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  Bennie French was well regarded by a certain underground element, but was as warm and affable as a brick. He once took Izella to New Orleans for some shopping, and instructed her to meet him at a particular corner at 2:00 p.m. When she failed to arrive on time, he drove home without her—one and a half hours away. “She had to take the bus,” said Bonita. “But she told me it was OK—she was the one with the credit card.”

  Shortly after their wedding in 1943, Izella made it clear she desperately wanted a child. Bennie, knowing he would have minimal involvement with his seventh (at least) offspring, begrudgingly acquiesced, and when his young bride was unable to become pregnant, they agreed to adopt. On September 27, 1945, a woman named Audrey Sears—20 years old, married, impregnated during an extramarital fling in Portland, Maine—gave birth to an eight-pound, six-ounce girl and surrendered her to the French family. Izella named her Bonita Ann, after an aunt. Before Audrey returned home, Bennie sat her down and said, “Are you sure this is what you want to do?”

  She nodded and left—never to be heard from again.

  “The best thing that happened to me was being given up for adoption,” said Bonita. “My mother wanted a baby badly, and she was the greatest. Everything I did and everything she did, it was always me and Mama, me and Mama. I had a wonderful childhood because of her.”

  Not that she was easy. Bonita wasn’t one to sit still. As a teenager she brought home boyfriends for her parents to meet, only to hear Bennie snarl, “Ain’t no way you’re dating that McDonald boy again!” Bonita would be out with him the next night. She attended St. Joseph’s Academy in Bay St. Louis, an all-girl prep school with high academic and moral standards. “I remember we had this one teacher, a nun,” Bonita said. “She’d sometimes fall asleep during classes and we’d sneak into her book and read all the answers. I had a mischievous side to me.”

  And now, here she was in Perkinston, hanging around with the ballplayer. They were an item for two years—the surly jock who was all about winning and the petite health and physical education major whose goal was to become a teacher. “Irvin’s the only boy Daddy ever liked,” she said. “He didn’t like anybody. But something about Irvin worked for him.” Maybe it was the young man’s utter disinterest in affection. Irv was an attentive and interesting boyfriend, but a fan of neither holding hands nor public kisses. Bennie and Izella never saw their daughter in any sort of lovey-dovey moment with Irv, and they were perfectly fine with that. Why, his proposal was vintage Butch Favre: he took Bonita to the Perkinston baseball field, stood by her side in the parking lot, and grunted, “Eh, let’s get married.”

  Did Irvin Favre at least get down on a knee?

  “Down on a knee?” said Bonita, laughing. “Irvin? Noooo, honey.”

  Both Irvin and Bonita had school to complete. After her sophomore year at Perkinston, Bonita transferred to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. Irvin arrived a year later, joining the baseball team and majoring in education.

  The wedding was held on November 27, 1965, at St. Paul United Methodist Church in Pass Christian. A reception followed at the Gulfport Community Center. About 200 people attended. There were no overly emotional or sentimental speeches. Schmaltz and Favre don’t mix. “I was happy,” Bonita said. “But if you’re looking for the cliché, it’s not here.” Both ultimately graduated from Southern Miss—Bonita with a degree in health and physical education, Irvin as an education major. After the wedding, they moved briefly into—of all places—Bennie French’s, the family bar in Henderson Point. Izella hung a curtain to divide the saloon from Irvin and Bonita’s bedroom. “You could have had some drunks fall through,” Bonita said, laughing. “Aw, not really. But a lot of times we helped with the bar at night. You do what you can to assist your family.”

  A couple of months after her wedding, Bonita Favre—now a 20-year-old physical education teacher and girls’ basketball coach at all-black North Gulfport High—was pregnant. Was she excited? “My biggest goal in life at that time was to marry and have a large family,” she recalled. “I actually wanted eight kids.”

  Her colleagues soon found out, and then her bosses learned the news. She was quickly out of a job. “It was a different time,” she said. “Old folks wouldn’t say ‘pregnant,’ they’d say ‘When you lookin’?’ or ‘You’re PG.’ If a job found out you were expecting, they wouldn’t hire you back. And it was allowed.”

