Gunslinger Read online

  How would this whole scenario play out?

  The young Hawks struggled, winning 4 of 10 games. Though Burton was a revelation at halfback, Lewis—the first black player to start at quarterback for the Hawks—was nothing more than a mediocre stand-in, there to hand off without screwing up. His season could be summed up in the Hawks’ ugly 7–2 win over lowly Vancleave High, during which the Hancock offense failed to capitalize on three fumbles and an interception. Or maybe a better example was the 21–0 home loss to Stone County, when Lewis’s longest completion went for 4 yards.

  “Melton was a very nice guy,” said Burton. “But Brett had nothing to worry about.”

  Although Brett Favre was going through the most dispiriting year of his life, there was some good news for the temporarily sidelined sophomore.

  Namely, he had himself a girlfriend.

  Her name was Deanna Tynes, and although she lived in Kiln and attended Hancock North Central, growing up, the two had rarely crossed paths. “I’ve been told that I first met Brett in catechism class when I was seven years old,” she recalled. Then, somewhat skeptically, “The story could be true.”

  Deanna was a year older than Brett. She was the daughter of a single mother, Ann, and adopted by a stepfather, Kerry Tynes. Deanna had a raven’s dark hair, with brown eyes and thin lips. Some said she bore a resemblance to the actress Winona Ryder. She was No. 12 on the Hawks’ girls’ basketball team, and one day—when she was a sophomore and Brett a freshman—she spotted him in the stands at a boys’ basketball game inside the high school gymnasium. Deanna thought it odd that Brett’s high-top sneakers were untied and flopped open. Her friends laughed and challenged her to question his fashion choice. “Realizing that I wasn’t going to get any relief until I did what they said,” she recalled, “I sighed and climbed up to the bench where Brett was sitting.”

  “Hey,” Deanna shouted, “why don’t you tie your shoes?”

  “I don’t know,” mumbled Brett.

  “Oh,” she said. “OK, then.”

  A week later, Deanna and some other members of the basketball team were changing into their uniforms. Deanna had just pulled her shirt over her shoulders when the door flew open. She expected it to be a coach. Instead, it was Brett. He and Scott had been goofing around, and his older brother shoved him into the room. Brett spotted Deanna and was mortified.

  Although he was reluctant to admit such, Brett had known about Deanna for some time; he’d kept his jealous eye on her from afar as she dated Drew Malley, his friend and the football team’s fullback. Burton egged him on to ask her out. “But Brett didn’t wanna mess with Drew,” Burton said. “Then Drew started up with another girl. I was like, ‘There you go, Brett! Here’s your opportunity! Take it!’”

  Scott was to turn 17 on December 22, 1983, and four days earlier Bonita held a surprise birthday party at the house, inviting the Hancock boys’ and girls’ basketball teams to attend. Deanna and her cousin, Vanessa, bought a shirt for Scott, then drove to the Favre household. Brett and his father had taken Scott to the Los Angeles Rams vs. New Orleans Saints game at the Superdome, and when the three returned they were greeted by a couple of dozen people and a vivacious “Surprise!” Brett didn’t know Deanna had been invited. He looked across the room at her. She stared back. As gifts were exchanged and candles extinguished, Deanna excused herself to shoot baskets in the driveway. Brett spotted her from the window and worked up the courage to approach. He had yet to kiss a girl, hold a girl’s hand, go on any sort of date. As he finished off a hot dog, he and Deanna shot baskets and played one-on-one. Vanessa asked if they wanted to take a ride, so she drove them around town—Brett and Deanna in the backseat, alone. “At one point Brett’s hand brushed against mine,” Deanna recalled, “and he jerked his hand back like my skin was made of poison ivy.”

  Later that night, Vanessa dropped Brett off at his house. Deanna walked him to the front door as her cousin waited in the car. When he finally got up the nerve to ask her out, she accepted. He leaned in for his first kiss. It was predictably awkward. His head went right, her head went left. Then his head went left and hers went right. Finally, after a goofy laugh, their lips met. A few days later Brett called and asked, officially, “Will you go with me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Their first official date was a dance in nearby Dedeaux. There was a DJ, some liters of soda, a tray of supermarket cookies. They danced for the first time to “Time Will Reveal” by DeBarge. Brett hated dancing but didn’t mind with Deanna.

