That Brett Favre, however, seemed to be dead. “I began to realize that Brett was no longer the man I knew,” she recalled. “The Brett I knew was quiet; this Brett was a party boy who stayed out all night with his friends. He was loud, rough, and often hateful. I saw the first signs of a mean streak I didn’t know Brett had. I wasn’t sure what had changed him, but I suspected it had something to do with drugs or alcohol. Brett didn’t seem to care that Brittany and I were in the house. He started to ignore us soon after we arrived, and when I pressed him on it he became very snappish with me. I kept wondering if I should go back home, because this life was not at all what I had expected.”
It’s a ridiculously common tale, told in books, in movies, in seemingly 60 percent of ESPN’s 30 for 30 productions. The athlete starts humbly, tastes stardom, and metamorphoses into an ugly, unrecognizable creature. By the time Deanna and Brittany relocated to Green Bay, Brett’s tight social circle was firmly established, as was his well-deserved reputation as a drunk womanizer. His two primary running buddies were Frank Winters, the burly offensive lineman, and Mark Chmura, the handsome tight end, and together they formed an oddball trio. A six-foot-three, 290-pound center, Winters was born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, and spoke with a thick, exaggerated accent that earned him the nickname Frankie Baggadonuts. One of his favorite sayings, uttered repeatedly, was, “Beer and pizza—that’s how you make it in this league.” Nobody was quite sure what he meant, but it sounded right.
“Frankie and Brett were from different worlds, but they were really close,” said Rob Davis, who spent a decade as the team’s long snapper. “Brett was Mississippi, Frank had that New Jersey brashness to him, like a goombah. He set the tone for the offensive line—we’re gonna smack people around.”
Winters was squat and round, and walked like a bowling ball hoisted upon tiny legs. Chmura, on the other hand, had presence. He didn’t rise from chairs, he unfolded. He carried himself with an upright gait of regalness; a six-foot-five, 248-pound model brought to the football field. But he was also insufferably arrogant; a man who thought himself smarter than he probably was. Teammates laughed with Favre, laughed at Winters, and rolled their eyes behind Chmura’s back. “I always joked that if Mark was at a bar and he went unrecognized, he’d call the phone number and have himself paged,” said one former running buddy. “He was that arrogant and insecure.”
When it was time to work, Favre went above and beyond. Through the years, it was the one part of him that improved the most—dedication to craftsmanship. Holmgren and Wolf insisted he needed to devote himself fully to the game, and he tried. Despite his irksome (to Holmgren) need to break apart the playbook and design his own X’s and O’s on the fly, Favre was also a craftsman. He learned his teammates’ strengths and weaknesses; he knew when and where certain receivers liked their balls. Though far from an MIT-caliber brainiac, Favre had an unrivaled capacity to remember details. From routes to blocking schemes, it all stuck. “We were at dinner one time, and he’d seen the movie Sling Blade several days earlier,” recalled Peter King of Sports Illustrated. “Well, he was doing paragraphs of dialogue from the film, in character, without missing a word. It was unbelievable.” Members of the Packers vividly recall Favre staying late after practice, arriving early the next morning. He knew the reputation he had earned in Atlanta as an indifferent slacker, and he didn’t much care for it. “During lunch sometimes I’d go and work out and I’d see Brett on the treadmill, studying plays at the same time,” said Darrell Thompson, the Packers halfback. “Or he’d be on the StairMaster for 20 minutes, working up a stretch while looking at plays and reads. He wasn’t one to rest on accomplishments. He wanted to be great.”
But there was . . . the pull. “The 8,000-pound gorilla in the room was Brett’s philandering and Brett’s drinking,” said Bill Michaels, host of the Packers’ postgame show. “We all knew it’s there. But most of us chose to ignore it.” Favre went out when he wanted to go out; he had sex with whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. There was a Milwaukee bar, Taylor’s, with couches and a spare room designated for Packers players. Favre, Winters, and Chmura became frequent Tuesday-night attendees—Deanna and Brittany be damned. “It was widely known that Favre, Chmura, and Winters would come to Taylor’s, and they could do whatever they desired,” said Tom Silverstein. “You’d hear all types of stories.”