  Her first son, Scott Earnest Favre, was born on December 22, 1966, while Irv and Bonita were living in Southern Miss student housing (Bonita had already graduated; Irv was finishing up and playing baseball). When Irv graduated in 1967, they relocated to Hancock County, to a piece of property wedged between two small towns (Kiln and Diamondhead) near the Gulf of Mexico. In the early 1940s, Bennie French had purchased just over 52 secluded acres of land in the area, with the intention of one day retiring there. He built a couple of houses on the property, including the one his daughter and son-in-law moved into. It was small, with two bedrooms and one bathroom. The land was tucked in between Mill Creek and Rotten Bayou—a mile-long stretch of the Jourdan River, which passed in front of the house. The waters were so close, Brett Favre later recalled, “that we could spit into it off our deck.” The property was overrun by pine trees and fields, with enough lingering alligators that one needed to keep pets on a very short leash. The actual location of the property is somewhat confusing. It is closest to the tiny village of Fenton, but the mailing address is Pass Christian. And yet, the Favres consider their hometown to be Kiln, which runs parallel to Fenton. Locals refer to it as the Kill, just as they call Pass Christian the Pass. When people asked, Brett Favre would say he’s from the Kill.

  “You have to say something,” Bonita said. “So that’s the answer.”

  Irv Favre kicked off his teaching career at Long Beach High, where he handled physical education classes and worked as an assistant baseball and football coach. He then went to St. John High, and in 1970 guided the school to the state baseball championship. It was during this span, on October 10, 1969, that the couple’s second son was born. The delivery—like all four of Bonita’s eventual deliveries—was not easy. For Scott, she spent 42 hours in labor. For the second, a painful 10. “[Gulfport] Memorial Hospital back then was not like Memorial Hospital now,” she said. “They had two labor rooms. I was there so long they put me in a hallway with some curtains around it. There was this little black doctor, and he’d come, deliver one baby, leave, come back, deliver another baby.”

  One might think the arrival of a son would render Irvin Favre somewhat emotional. And, indeed, it did. As his wife suffered through labor, he paced the hallways. “Please hurry this up!” he bellowed repeatedly. “Please . . . please.” That evening, St. John had a game scheduled against Hancock North Central, and Irv needed to be there. “He was serious,” Bonita said. “He would have left me if I didn’t have Brett in time for the game.”

  At 2:35 p.m., Brett Lorenzo Favre entered the world. He weighed eight pounds, nine ounces, measured 21 inches long, and shared a middle name with Bonita’s father. “He’s a big one, Bonita,” the doctor told her with a smile. “Right now he’s back in the nursery doing push-ups. He’ll be ready for a hamburger in a few minutes.”

  Before long, Irvin was out the door. He made the game with time to spare.

  2

  Childhood

  * * *

  “MEAN.”

  The word is uttered by the youngest of the four Favre children. Her name is Brandi. She is sitting at a kitchen counter, 38 years old and far removed from a childhood of snakes and alligators and her three older brothers ripping the heads off her dolls, then using them as baseballs.

  “Brett,” she said with a slight Southern drawl and great emphasis, “was mean.”

  When someone speaks like this of a relative, it is often either a joke or intentional exaggeration. One look at Brandi’s facial expression makes it clear this is serious. She is asked for an example, and between sips from a can
of Coca-Cola quickly offers one. The third Favre child, Jeff, was a quiet kid, seven years younger than Scott, four years younger than Brett. He was shy and awkward, and struggled to stand up for himself. When Brett was nine, he concocted a drink made from tobacco goop, Worcestershire sauce, and cow manure. Then he urinated in it, and forced Jeff to drink. “I’m not saying Brett’s mean now,” said Brandi, who was born three years after Jeff in 1976. “But long ago . . . God.”

  A pause follows, one that suggests Brandi is asking herself, Am I revealing too much? Then, more words . . .

  “Brett ran over Jeff with his motorbike,” she said. “Like, completely ran over him. He’d beat us until he knocked us out. Knocked us out cold—no exaggeration. He would grab us by the throat, throw us across the room. He hit me one time in the eye with a shaved block of wood. I don’t know why. Maybe he was searching for something . . . I don’t know.”