  Brett was a chronic notebook scribbler, and before long BRETT FAVRE #10 LOVES DEANNA TYNES #12 was etched onto hundreds of slivers of paper. “If you sat next to Brett in class,” recalled Jesse Dupree, a friend, “he’d steel your notebook and write it.” As a sullen sophomore with mono, he depended on Deanna’s positivity and companionship. Because the Tynes family lived 18 miles away, much of the communication took place via phone. “Deanna and I talked nonstop every night,” Brett recalled. “It was always about the future, and how great it was going to be.” Their dates weren’t typical dates—movies, burgers, video arcade. “One day,” she recalled, “he gave me a catcher’s mask and mitt because he wanted me to catch for him while he practiced pitching.” When Irv looked out the window to see Deanna squatting behind an imaginary plate, he ripped into his son. “Boy,” he screamed, “you can’t throw that hard to a girl!”

  “Why not?” Brett replied. “She’s catchin’ it.”

  By the time spring of his sophomore year rolled around, Brett was healthy enough to join the Hawks’ varsity baseball team. He started at third base, pitched some, and relished the opportunity to finally play under his father, the head coach. This came with its own set of complications.

  Irv Favre was notoriously tough. He didn’t explain so much as scream. “He’d be 100 yards away, and you’d hear him call you out,” said Jesse Dupree. “He was anything but soft.” Burton recalled an incident from his junior year, when he lied to his mother about having walked down to the Jourdan River for a swim. “She found out that I hadn’t told the truth, and I had to go home instead of going to football practice,” Burton said. “Then Irv found out, and that was all she wrote for me.” The coach called his star halfback into his office, removed a strap from a desk drawer, and repeatedly beat Burton across the rear.

  “Coach would rarely compliment you,” said Cuevas. “You could run for 200 yards, and on Monday it’d be everything you did wrong.”

  That sort of treatment was the norm for Hancock North Central athletes, and it was a thousand times worse for the Favre children. Irv viewed his kids as reinforcements of his philosophy, and refused to accept mistakes or injuries with anything but utter contempt. Brett spent many of his summers participating in American Legion baseball for Irv. One year, the team traveled to Ponchatoula, Louisiana, for a game. It was 95 degrees outside, and Brett was playing third base. The batter stepped to the plate and hit a liner that nailed Favre directly in his protective cup. “Brett fell to his knees, Irvin came running out of the dugout, yelling for him to get up and throw him out,” said Mark Ross, a coach with the team. “Brett got up, threw him out, then fell back on all fours.” He proceeded to vomit, but remained in the game.

  “That’s just how it was done,” said Ross. “That was Irv.”

  With a postrecovery return to sports, Brett felt rejuvenated. Yet it was also a disorienting time—new girlfriend, stubborn illness, and the absence of his hero and protector. Throughout his life, Brett had always turned to Scott Favre when he struggled. If Brett was awkward and occasionally bewildered by social arrangements, Scott was cool and confident. He was more handsome than his younger brother. More affable, too. He walked with a breeze to his back. “Scott was the best all-around athlete in our family,” said Brandi. “He did everything he was supposed to do, followed all the rules. He was a model of how a kid should be.”

  Now, though, Brett’s difficulties were being shared by Scott. Following an impressive baseball a
nd football career at Hancock North Central, Scott accepted a scholarship to Mississippi State, and moved 250 miles north to Starkville. Although he packed only 165 pounds on his six-foot-two-inch frame, the oldest Favre boy hoped to take Bulldog football by storm. Instead, Emory Bellard, the team’s head coach, paid Scott little mind, burying him deep on the quarterback depth chart and leaving him scratching for plays in freshman scrimmages. It hardly helped that football newcomers were mercilessly hazed. “It was so bad, it changed Scott,” said Brandi. “You could see it. It made him a different person. Not in a good way.”

  “In hindsight, I should have gone to a junior college for two years to grow and work on my game,” Scott said. “But Lydell Curry had gone to Mississippi State, some other friends went there, and I followed. Dumb mistake.”

