Gunslinger Read online

  Once, Brett accidentally shot Scott in the face with a Red Rider BB gun. “I was sure there weren’t any BBs left,” Brett recalled, so he approached his brother, placed the cylinder beneath his chin, and asked, “You want to feel the compression of my gun on your face?”

  “Go ahead,” Scott replied. “I dare you.”

  With a BB lodged in his chin, Scott ran off to tell his father. “I got whipped good for that one,” Brett said.

  Another time, with Scott chasing him around the yard, Brett dashed up to the loft in the barn. He threatened to throw a brick at his older brother’s head if he approached. “You couldn’t hit me if you tried,” Scott replied.

  That was all Brett needed to hear. He wound up, let loose . . . and missed. A chunk of the brick broke off, however, and caught Scott beneath the left eye. He was rushed to the hospital, and once again Irv let Brett have it.

  When asked which of the parents was softer, all of the Favre children cite their mom. Bonita, said Peterson, was “the mother hen—she would hug you, advise you, take you in, pray with you. She’s a real down-to-earth woman. A saint.” But, even were Bonita a strict disciplinarian, it’s not a hard battle to win. Compared to Irvin Favre, Suge Knight seems cuddly. Which, again, might explain young Brett’s propensity toward cruelty. Although it has often been said that Irvin “refused” to tell his children he loved them, the characterization is misleading. The words “I love you” were not deliberately avoided. They simply never entered his cranium. Not toward his parents, not toward his wife, not toward his offspring. “He was probably a little different with me because I was a girl,” said Brandi. “But it’d be hard for my brothers to know Dad loved them. That’s just fact.” Love and affection were emotions never designed to be verbally expressed. One loved by giving maximum effort. One loved by molding his soft kids into stones. One loved by arriving on time, by putting in nine hours of work, by making certain the bills were paid. To Irvin, Brandi was of little worth. Girls, in his mind, weren’t athletes. And without athletics, what was the value of a person? “My mom went to every dance recital, every event, everything I had,” she said. “But my dad had no interest in my activities, even if they were sports. He would come, but not really by first choice. Looking back, it killed me. You want love. You’re a kid. You need love. And he didn’t offer it in a way a child needed it.”

  Irvin ruled the household with a stern voice and a tendency toward violent resolution, and would beat the boys (and, on occasion, his daughter) with whatever appropriate item was closest. It could be a stick from the yard. Or a belt or black rubber hose. Sometimes they’d be offered a choice—a thrashing with an inanimate object, or kneeling for a prolonged period on a rock pile.

  “You’d take the rocks,” said Brandi. “Dad had this blue belt. And he would pop it before he’d hit us, just so we knew.”

  That.

  Whop!

  Was.

  Whop!

  Love.

  Whop!

  “One time we were on the back of my dad’s truck, and I was fighting with one of my cousins and Dad told us to stop,” said Brandi. “Well, we flipped off the back of the truck while it was moving. I kept beating my cousin up on the ground, and Dad beat me from out there all the way until we were inside. He wasn’t wearing a belt, so he used his hands and knees.”

  “My favorite moment has to be the bike story,” said Scott. “We were riding bikes down our road, which was gravel.” Brett was 10, and the cuff on one of the legs of his blue jeans wound up caught in the chain of his Huffy. He pulled to the side of the road, bent down, and repeatedly tried to yank the pants loose. Irv approached in his pickup truck, and Brett yelled out for help. “Dad! Dad!” he said. “Get us home!”

  “Nope,” Irv hollered, “gotta go.”

  He drove off, and Brett flipped the middle finger. “All of a sudden, here comes the truck in reverse,” said Scott. “Brett’s trying to run through the woods with the bike attached to his leg. I mean, he’s limping along and it’s really pathetic. He had no chance.” Irv stopped the truck, jumped out, grabbed his son’s middle finger and bent it backward. “You think that was funny?” Irv yelled.

  “No, Daddy! I’m sorry . . .”

  “You’re what?” Irv said.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  “You wanna do that again?” Irv said. “You ever gonna do that again?”

  “No!” Brett whimpered. “No.”