  Another pause.

  “I just don’t know.”

  Before he was mean, Brett Favre was terrified. Of this. Of that. Of shadows. Of noises. Of spiders. Of ghosts and wasps and ants and tall people. Whereas Scott seemed to emerge from the womb with the confidence of a five-star general, Brett looked around—then checked twice. Creaks in the floor freaked him out. Wind made his hands shake. “When he got the ESPY Award [in 2004] and they talked about him being tough and courageous, we all laughed,” said Bonita. “If they only knew how, when we’d come home when he was little, he’d turn every light in the house on. If we’d go to a haunted house for Halloween, he’d lock himself in the car. Courageous? Honey, not even close.” Perhaps the nervousness had to do with an incident from the toddler days, when Brett—decked out in an overcoat and cowboy boots—ran from the front yard to the bayou and into the cold water. Bonita’s mother, affectionately nicknamed Mee-Maw by her grandkids, was fishing nearby, and she caught the boy by his boot—“his head still in the water,” recalled Bonita. “We had forbidden the kids from going down to the bayou without an adult but that didn’t stop Brett from doing it.”

  Although neither Bonita nor Irv could know that baby Brett Favre would turn into the Brett Favre, there was an expectation that he would toughen up. Little Brett’s nervousness? Not tolerated. In the world of Irv, boys were hard and men were harder. You didn’t cry. You didn’t complain. A 101-degree fever was no excuse. Neither were chicken pox, measles, cuts, bruises, or dents. If there was a game to play, you played. If there was work to do, you did it. Water breaks? What the hell was a water break? Coddling? Hell, no. “Irv was up on the roof one day doing some stuff at the house,” said Clark Henegan, one of Brett’s longtime friends. “He fell off and landed on his head on the concrete. He got up, dazed, blood running down his face, and wouldn’t go to the hospital.”

  “When Mom went into town to go shopping, we’d beg her to take us with her because the second she left, Dad would work our tails off,” Brett recalled. “It was like being in the military. Dad would grab the rakes and say, ‘Let’s get after it.’”

  When Brett and his siblings speak of their childhoods, there’s often a fuzzy romanticism lifted straight from a Wonder Years marathon. If you listen closely, you can hear Joe Cocker singing as the color fades to sepia. It was, the narrative goes, a simpler time. Because they lived in relative isolation in Kiln, there was an emphasis on togetherness, right down to their address: 1213 Irvin Farve Road—strange even before one realizes the town accidentally misspelled the name on the street sign. “The roads used to have numbers down there, but the police wanted to give them names so they could find people in case of emergencies,” Irvin Favre once explained. “It just so happens that I’m the one living on the road, so they named it Irvin Farve Road in the 1970s.” You were unlikely to find a solitary Favre there. No, it was always 2, 3, 4, 5 . . . 10, 15. Cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. Birthday parties were excuses for deep-into-the-night crawfish boils accompanied by large coolers of iced beer and Irv and Bonita’s smoldering cigarettes. Debates could get heated and last for hours. Favre vs. Favre. “We called where we lived the Compound,” said Brandi. “Because it really is a Favre compound.”

  At the end of the long gravel road sat the house. “There was always someone there, eating food, taking a nap, talking, whatever,” said Bonita. “That, you could count on.” Without fail, Bonita would wake at 6:00 a.m. to prepare breakfast. And not merely bowls of Corn Flakes. Nope, pancakes, waffles, eggs, biscuits.

  The family owned four dogs—a collie named Fluffy, a Saint Bernard named Whiskey, a German shepherd, Bullet, and Lucky, the chocolate Lab. All were beloved and cherished. All were consumed by alligators. (“Alligators don’t eat a dog right away,” Brett once said. “First they roll around and let it writhe awhile before they take it down.”) Or, perhaps, done in by a cottonmouth. It’s hard to say with 100 percent certainty.