  One afternoon, after wrapping up at practice, Scott returned from the field to find local police officers waiting for him. He was arrested for writing fraudulent checks to purchase an expensive car stereo at the nearby Walmart, and was placed in Oktibbeha County Jail. “Very few people from the college took up for me,” he said. “Everyone seemed to be trying to figure out why I did it. Was I on drugs? Was I selling drugs? The thing nobody asked was, ‘Why would a guy without a car steal a car stereo?’”

  It was later confirmed that someone had stolen Scott’s checkbook and gone on a Walmart spending spree. The fiasco capped a miserable half year, and Scott Favre packed his belongings, bid Bellard a cold farewell, and transferred to Pearl River Community College.

  The mother tends to be overlooked. Isn’t this often the case with sports figures? We look back fondly at the lessons imparted by the paternal figure, praising him for all the lectures, all the drills, all the doggedness and toughness. And we minimize the woman who created and nurtured the little man.

  Bonita Favre never taught her offspring how to throw spirals or fastballs. She was a sound girls’ basketball coach with good coordination. She attended nearly every game of every Favre child, sitting in the stands, cigarette between her lips, cheering with the rest of the attendees. (“Sometimes it was just impossible to do,” she allows. “You’d have three games going at once, and only one me.”)

  “Mom was always there for us,” said Brandi. “Always.”

  Bonita’s greatest gift to her children was not availability, however, but empathy. In her 16 years as a special education teacher at Hancock North Central, Bonita went out of her way to expose her students to a world they rarely saw. She was compassionate, detailed, softhearted. “I did all kinds of things I wasn’t supposed to,” Bonita said. “I’d take the kids into grocery stores so they’d get some exposure to everyday things that maybe they wouldn’t have any other way. One time, I took a class of special education kids on a ferry-boat ride. I didn’t have permission to do it, and Lord knows what would have happened if one of them had fallen overboard or something. I just thought: These kids probably won’t ever have a chance to do this if I don’t take them myself. And I knew if I asked ahead of time, somebody would tell me I couldn’t do it.”

  Bonita refused to shield her own children from her job. She knew the sway sports stardom carried in determining high school status, and she insisted Brett serve as a defender for her students and make certain nobody picked on them. He would visit her classes, talk sports and movies and whatever crossed their minds. “He looked after them, just as all my kids did,” Bonita said. “When I went to the Special Olympics, the kids came too. You can’t teach empathy and understanding without exposing people to those who need empathy and understanding.”

  In the fall of 1985, Brett was finally able to take his place as quarterback for the Hancock North Central Hawks. By virtue of being asked to throw five or six passes per game, he wasn’t a star. But he was the head coach’s son and a student body leader, and his parents asked for him to behave as one. During summers, when Brett played American Legion ball under Irv, he shared road lodging with Ronnie Herbert, the team’s developmentally delayed manager. “Nobody wanted to have a room with him,” said Brandi. “But Brett did, and he never complained or minded. He knew it was the right thing.” In football, the team’s water boy was a kid named Kenneth Garcia. Better known as Turtle, he was also developmentally impaired. Some of the students taunted him. Many ignored him. Brett befriended him. “It came naturally,” said Bonita. “He could be very understanding.”

  With his son now starting at quarterback, safety, and punter, and a large number of new, high-caliber players joining the roster, Irv Favre’s Hawks were, after a half-decade drought, competitive. The team featured two running backs—Burton and Stanley Jordan—who exceeded 1,000 yards on the ground, and a quarterback who could launch a ball 70 yards in the air without so much as a trickle of sweat. Not that it mattered. There was never any chance of Irvin Favre letting the boy drop back and wing it. Years later, it remains fodder for what would make a fantasticgridiron-themed mystery series—The Coach-Dad Who Never Threw. Irv had witnessed enough backyard football to know Brett possessed a fabulous arm. Yet when it came to game planning, Brett’s role was no different from that of the Wing-T quarterbacks at Delaware. Handoff left, handoff right, keep the ball and run left, keep the ball and run right. Pass once every solar eclipse and don’t get in Charles Burton’s way. Yawn.

