And I thought Wisconsin’s long, state-wide nightmare was over.
A new documentary called Last Day At Lambeau, which chronicles the Brett Favre “retirement” saga of 2008, is set to be released in Madison next week and is sure to re-trigger some dormant emotions among Packers fans about the Ol’ Gunslinger himself.
I haven’t see the film yet, but as I watched the above clip on the film’s website my first reaction was to laugh. Seeing footage of Cheeseheads rallying behind the bearded Mississippian, crying “Bring Brett Back!” as they picketed Lambeau Field, made me realize how silly that whole melodrama was at the time and how foolish it is in retrospect.
Tony Mars, the cofounder of SaveBrett.net, talks in the clip about a petition effort he spearheaded in an attempt to convince Packers brass to keep Favre. “Despite how much press coverage the effort got,” he says, “never at any point did the Packers organization acknowledge us in a formal way. And you would think that an organization would want to hear from its fans. That was one of the most disappointing things to me as a Packers fan.”
Let me say this: never at any point in my life do I want a professional sports organization – let alone the Packers, a team I adore and own fake stock in – to consult me about business decisions. I have enough self-awareness to know that I know nothing about how to run a successful football team, so to think that these Packers fans expected to be consulted by the team before making a decision about what to do with Favre is preposterous to me.
Listen, I get it. I loved Favre too. There’s proof of that on the Internet. I still stand by those words because they represented how I felt at the time. But you know that Super Bowl the Packers won in 2010, and the 15-1 team and league MVP they had in 2011? If the rabid Cheeseheads of ’08 got their way, say goodbye to all that. Ted Thompson, Mike McCarthy, and Mike Murphy were smart enough then, in the midst of a tumultuous offseason, to make a very tough but very smart decision.
I don’t buy the argument that Thompson & Co. should have let Favre come back after retiring just because of what Favre had done for the organization. Indeed, he did a great many things that I got to witness first-hand, but he retired. He made that decision, not Ted Thompson. The organization decided to move on and invest in its future with Aaron Rodgers, which I’m sure many of the fans who picketed Lambeau and booed Rodgers at training camp are pretty OK with now.
As I haven’t seen the full film yet, I won’t make any grand judgments about it. As a lover of all things Packers, I’m excited to see an in-depth look at the organization’s defining moment. But if it’s ninety minutes of pointless pontificating and Packers fans bellyaching in news clips about trading away The Legend, then count me out.
Enough ranting about Brett. Time to watch some Aaron Rodgers highlights.