  The boys—Scott, Brett, and Jeff—shared a room. Brett had his own sofa bed against one wall, Scott and Jeff were together in an adjacent king bed against another wall. The walls and ceiling were covered with sports posters. T-shirts and pants were passed down from kid to kid to kid. Trophies—plastic, topped with the ubiquitous gilded figurines—sat atop a shelf. “It got so dark [in the house] you couldn’t see the brother next to you,” Brett recalled. “We’d lie there and talk about the home run we were going to hit or the football game we were going to have. There was a little weight set by the bed, and I would pump weights in the dark. Scott and Jeff laughed at me.” The brawls were legendary. “We’d tear shit up and move shit around,” Jeff said. “The beds were on cinder blocks, and you’d slam into them, bleed, get cut up. We’d play football right there, in the room. Hard tackle.”

  When Brett was two or three, Irvin’s grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with a large party. While preparing to leave the house, Bonita noticed little Brett sitting on the floor, holding her purse and acting funny. “He took some sort of medicine, which doesn’t seem like a great idea,” Bonita said. “I called the doctor, who told me to bring him in. So I put him in the car, and we have meatballs in the back of the station wagon, because I made them for the party. Well, Irvin is driving and he hits a German shepherd with the car. The meatballs go flying, Brett is high on medicine, the dog can’t be doing so good, what with the bumper in his head and all. We finally get to the doctor, and Brett throws up, and the doctor said I need to watch him, and not to let him sleep for more than an hour. Now we’re at the party, I’m watching him. And he’s fine, but the meatballs never really make it.”

  Hunting is a major pastime in Hancock County. One of Brett’s first experiences with a gun and the woods came when he was seven. “He went out one morning, all bundled up because it was kind of cold, and he was going deer hunting,” Bonita said. “On the other side of the creek he came right up on a deer and it scared both of them to death. You know, one of those things where Brett ran one way and the deer ran the other.”

  “Our family was always familiar with alligators,” Brett said. “One time three of them were in the backyard. My brother Scott and I got a pack of Oreo cookies. We threw it in the river and watched them tear it up . . . if we didn’t have Oreos we’d throw hot dogs and bread. Then one day Daddy comes home and the alligators are up on the bank by the house, waiting for their cookies. My dad went berserk. He shot all three of them.”

  Because the Favre kids grew up in geographic isolation, they did not ride bicycles to town (there really was no town) or catch double features at the local movie theater (there was no local movie theater). No, 95 percent of boyhood activities took place on the property. Blood was often unapologetically spilled. Trash talk was encouraged. “Brett didn’t have many close pals,” said Scott. “We were sort of it.”

  “There were no friends around, and that was great,” said Jeff. “All we did was play together. We played ball together. We made our own basketball goal. We’d go cut down trees and make our backboards best we could. We did everything ourselves. We made do with what we had. And
it was wonderful. Wiffle ball. We made a ball out of anything. Duct tape, electrical tape, socks, paper. Anything that we could creatively come up with our minds.

  “People wonder why the state of Mississippi produces so many athletes. It’s because, here, you make use of what you have. And that brings out the creativity. That’s what allows you to overcome things. You don’t have a ball, don’t say we can’t play ball. Make a ball. Take a piece of paper, crumple it up. Take another piece of paper. Or take a sock, wrap it up with electrical tape, with duct tape. Whatever you have to do. If you want to play, you’ll find a way to make it happen.”

  On weekends, the Favre kids would chow down their breakfast, watch an hour or so of cartoons—then exit. Irv’s standard line was, “Inside or out?” and he meant it. “You didn’t go back and forth,” Jeff said. “You picked inside, you stayed inside. You picked outside, you stayed outside. He had some simple ways, but they were mostly good. He’d say to us, ‘Look, you don’t wanna work around the house? Get a ball in your hand, get a bat in your hand, get a glove in your hand.’ Of course, he’d still eventually get the work out of us.”

  There were 101 methods to pass the time. Swim in the bayou. Fish for crawfish. Scale trees. Set things on fire. Unload pellets at squirrels and groundhogs. “I wish I had a nickel,” Irvin once said, “for every window that got shot out.” An old barn sat adjacent to the house, and the boys would climb its splintered beams and launch rocks at one another. “We’d see if we could knock each other out,” said David Peterson, a cousin. “See, there wasn’t nothing to do—but we didn’t know there was nothing to do. We did everything we could to stay busy, and it helped that we knew nothing else.”