Gunslinger Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Beginning

  Childhood

  High School

  Varsity Blues

  College-Bound

  The Man

  Legend

  Near Death

  Senioritis

  Hotlanta

  Arrival

  A Packer Emerges

  God and the Devil

  The Wheels Fall Off

  High and Dry

  Photos I

  Super Bowl

  Low

  Something About

  Chewed Up

  Big Irv

  Heir Apparent

  McCarthyism

  Photos II

  Soap

  J-E-T-S

  A Norse God

  A Saintly Beating

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2016 by Jeff Pearlman

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover photograph © Mitchell Layton

  eISBN 978-0-544-45367-8

  v1.0916

  To Michael J. Lewis

  The Jo-Jo Townsell of writers, the Jerald Sowell of proofreaders,

  the Ryan Yarborough of fathers, the Paul Frase of husbands.

  And a remarkable friend.

  (Moment of silence for Dennis Bligen.)

  We were up north in Wisconsin, deer hunting, and we went to this bar called Hilltop. And every bar had strippers. So we walked in—seven of us—and Brett had a hat pulled on low. It’s just packed inside, and all of a sudden somebody picked up that Brett Favre was in there. All these people started coming up, asking him for autographs. I was like, “You know what? He’s not here to do fucking autographs. Get lost.” We had our own little corner and the people just wouldn’t leave us alone. So I go, “Brett, fuck it. Let’s let the guy get on the fucking PA and say you’re signing autographs for $50. Anyone who wants an autograph, it’s $50. And he’s gonna sign until all your shit is done, then leave us alone.” So the guy gets on the fucking microphone—$50, Brett’s signing autographs! It was all guys. No women at all—except the strippers. It wasn’t a strip club, it was a normal bar. But during deer-hunting opening weekend all the bars had strippers. So Brett signs, probably, Christ, he had to sign over 100 items, easily. And you know what he did? He took the fucking money, rolled it up in a ball, and he threw it at the bartenders. Every fucking dime. Seriously. Every penny. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, and it was total Brett Favre.

  —KEVIN BURKEL,

  owner, Burkel’s One Block Over sports bar,

  Green Bay, Wisconsin

  Prologue

  BRETT FAVRE has a Superman shield tattooed on his left biceps. He has hairy arms and crooked knees. Brett Favre is a lousy texter. His grammar is awful. He’s probably the worst tipper known to humanity. It’s not because he’s overwhelmingly cheap. He just doesn’t like carrying money.

  Brett Favre is a bad dancer and an even worse basketball player. Brett Favre used to know all the words to “Rapper’s Delight”—the 14-minute, 35-second version. One of his favorite lines is, “If the chicken had lips, he’d whistle.” He also used to say someone was sweating “like Shaq at the line.”

  His favorite hat color was, for many years, red. Now it’s beige. His favorite beer was Miller Lite; his favorite dip was Copenhagen. He likes eating crushed pineapple from a can. Brett Favre is mediocre with names, fantastic with nicknames. Mark Chmura was Chewey, Cary Brabham was Catfish, Patrick Ivey was Poison. For nearly a year he thought Rob Davis, the Packers long snapper, was named Ron. One day he wondered why Ron Davis never responded when he asked him a question.

  “Because,” a teammate told him, “you’re saying the wrong fucking name.”

  Brett Favre is missing 30 inches of his small intestine. It’s the by-product of a car accident that happened before his senior year of college, and as a result, he produces the worst-smelling gas in the history of civilization. The scent has been described as “skunk,” “crushed worm,” “rotten milk mixed with squid,” and, best of all, “death.”

  Brett Favre loved LeRoy Butler, tolerated Sterling Sharpe, had little use for Aaron Rodgers. His all-time favorite coach is Mike Holmgren, his all-time least favorite coach is Brad Childress. He threw the football so insanely hard that Derrick Mayes, a Packers wide receiver, has mangled pieces of fleshy barbed wire doubling as fingers. “Can’t even tell you how many he broke,” Mayes said. Favre used to be able to drive a golf ball in excess of 300 yards. His short game was awful. He once went hunting and finished off a deer that refused to die by submerging Bambi’s head in a pond.

