As a long-time Green Bay Packer fan, back in the days when they were not very good and an afterthought in the NFL, there were but precious few memories worth remembering; these included the classic MNF game against the Redskins in 1983, which I was fortunate enough to catch before I was shipped out for another tour in Germany, at the time the highest scoring game in MNF history, and not decided until Mark Moseley’s missed field goal on the final play. The big play of the game turned out to be this one, leading to what would be Jan Stenerud’s game-winning kick for a 48-47 victory:
But for awhile, for “excitement,” you had to make do with dramedy like this…
…when kicker Chester Marcol grabbed his own blocked chip-shot and improbably ran it into the end zone. Unfortunately for him, coach Bart Starr was less impressed with the touchdown than with the blocked field goal, and Marcol—who actually led the NFC in scoring his rookie season—was cut a few games later.
In 1989, Don Majkowski seemed liked the “franchise” quarterback they had been missing since Starr, but like Lynne Dickey he was prone to injury, which eventually ended his career as a Packer in week 3 of the 1992 season, when some problem child replaced him, who had enough “upside” for general manager Ron Wolf to gamble a first round pick in a trade with Atlanta, who was only too glad to commit highway robbery on the deal, or so they thought. In came Brett Favre, who after giving warning to fans about what to expect about his sometimes hair-pulling play, made everyone a “believer” after this:
The rest was, as they say, is history. After 253 consecutive starts at quarterback, two Super Bowl appearances and one win, Favre was traded after a period of drama of his own making—announcing his “retirement” and then changing his mind to interfere with the Aaron Rodgers Era—because he didn’t feel like reporting to training camp until the last minute and he thought the team would take him back with open arms as it always did. This time Mike McCarthy made it clear that this wasn’t “his” team anymore, and he would have to compete with Rodgers for the starting position; he didn’t want to do that, and Packers wanted to move on from him, so he was traded to the Jets.
Now it was with the Jets that Favre became embroiled in off-the-field trouble. Not that this hadn’t happened before: in 1996 in an ESPN “breaking news story” featuring Keith Olbermann…
…it was learned that Favre, accompanied by Coach Mike Holmgren, was having a press conference in Green Bay announcing that he was checking into rehab for an addiction to pain killers. I suppose it did come as a bit of a shock at the time, but it wasn’t like he committed any crime, and he was easily forgiven for that.
After all, Favre wasn’t the first Packer Hall of Famer to become embroiled in scandal—he was just involved in more of them. In a retrospective article last year concerning the 1963 betting scandal involving Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, Sports Illustrated noted that
Hornung admitted to betting on horses, betting on college and NFL games, even betting on the Packers (though only to win). Starting in 1959, he placed wagers with a gambler in San Francisco that went as high as $500—at the time, more than the median monthly household income. When Rozelle and his gumshoes confronted him, Hornung denied nothing. Rozelle then summoned Lombardi to New York City to lay out both the NFL’s position and its trove of evidence.
It was big enough news to land the “Golden Boy” Hornung, who led the NFL in scoring three consecutive years as a combo halfback/placekicker (including 176 points one year, which remained the single-season record for decades) and the team into some unwanted publicity. But unlike Karras, Hornung admitted wrong and didn’t fight the one-year suspension imposed by Commissioner Pete Rozelle; however, it did land him on the cover of SI…
… in a story that opined that the true danger of what he did was the “subtle erosion” of the “quality” of sports. Hornung wasn’t a criminal, he was just someone who didn’t understand the harm he was doing: he was just a young man out for a good time, and what is wrong with that? Well, he just should have known better, but who is to blame him with all this money and temptation around—even if his fellow players seemed to know the rules against gambling?
We don’t know if Favre did any gambling, but what he has been accused of doing when he was with the Jets was more personally embarrassing than criminal. After he left the Jets and moved-in with the Vikings, Favre was accused of making women in the team massage parlor feel uncomfortable, as satirized in this Taiwanese animation at the time:
And worse, he was accused by a former Jets sideline reporter, Jenn Sterger, of sending her an image of his member via cell phone, and making “unwanted” text advances. A league investigation ended in little more than a wrist slap for non-cooperation, and it didn’t help that a friend of Sterger testified that she had some weird fetish about not only inviting but collecting on her computer various images of body parts from men she “flirted” with.
