Favre’s ‘old school’ a lot like Watson’s new one
Brett Favre is lying to himself, but he’s not the only one.
Many of us look at a younger generation, shake our heads and wag our fingers, scolding the kids for the same offenses we committed long ago and then forgot. There but for the grace of a youth with no camera phones go we.
“I’m kind of old school,” Favre, the 51-year-old Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback, told Yahoo Sports this week, and there’s nothing wrong with that sentiment. The problem, of course, is when it leads to faulty judgment and revisionist history.
More often not, the new school isn’t as different as we think.
If Favre didn’t realize that before the last couple of days, he’s received plenty of reminders. His comments to Yahoo blasting Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson for demanding a trade might have sounded righteously profound in his head, but they fell apart under the slightest scrutiny, which plenty of people were happy to provide.
“I think we make too much money to voice an opinion,” Favre said, and it didn’t take much research to dig up reports of Favre making similar trade requests after Green Bay failed to trade for wide receiver Randy Moss in 2007. A year later, after first announcing his retirement, Favre sent a letter asking the Packers for his release so he could play for somebody else.
There could be cheaper jokes to be told here about the money Favre makes — this was the man asked by the state of Mississippi last year to repay $1.1 million in welfare funds for speeches he reportedly never gave — but there’s no need for that, is there?
A more relevant observation would be that when Favre was expressing his frustration with the direction of his franchise 14 years ago, it was on its way to an NFC Championship Game, a far cry from the self-inflicted misery that appears to await the Texans for the foreseeable future.
If any player in the NFL has the right to voice an opinion about where his organization is headed, it’s Watson (with teammate J.J. Watt being another acceptable answer). And to his credit, even Favre sounded like he recognized as much.
“I’m not saying he’s wrong,” Favre said. “Again, it’s a different day and time.”
But is it, really? Players attempting to use whatever leverage they can wield is not a recent phenomenon.
More than four decades ago, Washington running back John Riggins sat out the entire 1980 season because of a contract dispute. Before John Elway ever took an NFL snap, he demanded a trade from the team that drafted him, and got it when the Colts shipped him to Denver in 1983.
Those stories, and plenty of others, predated Favre’s era of supposedly quiet superstar acquiescence.
It’s not as though this selective memory is peculiar to Favre, or even to football.
NBA old-timers lament the “newfound” prevalence of super teams, not mentioning how Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Shaquille O’Neal each either demanded a trade or jumped ship via free agency to end up with the Lakers, or how Moses Malone chased a title with Julius Erving and the Sixers, or how the 1996-97 Rockets ended up with Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, Charles Barkley and Scottie Pippen.
That didn’t work out so well, but it’s hard to blame LeBron James and Kevin Durant for picking better running mates.
Yes, there are modern athletes who lose themselves in self-indulgence, which makes one wonder what Babe Ruth’s Instagram account would have looked like. And yes, sometimes they can come off as obnoxious, which makes one thankful Ty Cobb never had a Twitter feed.
If Watson voices an opinion and lands himself in a better situation than the dysfunctional mess he’s in now, he’ll simply be doing what athletes have been trying to do for more than a century, by using whatever means they have at the time.
Soon, thanks to evolving public opinion and advancing legislation, college players will be able to capitalize on their names, images and likenesses.
Had this long-overdue development happened three decades ago, those players would have jumped at the same chances incoming recruits might get in the next few years.
And if any of us get tempted to moan about the values and methods of the “new school?”
If we’re honest with ourselves, we might realize we attended a version of the same one.