Brett Favre Lambeau Return Was So Damn Palpable in the Stands

Green Bay, Wisconsin is in a state of transformation. Twenty-five years ago, there was Lambeau Field, but the Packers had been woeful since Vince Lombardi. The idea that a two-mile stretch heading southwest on Oneida would now resemble much of American suburbia would never have entered the imagination. First came the shopping mall, modern chain restaurants like Chipotle and Panera have kept sprouting up around it, and now any building that’s a remnant of the manufacturing economy in that area looks anachronistic. Other Wisconsin towns, other than those immediately outside Milwaukee or Madison, have not experienced similar gentrification.

In Lambeau’s immediate vicinity, the Packers have been buying up and tearing down everything. With salary cap constraints and without an owner to extract the profits for a profligate lifestyle, there’s not much else they could be doing with their money. The region’s chief export, the franchise is doubling down on its own infrastructure and absorbing everything in its path like Cartman’s trapper keeper. So, the Green Bay Brett Favre returned to was not nearly the one he entered in 1992, where Bob Harlan, Ron Wolf, and Mike Holmgren were, as Jason Wilde wrote, the architecture triumvirate, and the quarterback would do much of the heavy lifting.

And now he will be a face of the booming tourist industry for the foreseeable future.

By now, you’ve seen and heard that Packers fans filled Lambeau Field and showered Brett Favre with applause and adoration. This was always a matter of when — barring untimely tragedy — and not if, which was expedited by his overtime interception in New Orleans, and then his former team’s championship in Dallas. No need to rehash all this, but I explained at The Classical two years ago why we would forgive, forget, and wholeheartedly embrace the man.

But, this way surpassed my expectations. I envisioned a thunderous applause during a game, but packing Lambeau in the middle of an oppressively hot day in July for no other reason, and continuing on for five minutes until Favre was finally able to speak, was as palpable a scene as I’ve ever witnessed in sports spectatorship. It’s embarrassing to say this, because I understand that caring this much about strangers playing a violent game is, on its face, so irrational, but my eyes were watery.

Boys and girls who were not old enough to remember Favre’s time as a Packer were there with their fathers and mothers, invariably educated about the meaning of the moment and wholly aware that they were witnessing a special event in franchise history. Everybody was so damn happy.

In a nutshell, this event was the justification for zealous fanhood. As I wrote two years ago:

Though, Favre did make us feel like a champion, and always that a championship was within reach. Every cliché that you’ve grown tired of hearing about Brett Favre was what made the roller coaster so fun to ride, especially when the most recent alternative was nearly three decades of futility.

Also: What good is it to be pissed off all the time? This is not to say that Sconnies face zero adversity, but they don’t suffer much anxiety. Everybody’s cheerful. Nobody’s passive-aggressive. Lifestyle decisions skew more towards immediate happiness than longevity, and the idea that fans would never again throw their arms around Favre was laughable.

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The Packers did everything in their power to prevent Saturday from becoming a drunken orgy. With gates opening at 5:15, they didn’t open the parking lots until 4:30. While there are a bunch of bars around Lambeau to wet one’s whistle, it take a bigger commitment to get inebriated on $5 light beer tallboys than it does if you’ve got a case and a handle accessible on ice.

Consequently, there wasn’t the hugely vibrant tailgate scene I was expecting. However, Kyle Cousineau–who has been deemed the mayor of Green Bay by great Packers beat writer Jason Wilde– and Cousineau’s friends and family had a bit of a loophole in the nearby Distillery parking lot. There were perhaps a dozen other groups with tents and coolers and grills in this lot. Noting that there should have been more, Cousineau jokingly lamented that not enough Packers fans had showed up for the OTA’s of tailgating season.

A real estate appraiser, Cousineau is a sports media junkie. He knows all the Packers writers and bloggers, has rubbed elbows with national folks like Peter King, Albert Breer, Jason La Canfora, and Jeff Darlington as they pass through down, and has contributed a couple times to King’s MMQB site. He and his crew were great sherpas for the couple hours before the Favre ceremony, feeding me with bacon-and-cheese stuffed burgers, brats, cheese, and beer dip. Great times.

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It made zero sense, and all the sense in the world, that Brett Favre wore a suit on Saturday. He joked about never wearing it again, but the Favre who Packers fans fell in love with the first time never would’ve worn it in the first place. This is not to say that the whole shebang was contrived or a front, but a big part of it was an elaborate branding exercise.

The in-stadium event was only one facet. Autograph sessions were held in Green Bay on Saturday and Madison on Sunday where a signed 8×10 went for $220 and a photo op was $380. Before and after addressing the fans from the field, Favre appeared in the Lambeau Atrium, which was overflowing with corporate bigwigs, and where attendance was not opened up to the general public.

Pragmatically, the reconciliation presents myriad economic opportunities for Favre, his former teammates (you won’t be able to sneeze in Green Bay the next 30 years without it landing on someone like Antonio Freeman, William Henderson, Gilbert Brown, or Dorsey Levens), the Packers organization, and all the brands.

Unlike the vast majority of commercially viable superstars, he’s been candid about his flaws — who else could you imagine giving this type of access to Peter King about prescription painkiller rehab? — and, as Cory Jennerjohn noted at Cheesehead TV, resonated with Wisconsinites as a likeminded, rugged outdoorsman.

What has differentiated Favre as a pitchman over the years is his folksy charm, which has always felt so sincere and genuine. He really looks like he wears a pair of the cheapest jeans and wings the football around the backyard, breaking his friends’ fingers, as dogs run around having the time of their lives.

Though he said all the right things this weekend, I do hope that we as Packers fans have learned our lessons about Favre idolatry now. It’s one thing to earnestly appreciate all the happiness he brought us over the years, but the hagiography was what made the original fissure so hurtful. Part of the total package of a quarterback who was revered for playing like a kid out there is that there were times he acted like a child.

As a relatively solvable blind item, there is a well-known sports biographer currently working on a book about Favre and/or his Packers teams. This writer has uncovered some personal items about his subjects in the past that make blindly devoted supporters squeamish, and while I don’t have any inside information about whether he’s found out anything about Favre, it’s a good bet that there’ll be something in there that’ll have a ripple effect.

Now, will these revelations be any worse than the parts of Favre’s story — the partying, the addictions, and the dick pic — that are already an open book? Who knows, but it’s better to laud Favre as a transparently flawed man than as what feels like an evolving rebrand.