Gunslinger Read online

  This is not true.

  He was fifth.

  Having dutifully backed up Andrew Anderson in 1986, Young was Carmody’s opening-game starter. The second-stringer was Carter, the redshirt freshman who nearly accepted a scholarship to attend Nebraska before deciding to stay closer to his Louisiana home. The third quarterback was David Forbes, a 5-foot-11 sophomore, followed by the anxious Jackson. Then came Jay Stokes, an incoming freshman from Jacksonville, Florida, who completed 59 percent of his passes as a senior at the Bolles School. Lastly, there was Brett Favre.

  “When I first came here, I was depressed,” Favre recalled. “You sit there and you think about the fact that you were a starter in high school and all of a sudden you’re a nobody. It really gets you down.”

  The good news trickled in. First, Stokes flamed out, so much so that, years later, most members of the Golden Eagles had to be reminded of his existence. Second, Forbes suffered a knee injury that ended both his season and career at Southern Miss. Third, coaches and players took notice of the quarterback who quietly swapped uniform numbers, from 7 to 4.

  “During this one practice we were just throwing three-step hitches and the varsity wide receivers were out there with Gerald Goodman, our receivers coach,” said White. “Brett takes his pretend snap—one, two, three—and fires it out there. Robbie Weeks was one of our better receivers, and before he got his hands up, the ball hit him in the chest plate of the shoulder pads and it sounded like a 12-gauge shotgun going off. Just, Boom! All the receivers were screaming. Well, I looked over at Gerald, and we looked at each other like we had just seen the nuclear test treaty being signed. It was, ‘Did you see that shit?’” When practice ended, Goodman and White retreated behind the old field house and spontaneously jumped up and down like little children. “We’ve got one!” White yelped. “We’ve really got one!”

  “You heard his ball go by,” said Ben Washington, a Southern Miss defensive back. “I mean, guys were talking about how hard this Brett Something guy threw it, but I was skeptical. Then I stood there one day and he’s throwing balls to the wide receivers, and they’re whistling by. Whistling. Like, the noise of someone whistling . . .”

  Favre didn’t begin as a phenomenon, but word spread. There was a mythmaking quality to the banter—a You’re not going to believe this, but . . . sense of wonder. Carter, the backup quarterback, initially thought nothing of the freshman—“a tall, sort of skinny kid who looked like a hundred other quarterbacks. When you’re doing two-a-day practices, you mainly worry about yourself.” Then one day, Carter asked Favre to help warm him up before practice. He didn’t even know his name—“Hey, you.” Carter grabbed a ball, walked about 15 yards away, and tossed it toward the freshman. Favre fired back a heater. “It was a spiral right to my face,” said Carter. “The velocity of that pass rammed my hands into my throat. It hurt. I told him we were never playing catch again.”

  Carter’s recollection is hardly an isolated moment:

  Stephen Helms, redshirt freshman wide receiver: “He was trying to make an impression. So how do you do that? You throw it really hard. We’d run these drills where you’d run a 5-yard out and he’d break your fingers. He broke my finger. Crack! Then he broke [receiver] Darryl Tillman’s finger—and Darryl’s fingers were taped, with gloves on. Crack! Broken.”

  Chris McGee, senior wide receiver: “He split my hands open a couple of times during practice. Not 10 yards from me, he threw the ball as hard as he could. He did not have any touch. I caught the ball and threw it back to him. I said, ‘What the heck are you trying to do?’ I think I earned his respect that day because I caught the ball.”

  Carl Jones, senior fullback: “I can tell you this, and this is not lore. I saw Brett throw the ball 80 yards in the air. He was standing in one end zone and the ball landed on the 20-yard line.”

  Joel Singleton, junior linebacker: “A coach told the wide receivers to stop whining about Brett’s velocity and put their fingers in icy water to numb the pain. That was a first for me . . .”

  Jimmy Rosato, scout team coach: “I was coming out of the office and going to the practice field, and I see this person pick the ball up on the sideline, and there was a guy 20 yards up the field on the other side. Brett throws it on a rope and knocked him down. Then he picked up another ball, threw it to the kid, knocked him down again.”

  Over the course of camp, the Golden Eagles had three major scrimmages. The first two games came and went, and Favre did little. If a fifth-string freshman quarterback drops back to pass, and nobody’s watching, do his throws make sounds?

