Brett Favre Retires

The day Brett Favre retired is like Sept. 11, 2001 in two respects: It is one of those days when an utterly mundane setting suddenly becomes memorable because it is only in one place and at one time—Where were you when you learned Favre retired?—that one learns news of such cultural magnitude. And, both moments leave in their wake a kind of painful, mournful communal resonance. We feel a common wounding, as though we are all connected through common knowledge of the event—and through our emotional reaction to knowledge that the way forward no longer includes something previously held both sacred and stable.

Whether or not there exists a collective soul, the sadness, the suddenness, and the irrevocableness of moments like these are at once striking and bonding.

A Quick Word on Favre

Humility. Excellence. Perseverance. Teamwork. These attributes ring false like some faded motivational management posters hanging in a sterile office hallway between the water cooler and the fake plants. Yet these words are actual and potent when referenced with the human named Brett Favre, because for Favre, they were absolutely true. Through the medium of the television, the feats of his play were shared with a massive fictive family who believed in his ability, his drive, his resilience, his spirit. And we were repaid for that belief with both touchdowns and interceptions, but also those moments of pure magic.

On this day when Favre retires, it is as though an old friend has died. What he means and meant to us will pass from the present tense—the seemingly always mythic—into the pages of memory and legend. An era has ended.

The memory of Favre will now define the shape of some things to come for the Packer nation and beyond. We are no longer tethered to his glorious past nor to his seemingly perpetual youth. We are cut free, free to grow old and become our own heroes. Free to remember him and those memories associated with his greatness, placing those memories into a different category than we might have yesterday. For the world is new. As it is every moment of every day, but which moments and days like this one clarify. Let us take the moment to celebrate the memory of Favre and how he brought so many people together.

What an athlete. What a culture hero. What a human being.