There was a Madison bar, Buck’s, overflowing with drunk, bubbly coeds from the University of Wisconsin. “I saw Brett and his guys there a lot,” said one Madison native who later, as a journalist, wrote extensively about the Packers. “They’d be down on State Street, drunk, surrounded. All the stories ended with Brett with this woman, Brett with that woman. I think half of Wisconsin has some Favre-drinking-woman story. An amazingly high percentage of this state saw Brett doing something, somewhere.”
Favre was trapped between being what he was supposed to be (a loyal partner and devoted father) and what he was (a 20-something football player with money to spend and women to please). Perhaps in other locations (New York, Los Angeles, Miami), the media would catch wind and investigate the titillating world of a superstar gone wild. But not Green Bay; not Wisconsin. Dating back to May 29, 1848, the day it gained statehood, Wisconsin’s predominant non-Indian ethnicity was German—“and Germans are not ones to look down upon drinking,” said Tom Oates, the veteran sports columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal. “When towns in Wisconsin were founded, they’d build a church, a mill, and a brewery. It’s the odd state where drinking is celebrated.” Hence, while many saw Favre and his friends stumbling from bars, or chugging pints, the behavior was never deemed problematic, even with football games to win.
The local press, meanwhile, covered the Packers with the hometown friendliness of a 500-circulation rural weekly. Most of the beat writers and columnists knew of their quarterback’s off-the-field wildness, but in Green Bay such information was not to be divulged. Unless there was a direct link between Favre’s partying and Favre’s Sunday performances, his late-night whereabouts mattered not. “I remember struggling, asking the editors, ‘How far do we take this? Do we find out details?’” said Silverstein. “We talked about sending an intern to the bars, but never did. And a lot of the stuff was exaggerated. You’d hear, ‘Someone saw Brett snorting coke off the bar,’ and you’d sort of sigh, assume it’s not true, and move on.”
“He was protected,” said Kyle Cousineau, a longtime Packers blogger. “You could write about Brett Favre’s play. But him drunk with some girl? Never. It wasn’t allowed.”
Multiple journalists who covered the Packers agree that, during Favre’s heyday, the team made it clear that reporting on his hard-living ways would result in restricted access and, ultimately, no access. This wasn’t New York, where the Post and Daily News would sneer at such an order, then blast the team in an editorial. No, this was Green Bay—where the townspeople owned the team, and victories trumped journalistic integrity, and being a Packer meant wide-ranging protections. “Green Bay isn’t a city,” said Jeff Ash of the Green Bay Press Gazette. “It’s a Packer city.”
Every now and then, a member of the team would get in trouble with the law. But it took something especially big for that to happen. A Packer who raped someone might wind up behind bars. Armed robbery? Also not a great decision. Otherwise, all was good. “If you’re a player here and you get arrested, it has to be by a cop who doesn’t want to be a cop for long,” said Jerry Watson, owner of the Stadium View, a bar near Lambeau. “Because they’ll fire him, and switch him to doggy patrol. Will the cops admit that? No. Is it the truth? You bet. If you’re a Packer and you get picked up for drunk driving, they’re gonna call the team and handle it quietly. The G on that building doesn’t really stand for ‘Green Bay.’ No, it’s for ‘God’—because that’s what the team is here.”
As far as the franchise was concerned, Brett Favre was not to be touched—unless “touching” meant supplying him with pills to numb the pain. Which the training staff and
teammates did. As Favre’s play morphed from good to great to legendary, few people noticed that anything was awry. In the Packers locker room, he was the same guy he’d always been—snapping towels, pulling down shorts, spitting out rap lyrics like a hip-hop guru. LeRoy Butler, the star safety, calls him “the best teammate in the history of sports.”