  These are the kinds of things a biographer knows, because when you speak with enough people (in this case, 573), you learn stuff. I can tell you every mailing address from Brett Favre’s life. I can tell you what the bushes outside his Green Bay house smell like. I can tell you how he spit, what cars he drove, what he ordered to eat the first time he visited Boston. There are facts upon facts upon facts.

  They are interesting.

  They are intriguing.

  They mean little.

  There’s this weird thing most of us do with celebrities. We meet them, we shake their hands, maybe we even exchange a few words—and, therefore, we presume to know them. We assign adjectives to their personhoods based upon six minutes of interaction. Ice Cube is a jerk. Eddie Vedder is awesome. Kate Upton is an asshole. Peyton Manning is amazing. On and on and on, until we start to believe one can be wholly surmised in the 140-character Twitter allotment.

  It’s nonsense.

  In many ways, a biography is a search for definition of character. You can’t possibly re-create every moment, or enter the brain of a subject matter, or know precisely what someone was thinking at any particular moment. (This is something that has forever bothered me about sports media: “Joey, what was going through your mind as you dunked that basketball?” is a near-impossible question to actually answer.) What you can do is understand what causes a person to tick, and how he became who he ultimately became, and what he did to make the world a better, or worse, or more interesting place.

  Which leads to two of my favorite Brett Favre stories . . .

  First: In 2003 the Green Bay Packers hired a young coach named John Bonamego to serve as the special teams coordinator. He and his family moved down the street from the Favre household, on a cul-de-sac filled with kids who always looked for the quarterback. Bonamego’s oldest son, Javi, was five, and easily impressionable.

  One day Favre pulled the boy aside. “Hey, Javi, you and I are buddies, right?” he asked.

  “Yes!” Javi said.

  “Great,” Favre said. “So there’s this special hand signal, but it’s just for really close buddies to use to say hello to one another. I want to teach it to you, and any time I drive by you can do it to me. How does that sound?”

  “Great!” Javi said. “Just for us buddies!”

  “Right,” Brett said. “You have to keep it a secret, OK?”

  “Yeah,” Javi said. “I won’t tell anyone!”

  “You promise?”
Favre said.

  “I promise!” Javi replied.

  “Perfect,” Favre said. “So what you do is you hold your hand in a fist, like this, and then you just lift the middle finger so it’s all alone, and . . .”

  Second: When Favre was late in his time with the Packers, he learned of a Wisconsin boy named Anderson Butzine, who in February 2006 was diagnosed with ependymoma, a rare tumor of the brain and spinal cord. The quarterback wrote the child a letter, which—while cherished in the Butzine household—was merely one of hundreds of notes Favre penned to the ill and infirm. “I never saw Brett not respond to a person in need,” says David Thomason, who handled much of the quarterback’s fan mail. “He was amazing when it came to that.”

  As the years passed and his health worsened, the one thing Anderson clung to was his football hero. “By the time he was five, he was not doing well,” said Michelle Butzine, his mother. “Anderson was bedridden, he couldn’t move his arms, he couldn’t speak, he was on a ventilator, he couldn’t hold up his head.” Thomason was updated on Anderson’s condition, and reminded Favre that there was a boy in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, who needed him. One day, out of the blue, Michelle was told that the quarterback (now a Viking) and his wife would like to fly in from Minnesota and visit their home. The year was 2010. “The doorbell rings,” she said, “and there’s this big guy, big smile on his face.” When Anderson saw Favre, he excitedly lifted his right leg into the air. He was wearing a purple-and-yellow Vikings sock. “It took such an effort,” said Michelle, “but he always loved the stinky-toes game, where we’d pretend his feet smelled.” She explained this to the Favres, and Brett bent to one knee, gently held Anderson’s right foot, took a whiff, and said, “Aw, they’re not so bad.” Favre spent three hours with Anderson, at one point sitting by his side and stroking the hair atop his head, whispering warm words into his ear. He complimented the different pictures Anderson had drawn—many featuring Favre in a Minnesota uniform, wearing a backward No. 4 (as the tumor progressed, Anderson struggled to write numbers correctly). “It was the sweetest thing,” said Michelle. “Lots of people have heroes. Lots of people are fans. But to know your hero loves you as much as you love him . . . that’s special.”