  The father insisted he knew what he was doing. And, as a motivator, there were few better than Irvin Favre. His pregame pep talks were inspiring and feisty—They say they’re gonna kick your rears! They say you guys can’t bring it! Is that how you wanna go down? He also grasped the psychology of the teenage boy. “He’d write letters to his own players, pretending they were from the other team,” Brett recalled. “They’d say stuff like, ‘You no-good so-and-so, we’re going to whip you.’ And the players believed it. We’d get so mad we’d want to kick some ass.”

  Strategy-wise, though, Irv Favre was done in by a stubborn adherence to running at all costs. “It’s weird, no question,” said Vincent Cuevas, the Hawks’ top receiver. “It’s not like Brett developed his arm strength in college. He had it in high school, and we all hoped Coach would air it out. But it wasn’t an option for him. I never understood.”

  Against the majority of the Hawks’ schedule, it mattered not. Hancock North Central operated a wishbone/Wing-T hybrid, and Burton’s merging of speed and toughness resulted in high-scoring games that suggested offensive genius. Through its first three contests, the team scored 11 touchdowns—all but one via the run. The Hawks gained 342 yards of total offense in a 32–7 crushing of St. Stanislaus, then scored six touchdowns on 350 total yards while humiliating St. Martin, 39–6 (Burton ran for 301 yards on 13 carries against the Yellow Jackets). It was easy work, made easy by one of the smoothest halfbacks anyone had ever seen.

  “I remember after one game, we were sitting in the office and Irv said to me, ‘Why are we throwing the ball so much?’” Shaw recalled. “I said, ‘We only threw it four times tonight.’”

  The team’s three defeats, though, told the story of a head coach unwilling to recognize the potential greatness of a boy living beneath his roof. During practices, Brett unleashed passes that sailed far into the Mississippi sky—high, awe-inspiring rainbows that caused people to stop and watch. He threw finger-crunching outs and slants; “the kind of tosses NFL quarterbacks probably made,” said Cuevas. In one game, he rifled a touchdown pass to Tommy Lull that knocked the receiver back two feet. “I had,” Brett recalled, “a little to learn about touch.” Another time, his pass hit Delano Lewis in the chest with such force that his helmet popped off his head. “The only way to catch his balls was with your body,” said Jacob Dupree, a teammate. “You couldn’t catch with your hands.” The quarterback made certain his father was watching. The throws were unspoken pleas to open things up. Irv, however, would not budge. “Irv’s basic philosophy of football was that the team that runs the best and plays the best defense wins,” said Rocky Gaudin, his assistant coach. “We knew we had a kid who could be a real good quarterback. But Charles B
urton was a Walter Payton–type runner.”

  In a 14–6 Hawks loss at Stone County High in Perkinston, the Tomcats played eight men at the line, dared Burton to run, then knocked Brett out of the game when he plunged into the teeth of the defense and was slammed to the ground. He threw a total of seven balls, three of which were completed. Even when it was clear Chris Calcote, the Stone County coach, knew what was coming, Irv refused to throw. Against Long Beach, the Hawks led 14–0 in the second quarter, then went 17 straight plays without a pass as the Bearcats—also playing the majority of defenders at the line of scrimmage—charged back for a 15–14 triumph. “I guess we didn’t want it bad enough,” Irvin Favre said afterward, chalking up the loss to lack of effort, not lack of vision.

  The most egregious setback came on November 16, in the 11th annual Wendell Ladner Bowl against Forrest County Agricultural High. The Aggies took a 15–8 halftime advantage and led 22–15 at the end of the third quarter. The Hawks received the ball early in the fourth quarter, and promptly ran three straight plays for minimal yardage before punting. Standing alongside his father on the sidelines, Brett begged for the offense to open up. Like most other schools, Forrest County had devoted itself to stopping Burton. “Dad,” Brett pleaded, “I can throw on these guys. Lemme go deep, please . . .”

  “Boy,” Irvin responded, “shut your mouth.”

  The outcome was sealed with 58 seconds left in the fourth, when Brett’s desperation heave to Cuevas was intercepted near the end zone. As he walked off the field, the quarterback’s shoulders were slumped, his eyes glued to the ground. Hancock finished 7-3. Brett Farve loved the game of football more than anything else in life, but he wasn’t allowed to do what he did best.

  Throw.

  4