  The third scrimmage was scheduled for a Saturday afternoon. Generally, the games pitted the first team against the second team, with third-string players earning small nuggets of fourth-quarter action. This time Carmody announced that the first team would be facing the third string. A loud, visceral taunting immediately overtook the meeting room—veteran players graciously explaining to the rookies that they were about to turn into roadkill. “It was going to be ugly,” said McHale. “You had a group of players who knew the system inside out, going against a bunch of new kids with no clue.”

  On the morning of the game, White told Favre he would not only start for the third team, but play at least three quarters. What followed, McHale recalled, “was one of the most amazing feats I’d ever witnessed.” The third-teamers began the game with the ball on their own 35-yard line, and on first down a tailback named Kerry Valrie slammed into the line for no gain. The varsity starters rained insults upon the pile, and the third-stringers already looked defeated—heads bowed, bodies sagging. Favre wanted none of it. He approached White on the sideline, pleading, “Please let me throw the ball, Coach.” McHale later wrote of what transpired:

  Brett stepped under center and took the snap. In a flash, one of the defensive linemen broke through the line and came up the middle to try for a sack, but Brett shook him off and scrambled to his right. Brett was running as hard as he could and pointing to where he wanted the receiver to run the pattern. Several defenders gained on Brett but he drew back his arm and launched a rocket. We all could hear the ball hit the receiver’s shoulder pads. It was a 15-yard completion. You could see the eyes of the offensive players light up as they felt pride in gaining a first down against the first-team defense.

  Throughout the game, a defensive back named John Baylor chanted, “Elway! Elway! Elway!” as Favre scrambled around the field, looking much like the Denver Broncos quarterback. It wasn’t mocking, but homage. The third-stringers lost badly. But Brett Favre won. He threw a couple of touchdown passes, ran the offense to perfection, and earned the respect of the defensive starters, who slapped him on the helmet and punched him on the pads. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this,” Gene Smith, the team’s defensive ends coach, told McHale.

  Standing along the sideline, Young and Carter marveled at the arm strength and the moxie. A few days earlier neither had known the third-stringer’s name. He was “Freshman” or “Kid.” Now Brett Favre wasn’t a stranger and wasn’t No. 4 and wasn’t the guy who would hold the clipboard and signal in plays.

  He was the competition.

  From the time Brett Favre signed his scholarship, the plan was to stick him on a shelf and redshirt him for the season. Even as his arm turned heads and his confidence won over disciples, Carmody thought it best to wait. Ailrick Young was the starting quarterback. So what if his passes fluttered? And so what if his deep-passing game did not exist? And so what if he was one-dimensional? And uninspired? And a below-average Division I football player?

  Now in his sixth year as the Golden Eagles’ head coach, the 54-year-old Carmody was a model of stability and consistency. The attributes most enthusiastically noted in a Southern Miss media-guide profile were “detailed organization and the ability to sustain long hours of hard work.” He was smart and loyal, but rarely took chances or made drastic changes. The defense he ran as a coordinator at Ole Miss in the mid-1970s was the same one Southern Miss e
mployed in 1987. He liked offensive coordinators who operated the option, primarily because it was safe.

  That’s why, in the lead-up to the season opener at the University of Alabama on September 5, White and McHale were stupefied when, during a staff meeting, Carmody abandoned the “Redshirt Brett Favre” plan, implying he’d like to get the true freshman a few snaps against the Crimson Tide. “Coach, I don’t know how he can be ready,” White replied. “He doesn’t even know our plays.”

  Carmody, a man who made cardboard seem enrapturing, uttered words that no one in the room would soon forget. “Jack,” he said, “anybody that gets my defense as excited as he does, I don’t care if he knows the plays or not. Just see what you can do to get him some experience.”

  The days before the opener were filled with local newspaper stories concerning the Golden Eagles’ prospects. In particular, much scrutiny was heaped upon Young, who, according to Doug Barber in the Sun-Herald, “displayed a strong arm in the USM spring game and has good quickness to the corner in an attack that depends on the speed and ball-handling ability of the quarterback.” The assessment could have come straight from Carmody’s mouth—and almost certainly did. Behind the scenes, Southern Miss players had little to no confidence in Young. “He was a very nice guy,” said Pat Ferrell, a senior offensive tackle. “But as a quarterback, he was merely fair. I didn’t think he was that good. And when he played, we did the same old stuff we always did. Predictable run-first nothing. We could win some games, but we weren’t going to ever dominate.”