  Later that season, the Vikings hosted the Bears in what turned out to be Favre’s final NFL appearance. After the 40–14 loss, he was hit with questions from the press about a rough season and a potential concussion and whether he was, at long last, done with football. When all the pertinent material was supplied, and the media session wrapped, a reporter posed a seemingly meaningless inquiry about the white towel that had dangled from his waist throughout the game.

  “Brett,” he said, “this might be a dumb question, but why was there a backward No. 4 written on it?”

  Anderson Butzine died less than a year later.

  1

  Beginning

  * * *

  THE HOUSE was white and small. Two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom with a dinky tub, a tiny common area. It was located in Gulfport, Mississippi, at 1412 37th Avenue, one block from Milner Stadium, where many of the youth teams in the state’s second-largest city (after Jackson) held their football games.

  This is where Alvin and Mary Spikes Favre raised their five children.

  This is where the modern Brett Favre story slowly comes into focus.

  Alvin was a smallish man—only five feet nine and 160 pounds. He worked as a welder at the nearby shipyard, and when that position was eliminated he was hired by the local wholesale company Wigley and Culp, where he managed a warehouse overloaded with cigarettes and candy. “He’d get there at 5:00 a.m.,” said Janet Peterson, a daughter. “Dad would make sure all the trucks were loaded, make sure the orders were right. Then they’d be sent on their way.” Based upon his gruff facial expressions and calloused hands, one might have presumed Alvin Favre to be a hardened tough guy; a belt-wielding terror; a man you didn’t want to mess with. “He was actually very easygoing,” said Karen Favre, the youngest of the children. “In our house, he wasn’t the parent you feared.”

  If the Favre children ran toward Alvin when he entered the front door, they tiptoed hesitantly around Mary, a homemaker who Karen believes, in hindsight, was likely bipolar. “Mom tore our tails up,” said Karen. “She’d hit us with anything she could find—brooms, lamps, belts, whatever. In today’s world, she’d be abusive. Back then, she was just disciplining. But she was not a nice person.”

  The oldest child, Jim, was born in 1941. Four years later, on January 5, 1945, a second son arrived. The boy was big and burly, weighing eight pounds, one ounce when he first appeared at Memorial Hospital. He was named Irvin—Irvin Ernest Favre. And, from a very young age, he was the obvious possessor of both serious athletic ability and an indefatigable competitiveness. “If you gave Irv a ball,” said Jim, “he knew what to do with it.”

  Back in the 1940s and ’50s, well before specialty sports camps and cable television and Xbox 360s and iPhones, the boys and girls of Gulfport spent their free time outside, running through fields, hiking through woods, fishing, hunting, throwing, kicking. The Favre family was enormous (more than 60 relatives lived in Gulfport alone), and just a stone’s throw down 37th Avenue was the home belonging to Mallett and Nora Spikes, the kids’ maternal grandparents. “We had aunts and uncles, cousins—all nearby,” said Jim. “You were never alone. And we didn’t take vacations. We were home, playing.” Family was everything. Mary made elaborate homemade cakes for birthdays and Christmas, and on Thanksgiving she would bake five scrumptious sweet potato pies, one for each child. “It wasn’t like today, where people move far away,” said Jim. “Being a Favre meant being together. I probably didn’t appreciate it back then as I do now.”