“What did Brett do that was so special?” Butler said. “This was him: We had some African American guys in the corner playing a game called spades. We had some white guys playing backgammon. We had some older guys, you know in camouflage, getting ready to go hunting after practice. We had some of the younger guys playing video games. The locker room is separated into different cultures of people doing all this stuff. Brett Favre went to every culture, and after a couple of days everybody liked the guy. He introduced himself and fit in. He didn’t wait for guys to come to him. He’d go over to the younger guys and say, ‘I don’t really know how this game is played—but I want to play.’ He went over to the brothers and said, ‘I don’t know a lot about hip-hop music, but I’m open to listening to it.’ He’d be, ‘OK, now I like hunting, but I’m used to shooting more coyotes or whatever. I’m open to shooting deer. You know what, I like country music but I don’t really know that artist. But I’m open to listening to it.’ And you take that on the field and you say, ‘That’s the guy I wanna follow through a brick wall. Because he took time out to know me as a person.’ So Brett didn’t just hang out with white guys. He didn’t just hang out with black guys. He hung out with everybody. Not a lot of guys would do that. I would almost go out on a limb and say that no guys would do that. Certainly none in his position, as the star quarterback of the Green Bay Packers.”
This was of little value to Deanna, who felt lost, alone, confused, disoriented. One day she went to the local dentist to have her wisdom teeth removed. That evening, Brett asked her to call the office and complain of mouth soreness. “Why?” she asked. “My teeth are fine.”
“Because,” he said, “my back is killing me and there’s no other way to get pain pills.”
Deanna believed Brett because she never considered him to be a liar. “What I didn’t know,” she recalled, “was that he was using everyone he knew—me, the team doctor, his trainers, and his teammates—to get painkillers. Anyone who might have Vicodin, or access to it, became a target. He had no trouble getting the drug, because he worked in a job where people get hurt all the time.” She found white pills in plastic bags. They were Vicodin—made clear by the name neatly inscribed on each tablet. But why in a Ziploc, as opposed to a prescriptive vial? Her boyfriend was hooked. “I’d do anything to get it,” he recalled. “Lie. Beg. Borrow. You name it . . . They were my diamonds, my security, my escape, and my obsession.” Favre’s daily routine included sneaking into the bathroom at nine o’clock at night to pop 15 Vicodins, riding the high into the night, then sticking his head out the back door to vomit. He would suppress any guilt by ignoring Deanna while staying up late to play Sega Golf and watch television. He detailed the ritual in his 1997 autobiography:
The problem isn’t getting the pills down; it’s keeping them down. I’d go into the upstairs bathroom at home, take a big slug of water, and try swallowing a handful of pills. Most of the time I’d just throw them right back up and they’d land on the floor. No big deal. I’d just pick the pills out of the vomit, rinse them off and try again. It was just awful, and it went on every night.
“He behaved like some kind of high-strung superman,” Deanna recalled. “He’d stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning and then get up at 7 and go to work. He was drinking, too, more heavily than I’d ever seen him drink.” At long last, Deanna confronted Brett. “Are you addicted to painkillers?” she asked.
“No,” he insisted. “I am not.”
It was a lie. Not only was Favre struggling to sleep, but his body started to malfunction. Dehydration was a regular issue, as was constipation. Both were Vicodin side effects. “It got to the point,” Favre recalled, “where sometimes I couldn’t take a shit for a week.” On the eve of the December 31, 1994, playoff game against the Lions, Favre had wound up inside Bellin Hospital, his stomach and midsection ravaged by crippling cramps. After several tests, the doctor said, “My God, you’ve got this big ball of stool built up in your intestine.”
An enema removed the blockage, but Favre was momentarily scared straight. He was done with Vicodin! Never again! Really—never, ever, ever again! He learned his lesson, and this time it would stick . . .
“Sure as shit,” Favre recalled, “I was back to taking the Vicodin after the game.” To avoid any future blockages, he began chugging magnesium citrate—a laxative used to treat occasional constipation. “I would drink it,” he recalled, “and it would blow everything out.”
Against conventional logic, Brett Favre, drug addict, was a significantly better football player than Brett Favre, mere beer drinker. But, to those who know the game, it is not especially puzzling. Pain reigns in the NFL, and with less worry comes greater freedom to be daring and creative and adventurous. Favre wasn’t the quarterback who dropped back and knew what would transpire next. He scrambled, shifted, danced, guessed. He has been referred to as a gunslinger in print at least 5,000 times, and with good reason. “He did whatever it took to win,” said Joe Sweeney, Favre’s longtime business partner. “Did it come with a price? Absolutely. I remember the day after one game, both hands were swollen, his knees were swollen, one ankle was the size of a grapefruit, and his back was killing him. You want to know why he needed the drugs? It’s easy—he was getting killed.”
