during the first couple of weeks of camp, when you're shaking the rust off, and your passes are two feet too far or two feet short, that you ask yourself, Is this the new me, is this the new reality?

A: Yeah--Is this the beginning of the end? I hear that all the time. When you've played 16 years you know that it's just a matter of time before arm strength, or your legs, give out. You're always wondering.... I come into camp now, my mind's still telling me I can make that throw. But will my body tell me that? My game's always been about throwing from awkward positions and making throws that other people wouldn't make.

He pauses. "And if I can't do that, I can't play."

Whenever Favre jogs onto the practice field with that delicate, slightly pigeon-toed gait, he looks like a man with a stone in his shoe. After starting 241 consecutive NFL games, he is as well-conditioned as he's ever been, but he carries forward all the antique injuries, the catalog of his mortifications: right side, left side, top, bottom, feet, ankles, knees, hands, shoulders, hips, ribs, arms--sprained, sprung, pulled, bruised, broken, separated, cracked, torn, cut, shattered. Annually, if mostly lightly, concussed. By lore and acclamation, the toughest man in the game. Having admitted in 1996 that he was addicted to painkillers, it might take him a while longer to realize that what he may be addicted to is pain.