  Irv released the finger and stormed off back to his truck, leaving Brett and his bicycle attached at the leg.

  Of all the outdoor activities embraced by the Favre children, nothing trumped sports.

  In 1972 Big Irv, as he was increasingly referred to, took over as the head baseball and football coach at Hancock North Central High, and Bonita was later hired as a special education teacher. When Irv wasn’t at the school, coaching or teaching physical education and driver’s ed, he was working with his sons on baseball and football, or talking to his sons about baseball and football, or lecturing his sons about baseball and football. Scratch that—not lecturing. Barking. Demanding. Blaming. “You could go out there and say it was just a game; that second place was OK sometimes, but that’s not really true,” Irvin once said. “You don’t go out there to come in second. Heck, you go out there to win.” The idea that his boys would perhaps forgo athletics for, say, drama or music wasn’t an idea at all. They would be jocks, just like their father.

  Scott, the oldest of the four children, was prodigious from the very beginning. He started playing Little League baseball at age seven, and also excelled in Pop Warner football. Every town has a child who does what the others cannot, and in Kiln that was Scott Favre. He was the fastest, the strongest, the most confident. “If you picked one guy from back then who you thought could be a pro at something, it was Scott,” said Charles Burton, a childhood classmate of the Favre boys. “He knew the games better than any of us.”

  By comparison, Brett was merely good. Because he was three years behind his big brother, Brett could seem small, slow, undistinguished. He was an average-looking kid—floppy, sandy hair, crooked teeth, scabbed knees and elbows. When they played games around the house, Scott ordered Brett around—run this route, throw this pass, play this position. He wasn’t as quick as Scott, or as charismatic. But the one thing he clearly inherited from Big Irv was the snarl. Peterson vividly recalled a backyard game of two-on-two tackle football, when he and Brett teamed up against Scott and another boy. After Peterson surrendered a deep touchdown pass, Brett reamed him out, demanding he use what they referred to as the Mississippi Bulldog method of tackling. “So the next time the kid caught a pass, I Mississippi Bulldogged him just like Brett said,” Peterson recalled. “I jumped on top of his head and brought him down by his head.” The boy rose from the ground, bloodied and lacking his two front teeth. After scanning the ground, Peterson noticed two rectangular white objects embedded in the skin of his right arm.

  Brett laughed and laughed, until the boys sought out Big Irv inside the house. He grabbed a pair of pliers, yanked the teeth from Peterson’s body, and covered the wound with duct tape. “Now get the hell out of here,” Irvin said. “Go do something.”

  Another time, Bonita took Brett and Peterson to a local Punt, Pass & Kick contest. “I didn’t even want to go,” Peterson said. “But Brett insisted.” The two went station to station, and to everyone’s surprise, Peterson won. “Brett was so mad, I thought we were going to fight,” Peterson said. “He was just that way with everything. He didn’t know how to lose.”

  To most American parents, this would be a source of disappointment. Irvin loved it. In his world, losers accept losing. That’s why, in his job as the Hancock North Central High football coach, he didn’t merely browbeat players who disappointed. He removed a wood stick from his desk, ordered teenage boys (many bigger than he was) to bend over, and paddled them. He also cursed kids out, threatened their happiness, worked them to the brink of exhaustion.

  Th
is same methodology took place at home. For years, one of the staples of the Favre boys’ entertainment was a game called goal line. Scott and Brett would place a football five yards from an imaginary goal line, then give Jeff—little, understated Jeff—four plays to run for a score. Sweeps were not permitted. “Jeff had to run through us,” Brett recalled. “We beat the shit out of him . . . noses got smashed, fingers got mangled. There’d be blood.”

  Irv approved.

  When Brett Favre was a year old, he received a full football uniform—helmet and pads included—as a Christmas gift from his parents. The little boy wore the duds everywhere, and shortly thereafter was presented with an equally sweet gift—a baseball uniform. Both outfits became regular parts of the Brett Favre wardrobe, and would have never left his body were it not for Bonita’s insistences.