To excel as a gunslinger, one must be some combination of insane, unaware, indifferent, and numb. You can’t flinch from oncoming tacklers; you can’t be afraid to make a throw that could work but might not. “People called him unorthodox, but it was more than that,” said Mark Williams, a former Green Bay linebacker. “It was his willingness to try anything.”
The 1995 season came with expectations. Sharpe was gone, but the roster was deeper than ever. A team that long struggled to move the ball on the ground featured a pair of underrated runners (Edgar Bennett, Dorsey Levens) who dazzled in camp. Sharpe would no longer be executing the game’s best routes, but he’d also no longer be whining with every perceived slight. (Asked in camp whether he missed the star receiver, Favre noted dismissively, “Not really—Sterling never practiced or played in pre-season games anyway.”) Robert Brooks, now in his fourth season, was a suitable replacement. Chmura, rock-headed but sure-handed, and Keith Jackson, acquired from the Dolphins, formed the league’s best tight-end duo. The defense, featuring White and veteran Sean Jones as bookend defensive linemen, was ferocious. The general take among NFL experts was that the Packers were a legitimate Super Bowl contender.
So was Brett Favre nervous and uptight from the expectations?
“I’m the last man on the totem pole,” said Lenny McGill, a little-known defensive back from Arizona State. “It’s training camp and I have 15 minutes to go until a meeting starts, so I rush to the bathroom. I’m sitting on the toilet reading the playbook, preparing, and I hear somebody say, ‘Well, good morning, Lenny.’ And it’s Brett peeping over, looking at me sitting on the toilet reading my book.”
McGill didn’t know what to say.
“What’s up, Brett?” he said.
“You doing OK?” Favre replied.
“Sure,” McGill said.
“It’s kind of hot in here,” Favre said, “don’t you think?”
Um . . .
“He pulls out this ice bucket and proceeds to pour it all over me,” McGill said. “I had no time to change, so I show up to the meeting soaking wet. People asked, ‘What happened to you?’ What happened? Brett happened . . .”
Favre’s 1995 season was an ode to improvisational quarterbacking genius. Jon Saraceno of USA Today memorably called him “Opie with a robust arm—a classic overachiever with loggy legs and a scrambling style that looks more like Barney Fife than Roger Staubach.” Any questions ab
out his long-term usefulness, or whether he was a worthwhile starter, died as Green Bay jumped out to a 5-2 start. On October 22, in front of a record 60,332 fans at Lambeau, he lit up the Vikings for four touchdown passes in a 38–21 victory that kept the Packers in first place. Three weeks later he had what many consider to be the greatest performance of his career, using the 150th regular-season meeting between the Packers and Bears to announce his arrival as the NFL’s best quarterback, if not player. In a game at the Metrodome a week earlier, Favre suffered a gruesome sprained ankle that was fat and plump and the color of a bowl of Froot Loops. “It was a rainbow, just disgusting,” said Butler. Ty Detmer, the backup, stepped in, but was also knocked from the game with injured ligaments in his right thumb. T. J. Rubley, the journeyman third-stringer, entered to promptly commit one of the great gaffes in franchise history, calling an audible late in the game that resulted in an interception, the loss, and the unofficial end of his football career. Ron Wolf signed Bob Gagliano, a free agent quarterback of little note, and rumors circulated that either Rubley or Gagliano, the pride of Utah State, would start against the Bears in a battle for divisional supremacy. On Wednesday Favre was still on crutches, and trainers were alternating ice pumps and heat packs on the ankle. For 20 hours every day, Favre had some sort of therapeutic pack affixed to his lower leg.
The game-day temperature was 22 degrees, with the howling wind making it feel 15. Snow flurries cascaded from a pewter sky. Lambeau Field was packed, and Brett Favre—Vicodins aplenty—still walked with a limp. With a 6-3 record, Chicago held a one-game divisional lead. In the stands, loyalists unfurled a banner that read, WELCOME HUNTERS! BEAR SEASON HAS OFFICIALLY COMMENCED IN GREEN BAY.
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