  Of the 11 games on the schedule, the Alabama matchup reigned supreme. The majority of Southern Miss’s players had aspired to attend larger football schools. If you were a kid growing up in Mississippi, you dreamed of Ole Miss or Mississippi State. If you were a kid growing up in Louisiana, LSU was the holy grail. And if you were a kid from Alabama—as was the case with 42 members of the Golden Eagles’ roster—you worshipped at the altar of Bear Bryant and the Crimson Tide.

  Because Southern Miss didn’t belong to a conference, it had few real rivalries. In Alabama, Carmody and his staff saw the program they aspired to be. In Southern Miss, the Crimson Tide saw an easy win to start the season. The Golden Eagles captured just 3 of 25 all-time meetings, and lacked the resources and cachet to keep up. The Alabamians who wound up committing to Southern Miss were a bit small or a bit slow or a bit dumb to ever play for the Tide. “We used to call ourselves the Alabama rejects,” said Hallman, a native of Centreville, Alabama. “We knew that school didn’t want us, and we’d be able to get some revenge by playing against them for Southern Miss.”

  When Favre found out he would dress for the game in Birmingham, he phoned home, blabbering excitedly about the journey and the new uniform and the chance—slight, yes, but still a chance—that he might play. Beginning with Scott’s freshman year at Mississippi State, Irvin and Bonita committed themselves to attending all of their sons’ college games, and routinely loaded up the family van with children, cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews, and friends. In Hattiesburg, the news was barely news at all—toward the end of a Sun-Herald game preview, Barber wrote, “Freshman Brett Favre of Hancock North Central will travel to Birmingham as the No. 3 quarterback behind Young and redshirt freshman Simmie Carter of New Orleans.” It was the first time he was ever mentioned in any sort of Southern Miss–related article.

  Because Alabama lost most of the starters from a team that finished 10-3 and was, at one point, ranked No. 2 in the country, Southern Miss players convinced themselves an upset was possible. Bill Curry was in his first season as coach of the Tide, and his defense scared no one. “We always felt we could play with those guys,” said Hallman. “We never thought of this huge talent gap.”

  The game began at 1:30 p.m. at Legion Field. And it was ugly. Before a sellout crowd of 75,808 crimson-and-white-clad fans, Alabama jumped out to a 24–0 halftime lead en route to a 38–6 blowout. For the media members in attendance, the obvious story line was Bobby Humphrey, the Tide halfback who scored three touchdowns and ran for 84 yards on 17 carries. For those pulling for Southern Miss, on the other hand, the story line was simple: Ailrick Young’s debut proved disastrous. He completed 5 of 11 passes for 60 yards, and the offense didn’t record a first down or cross midfield until 12:22 remained in the second quarter. Carmody considered pulling him on multiple occasions, but thought better of it. Carter, the backup, was a run-first Young clone who would fare little better. Favre, meanwhile, was 17 and raw. What better way to crush a boy’s confidence than by feeding him to the monsters? When asked about his starter’s performance, Carmody put on a brave face and said, “I thought Ailrick did a good job . . . at times.”

  Behind closed doors, the coach was at a loss. The Golden Eagles hadn’t played in a bowl game in six years, and boosters and alumni were increasingly frustrated by Carmody’s unwillingness (or lack of ability) to sell the program. Carmody viewed himself as solely a football coach. Which, in an earlier age, might have been fine. But in the 1980s, Division I teams required their coaches to shake hands and attend rubber chicken banquets and excite the loyalists with promises (legitimate or not) of bright futures. That simply wasn’t Carmody’s style, and if he wasn’t winning, he wasn’t viable.

  Minus a legitimate quarterback, Southern Miss would not be winning. Once Alabama took the lead, it dared Southern Miss to throw the ball. Only, Young couldn’t. The Tide stacked the line, played single coverage on the Golden Eagles receivers, and taunted at will. “Ailrick was more of a track guy playing quarterback for us,” said Kerry Williams, a defensive back. “He wasn’t a thrower.”