  A couple of years later, Irvin Favre started taking his sons to football and baseball practices. Along with coaching the teams at Hancock North Central, Big Irv served as the manager of Joe Graham Post 119, Gulfport’s entry into the summer American Legion baseball circuit, as well as the Gulf Coast Stars of the Connie Mack league. Much of Brett’s time at the fields was spent goofing around with his brothers and the other young children in attendance. When he wasn’t causing mischief, however, the boy paid attention. He loved seeing his father berate the teenaged players. It was fine entertainment. He also liked trying to grasp the strategies that came so easily to his old man. At 5 feet 10 and 220 pounds, with broad shoulders, an anvil-shaped jaw, and a rectangular head, Irvin Favre was physically imposing. But through his boys’ eyes, his stature went beyond mere physique. “God, it was incredible to watch my dad coach,” Brett recalled. “I remember going out to watch the high school football practice thinking, ‘Someday I want to be just like those guys.’” Favre saw the players as gladiators, if not gods. They were skyscrapers, and his father owned them all. “Nobody messed with him,” Brett recalled. “I remember standing on the sidelines thinking, ‘My dad has got some nuts.’”

  The games were little Brett’s slices of heaven. That the players knew him—talked to him!—was a $100 million bonus. He was enlisted as a team batboy, so he’d dash back and forth, fetching gloves, chasing down equipment. Before American Legion contests, Irv’s players loved having Brett and his brothers slide across the dirt in their spotless white mascot uniforms. “Who do you think had to get them clean for the next game?” said Bonita. “It wasn’t my husband.” The kids on the teams were usually 16 and 17. They would spit and curse and stick pinches of chewing tobacco between their gums and lips. The lessons were not lost upon the children. “Jeff came to me at the age of three,” Bonita recalled, “wanting to buy Red Man.”

  “I saw the catcher adjusting his cup,” Brett said, “so I’d reach down and play with my balls, too.”

  Before a state championship game in the summer of 1974, members of the Joe Graham Post 119 squad were goofing around when Brett walked into the practice swing of a slugger named Leon Farmer. The resulting knot on his forehead was the size of a cantaloupe, and Bonita rushed her son to the emergency room. When the attending physician asked Bonita how long her son was out for, she shrugged and said, “He wasn’t.”

  “Surely it knocked him down, no?” he said.

  “Nope,” replied Bonita.

  If the sporting events were intended to motivate the Favre boys toward athletic excellence, mission accomplished. But they also served another purpose. The state of Mississippi’s long and ugly struggles with racism are no secret, and Hancock County is hardly an exception. When, in 1954, the United States Supreme Court decreed via Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that America’s public schools had to be desegregated, most of Mississippi delayed and hoped the ruling could be ignored. Were there riots in Kiln? No. But many white families greeted the inevitability of desegregation by having their children enroll in Annunciation Catholic School, which opened in 1960 as a rebuke to the Brown ruling.

  Unlike many of her contemporaries, Bonita Favre was raised with a surprising open-mindedness about race. Could she have dated someone black as a teenager? “No,” she said. “My daddy would not have that. There were lines you didn’t cross.” But come three o’clock every afternoon, Bennie French would drive to the black part of Pass Christian and pick up his cooks and busboys for work at the bar. There was a black dishwasher, Kenneth Youngblood, who was so little he had to stand atop crates of Coca-Cola to reach the sink. “Kenneth and I would cut up and play together, and I never thought about him being black, or like there was supposed to be a separation,” she said. “He was a friend.” Later, when Bonita taught at all-black North Gulfport High, she coached the girls’ basketball team. “When we’d go to games people would say, ‘Here comes that white woman with all them niggers,’” she said. “To me, they were my kids.”

  When Brett and his brothers watched Irvin coach, it wasn’t merely a lesson on hitting and throwing and tackling. No, they witnessed a rainbow coalition in action. The teams were black and white, and Irvin refused to play favorites based on race. If you could do the job, you were given the job. Players of all colors would come to the Favre household for dinner. Later, when the boys played varsity sports, their teammates—black, white, whatever—were regularly invited inside the home for meals, for games, for TV. “I can’t speak for my friends, but we never thought about race,” said Scott Favre. “It was about who you were as a person, as an athlete. I looked at blacks as teammates and friends. My brothers were the same way.”