  All of the children were bequeathed nicknames by their father. The sisters, Janet and Karen, were Sister and Kay Kay, respectively. Jim was Jimbo; Alvin Jr. was Rock. And Irvin, tightly wound and built like a miniature refrigerator, was Butch. Although Alvin Sr. had played football at Gulfport High, he all but swore off sports after breaking his ribs in a game as a junior flanker. That role-model void, however, was filled for Irvin by Richard, Cecil, Archie, and Lou Cospelich, his older cousins who lived across the street. “When the Cospelich boys played,” said Janet, “they played to win.” Irvin regularly sat on the porch, tattered blue jeans, hand-me-down T-shirt, a wad of chewing gum pinched between his lip and gums, and watched, mesmerized, as the kids threw a baseball back and forth, making it whistle through the air. By the time he was eight, Irv could cross 37th Avenue, glove in hand, and join in. He was strong-armed and hard-headed and—as a kid nicknamed Butch would be—vicious. Few peers remember Irvin crying from a ball to the ribs or a bat to the head, but he was known to storm off in anger after a blown call. Irvin Favre didn’t merely take losing badly. He didn’t take losing at all.

  By the time he reached Gulfport High, Irv was a blossoming two-sport star. In football, he played split end and linebacker, using his physicality and fearlessness to excel. His first love, however, was baseball. Irv was one of the best right-handed pitchers in the area; as a senior he tossed a 13-inning no-hitter. He was a serious kid and an average student, with little time for girls or trouble. The closest he came to mischief was when he accidentally shattered a taillight on the family car by throwing a misguided pair of pliers.

  Shortly before graduating from high school in the summer of 1963, Irvin Favre chose to matriculate at Perkinston Junior College, one of the region’s finest (and only) community colleges. Located 30 miles north of Gulfport in Perkinston, the school was best known for its vast stretches of nothingness. It was home to a creek, a couple of stores, a radio station, a hamburger joint.

  Irv Favre knew he needed a college degree, but came to Perkinston because the coaches offered a chance to continue his two-sport path. He would pitch for the Bulldogs baseball team and play end in football (until a broken ankle ended his career during his sophomore season). It was also here, in the middle of nowhere, that his life w
ould forever change.

  One night, while attending a beach party in Henderson Point, Irvin was speaking with Jimmy Benigno, the Perkinston quarterback, when he was introduced to a college classmate named Bonita French. Although she was 10 months younger than he, Bonita had graduated from high school at age 16 and was midway through her sophomore year of college. The two chatted for a while, and Irv was smitten. Bonita had a warm smile, defined cheekbones, and chocolate-brown eyes, and smoked cigarettes as if they were two days from extinction. Like Irv, she was straightforward and took no guff. The stereotypical Southern belle of the era was genteel and soft. Save for her accent, Bonita was more New York sass. As for her early impression of the man standing before her? “Nothing special,” she said. “We hung out at the Perk but it wasn’t any big deal. There was nothing to do. So you hung out with people.”

  Over the next year, Irvin came to appreciate the improbable story of an improbable woman. The Perkinston Junior College campus was filled with young coeds whose biographies were somewhat standard-issue: two-parent home, raised on the Gulf Coast, here for a couple of years of study with the hope of landing a husband.

  And then there was Bonita . . .

  Her father, Bennie Lorenzo French, was a character. With his first wife, Hazel, he had six children. His second marriage, to Jessie, was childless. Bennie’s third wife, Izella Garriga, was 18 years his junior, and attended the Bay St. Louis High School senior prom with his son, Bennie French II. Based out of Henderson Point, the elder Bennie French was a man of many trades and talents. He was a womanizer, a gambler, a bar owner, and a rumrunner. He kept a .45-caliber pistol in his pocket and owned a pair of side-by-side taverns—Bennie French’s and the Beachcomber. Both smelled of tobacco and gin and served as a second home to the region’s most notorious gamblers. Every few months Bennie would pack a bag, catch a boat to Cuba, and return with huge quantities of alcohol to bootleg. “We’re not talking about old stump juice that they made out here in the stills,” said Bonita. “This was some good whiskey.” During Prohibition, local moonshine stills were hidden beneath mounds of sawdust.