  It has been suggested that watching the Alabama game was the height of frustration for young Favre. This is not true. The team was losing and Young was a catastrophe, but Brett—born of a town of 2,134 residents—was in pigskin heaven. The sights, the sounds, the crowds, the smells. Yes, he knew he was superior to Ailrick Young. But this was an amazing high. “It was exciting to be on the sideline,” he said afterward. “I couldn’t really explain it.” After the game, Brett briefly met up with his family members, all of whom agreed the Golden Eagles would have been better served by a quarterback with a throwing arm.

  “At some point,” Brett said, “I’ll probably get my chance.”

  The Southern Miss football team had two weeks off before hosting Tulane at M. M. Roberts Stadium, and Brett Favre used the interim to immerse himself in the time-honored rituals of collegiate existence.

  A nondrinker throughout high school, he suddenly found himself gleefully intrigued by the cold canned beverage known as beer. He sought out every wild and crazy corner of Vann Hall, the athletic dormitory. From a structural viewpoint, the facility was an ugly cobbling of concrete and cement, of grays and browns. It was closer to a correctional institution than luxury living, but the players—away from home, surrounded by peers—loved it. “It was a crappy place,” said Toby Watts, a defensive tackle. “It was smelly, cold, uninviting. But it was ours.” The seniors were placed on the first floor, with the remaining players relegated to the second and third (many members of the men’s basketball team also lived on the third). Jim Ferrell, a senior center, led a covert movement to splice the cable TV feed from the Vann lounge, and before long everyone had access in their rooms. The Hall was attached to an athletes-only cafeteria (Thursday was always steak night!), and one of the players stole a key, had copies made, and doled them out. “We’d swipe food from there and cook it in our rooms,” said Ferrell. “I don’t think we ever got caught.” Because Vann Hall had three separate exits, it was fairly simple to sneak out. “Sometimes the coaches would ask me to try and calm [Brett] down a little,” Ryals said. “One night we’re about two minutes from curfew and I check his bed and he doesn’t move, so I pull down the covers and there are six pillows zigzagged down his bed. The coaches peek in and say, ‘Young Favre went to bed kind of early tonight,’ and I say, ‘Yes, sir, he did.’ He got in about four. That’s when I knew I couldn’t even try to stay wi
th him.”

  Brett shared the suite with Alan Anderson, Ryals, and another player. After a couple of weeks, though, Favre tired of Anderson, who always seemed to be on the phone with his girlfriend, Vanessa. “He’d have a big dip in his mouth that made him sound like he had a speech impediment,” Favre recalled. “He’d sit on the phone for hours saying, ‘I love you, Vanetha.’ Good Lord, it made me about puke.” Favre and Ryals removed the mattresses from their beds, placed them side by side on the floor in one of the rooms, and banished Anderson to the other. When McHale walked in on the arrangement, he frowned. “One of you is going to have to live with [Anderson],” he said. “Whether you like it or not.” One night, while Anderson was out, Favre gathered a handful of tacks and stuck them through the cover sheet of his bed. “I had about five friends hiding when he came into the room,” Favre recalled. “He got undressed, hopped into bed and started to scream. Everyone was laughing their asses off. Everyone except for Alan.” Problem solved: Anderson moved out.

  With rare exception, freshmen are to be seen, not heard. Such was certainly the case for many of the new players at Southern Miss, who tiptoed past the juniors and seniors while hoping not to be called out. Favre, however, never allowed himself to be defined. He bounded from room to room like an excitable puppy, throwing out nicknames, putting guys in headlocks, farting loudly, burping even louder, telling off-color jokes, talking trash. He kept a jar of pickled pigs’ feet below his bed, and shared the unique delicacy with any interested parties. He particularly gravitated toward the offensive linemen—purveyors of large muscles and large quantities of alcohol. “One time all the linemen—offensive and defensive—were in someone’s room, taking shots at each other, fighting,” said Watts. “We had a tight end named Billy Schrider, a pretty big guy [six feet four, 216 pounds], and we got to wrestling. It was a tough fight, but I finally got him down. Well, Brett walks up and he said, ‘I want a crack at you.’” Watts was six five and 242 pounds, a lean, muscular kid who placed second in the Texas state shot-put championship as a senior at Aledo High in Fort Worth. “You don’t want this,” he sneered.