  Brett Favre’s organized athletic career began at age six, when Irv and Bonita signed him up for the local Harrison-Hancock Baseball League. Although he was technically too young, Brett was assigned to a team of eight-year-olds. He played third base, shortstop, and pitched, the first official inkling that his arm was particularly strong. “He could really bring it,” said Drew Malley, a childhood friend who played for an opposing team. “He didn’t have the best control, and that made you a little nervous when you stepped in the box. But he had a lot more talent than most of us.”

  A standard Brett Favre mound appearance would go something like this: strike out, walk, walk, walk, strike out, hit by pitch, hit by pitch, strike out. “Brett’s thing,” said Bonita, “was strike them out or knock them out.” Some opposing coaches questioned his age, wondering if the 6-year-old with the lightning bolt extending from his right shoulder was, perhaps, 9 or 10. Nobody enjoyed stepping to the plate against him. Favre had Nolan Ryan’s velocity and a blind drunkard’s control. In one game, he struck out 15 hitters while hitting 3—in a row. “I thought that was great,” he recalled. “It just made me want to throw it harder.”

  His organized football career began as a fifth grader, when he joined the local Hancock Hawks Pee Wee squad. It was an experimental experience both for prepubescent Brett and the town, which had never before fielded its own youth teams. As the high school coach, Irv always wondered why Hancock wasn’t developing his future players. So he asked Paul Cuevas, a former Hancock North Central halfback who had graduated in 1966, to kick-start a program. Cuevas agreed, and one thing he noticed early on in practices was that Irv’s son could really throw a football.

  The Hawks’ 17-man roster was comprised of fifth and sixth graders. They wore red jerseys with white pants, practiced on a ragtag field, and traveled the region, oftentimes competing in multiteam jamborees that would require playing three or four games on a single day. On the high school level, Irv’s offensive philosophy was run, run, and run. “You turned and you gave it to the halfback,” said Scott Favre. “That was a quarterback’s job.”

  Cuevas felt no fealty toward the system. “We saw right off the bat we had a kid who could throw and we also saw we had a bunch of kids who could catch,” he said. “We would shock the other teams.”

  The Hawks were loaded with athletically gifted children destined to one day excel for Irv. There was a tall, fast boy named Tommy Bond, who slammed into opposing ball carriers like the door of a bank vault. There was D
elano Lewis, the nifty tailback. Receiver Corey Blaze ran as his name suggests, and Vincent Cuevas, the coach’s son, would spend much of the decade catching Brett’s balls across the middle of football fields. “It was awesome,” Vincent Cuevas said. “I can’t say we knew Brett would turn into a pro. But he had this talent, and leadership, very early on. He was in charge, even as a young guy.”

  Brett’s debut was neither noteworthy nor charmed. The Hawks were scheduled to participate in a jamboree in nearby Bay Saint Louis, but that morning Irv decided he first needed a trim at his favorite barbershop in Gulfport. “I’m sitting there in full uniform waiting for my dad to have the finishing touches put on his flattop,” Brett recalled. “I was not a happy fifth grader.”

  By the time they arrived, the game was underway. Paul Cuevas inserted Brett at split end, and on one of his first plays he caught a pass for a short gain, fell on the ball, and had the wind knocked from his gut. He rolled around the grass, unable to breathe, tears streaming from his eyes. “You’re in the fifth grade,” he recalled, “and you’re sure you’re going to die.” Upon reaching the sideline, Brett begged his coach for a position switch. “I hate playing split end,” he said. “I want to play quarterback.”

  Cuevas acquiesced, and the next game began with Brett Favre under center. For years, people would refer to his debuts as his first games at Hancock North Central, at Southern Miss, in the National Football League. But here, on a small field with 30 or so spectators spread out along the rotted wooden bleachers, was Brett Favre’s legitimate quarterback debut. He wore uniform No. 10. His teeth were crooked, lips thin and fruit-punch red. His helmet had two white bars—one vertical, one horizontally splitting his sight line. Cuevas loved the way Brett walked toward the line of scrimmage. Not like a boy figuring things out, but as a man in charge. “He had a feel for it,” said Cuevas. “Maybe having a coach for a dad does that.”