Since Favre retired (for “real”), he hasn’t really spent much time in at least a Packer fan’s consciousness. Yes, fans are grateful he put the team back on the football map, but he is a Mississippi boy, and unlike Bart Starr who coached the Packers for a while, Favre hasn’t shown much interest in “giving back” to the fans, or seeking any employment in the sport outside a Sirius radio show, which has now been canceled. Favre occasionally made news from comments about Rodgers, or raising eyebrows about his wide-eyed (or wild-eyed) support for Donald Trump, which some people find disturbing.
Thus news about Favre’s latest scandal has unsurprisingly not raised any banners of support in Packerland, in fact for fans like me it is both embarrassing and yet not particularly surprising; even in his playing days. Favre was not known for good judgment in critical situations. I mean if this guy has one record that should remain untouched, it is his 336 career interceptions (Rodgers has already broken Favre’s team record for career TD passes, but has thrown only 96 interceptions).
To be fair, there were quarterbacks in league who were far more interception prone; for example, in 140 games, Joe Namath threw 220 interceptions—far more than the 173 touchdown passes he threw—and yet he is in the Hall of Fame. But Favre’s hair-pulling interceptions often came at the most inopportune times, like the ones he threw that prevented his teams from going to the Super Bowl in 2007 and 2009.
But Favre’s problems in Mississippi these days seem unforgivable and people are under the impression that he may deserve what he gets. It was one thing for Favre to be paid $1.1 million by the state to make “motivational” speeches he never made; perhaps it was just a favor for one of the few people in Mississippi who could be called a nationally-recognized figure without the baggage of politics. But while his present predicament suggests that he wasn’t necessarily looking for personal gain—he was seeking funding to build a volleyball facility at Southern Mississippi, where his daughter happened to be a volleyball player--it seems that he did at least have an idea of what he was getting involved in was not kosher on the funding side, and could put people in jail, even himself. The Gannett news service is reporting that this all started years ago with
federal money from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families fund, distributed as block grants to each of the 50 states. It potentially dates back to 2016, when Human Services executive John Davis began directing multimillion-dollar lump sum payments to the Mississippi Community Education Center, a nonprofit that theoretically would then determine how the TANF money could be used. Davis did not make director Nancy New report how she spent the money.
What appears to have occurred is that in this Republican-dominated state, poor people don’t really matter. It turns out that under the direction of Davis and New, with apparent knowledge of then governor Phil Bryant, that very little of that money was going to the people intended. Instead, it was going to pet projects of politicians and private enterprises, including those that Favre had an interest in, including a biomedical startup called Prevacus, and the volleyball facility. The cost of the facility ballooned past its original costs and was taking years to construct, and Favre was constantly badgering the governor for more funding, promising him financial perks with Prevacus, and naming the facility after him.
So the money for the facility was not coming from state and private coffers (or even the university’s), but from the federal welfare grant. Fictitious projects sprung up to explain that the money was being used to help poor people in the state with the highest poverty rate in the country, except that when the fiction was lifted there was something else there. It appears from text messages that Favre likely knew where the funds paying for his project was coming from, and at “best” thought it might be a bad “look” if people found out about it.
While Davis, New and others have been charged with fraud and are awaiting trial, Favre has been charged in civil court for the recoupment of the welfare funds illegally diverted to the volleyball facility and to Prevacus. Favre apparently had to pull a few more strings from certain people (maybe even the ex-president?) to acquire the services of former Trump lawyer Eric Herschmann, who claims he “did his homework” and believes Favre is innocent. But these text messages…
…suggest that Favre knew exactly what was going on, and was onboard with it as long as nobody (the media especially) found out about it. Of course, that is not the least of his problems at the moment. There are some in the sports media who are suggesting that Favre deserves prison time for this. It seems unlikely to me that a “beloved” sports and cultural figure in Mississippi is going to jail, but one thing for certain is that Favre probably doesn’t have to worry about a backlash from Packer fans, because they have for the most part moved on from him, since it is apparent he moved on from them long ago.
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