Brett Favre and the State of Man

This morning I watched a passel of middle-aged women trundling by my window. They were out walking. Now and then one of them would pull up close and pat the other on the shoulder and then drift off. The way they were knit together they looked like a gaggle of schoolyard girls.

One would be hard pressed to find that relaxed body language, mental and physical communion, in a group of guys, unless, of course they were on a football or baseball field. Maybe he doesn't grasp it but that rhythmic and easy kind of closeness is a big part of the reason that the 39-year old Brett Favre has retired from his retirement and has returned to the Green Bay Packers.

In the eighties, when Hall-of-Famer Mickey Mantle was dying from liver ailments, he wrote a piece for Sports Illustrated repenting for his drinking and his poor parenting. Mr. Mantle acknowledged how hard life was after he shed his number 7 jersey for the last time. The Mick regretted not taking good care of himself and admitted that he might have been a little more productive at the plate if he had trained more but the real sigh came when he wrote about how simply and sorely he missed the guys on the team.

Professional athletes are the envy of most men, and not just for their gazillion dollar salaries and the privilege of making their play their work. No, they also enjoy a kind of camaraderie that it is virtually extinct outside the precincts of sport and the military. Just glance at the glossy magazine sports photos and at the pure joy in the faces of mature men as they wait for a teammate who has just blasted a walk off homerun, or tumble on one another after a buzzer-beating three pointer. Beyond the arena and the playing fields, how often do you see men wildly hugging one another or, when the scoreboard tells a sad story, enmeshed in acts of group consolation?

The other night, I was sitting sleepless in my own personal dugout. Instead of counting sheep I was tuned into a major league baseball game. I don't even know which teams were playing but one image made it into my record book. One of the hurlers who was getting bombed, was yanked. Head hanging he trudged to the dugout, flung his glove down and sat dejected at the far end of the bench. A few seconds later, a teammate went over to fetch a bat and spontaneously leaned in and for a fleeting second, put his palm to the despondent pitcher's face and whispered a couple of words. This tender kind of gesture might be common in the realm of male sport but it is not something that you are likely to glimpse in the corporate world.

John Elway once confided to me how dark the first quarter of his life after football was. There is much anecdotal evidence and some statistical data suggesting that for all of their houses, fast cars, and stock options, depression is usually waiting for retiring athletes in the parking lot. And as Mr. Mantle noted it isn't just the loss of adrenaline rushes that hits you like a ninety mile per hour fastball. It is the sudden absence of a kind of human connectedness.

When the winds of fate blew the door shut on my own football career, I felt that chill of being locked out of the special bonds of sports brotherhood. These links are forged in the exotic hothouse of men both playfully and seriously united in a common cause. In this context, you often find yourself near-best pals with fellows whom, at a superficial level, you might seem to have little to share. In workaday life we are not as good, not as discerning at locating our common humanity.

To be sure, there are good chats and tight friendships after sports. Men come out of their caves to hunt golf balls and deer together and to attend this or that function but generally our most sacred times are the hours spent alone or within our clans. But this tendency towards the solitary, does not mean that men do not crave something more, something like the connection that I glimpsed between the women out for their group walk. That warm and playful something is there in sports. And Mr. Favre, the weepy and wily quarterback, who rejected a twenty million dollar offer to go into exile, is wise enough not to cut himself off from that rare source of fellow feeling before his time.

Comments

[StanTheManic]

Another song to Bret:

Won't you go away (little girl)
Wish you wouldn't stay (little girl)
Won't you go away (little girl)
Wooo ooo go away.

Please go away little girl
Go away little girl
It's hurting me more each minute that you delay
When you are near me like this
You're much too hard to resist
So go away little girl before I beg you to stay.

[JimR]

Why does it bother you?

[Dap]

"In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by his trade...
And he carries the reminders of every glove that laid him down or cut him until he cried out in his anger and his shame... I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains; Yes he still remains." -Simon & Garfunkel

Just a thought?

[Gordon Marino - Huffpost Blogger]

Dap,

Nice reference there. Thanks.
Gordon