Brett Favre (Pt. 4): Humility, Aging, and Faith

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Our American Stories, and we tell stories of all kinds here, folks, as you’ve come to love and know. And we’re always trying to get stories in the voice of the person telling them. We try and get out of the way, step as far back as possible, and we love to get stories behind stories. And Brett Favre’s life, we’ve been digging in deep. And this is the fourth part of a five-part series, Brett Favre’s Life Outside of the Goalposts, which is what we’re interested in here on this show. Not Brett Favre, the football star. That’s interesting, but who’s the man? What’s life like before and after? Who were his parents? Where did he grow up? How did he deal with fame and everything after? Here’s Brett Favre getting personal about his faith, about humility, and about aging.

00:01:00
Speaker 2: And I can’t speak for other people, but we, we, we, and I, s-I say we, more me.

00:01:06
Speaker 3: But we tend to lean on God when we need.

00:01:09
Speaker 2: Him, going to rehab, spending time by myself, like, “Open a Bible. God, I need some help. I can’t do this alone.” And I remember asking people, not I, and we, s-we, we still are active in the Catholic Church. In fact, my father, Tommy, our priest is one of our m-we, we take him on vacations and do all kinds of stuff. But, but I like leaning on someone. And I, I’ve had enough adversity to walk me through the Bible. If you go to rehab three times, you lose your dad. M, being lost her brother out here on a four-wheeler accident. Yeah, he was nineteen years old. Yeah, on my four-wheeler. Oh, he’s killed. A helicopter team out of here to the H-H hospital. But, I mean, it’s bad. Oh, you know. So, there’s enough things that, you know, you go, “God, I need some help here.” And, and you do well for a while, and then you slip, and you do well, and you slip. But I think as I, I’ve gotten older, I tend to slip maybe less. I, y-I, look at things differently. I think at, at fifty, I’m a lot wiser than I was at forty. But I’m sure if I make it to sixty, I’ll be saying, “You were a freaking idiot.” At fifty, “You didn’t know nothing.” Mmm. And I’m sure that’s the cycle that will always be. And I’ve been talking about just life in general. Uh, what, what we thought was important at eighteen… At thirty, we thought that, “What, you know, what were you thinking?” And then at forty, you thought, “What were you thinking at thirty?” And, but you… I feel…

00:03:16
Speaker 3: Like you, you narrow down as you get older what matters.

00:03:23
Speaker 2: And what it takes, you know, to achieve whatever happiness.

00:03:31
Speaker 3: And so, I think that…

00:03:36
Speaker 2: My faith has gotten, gotten better and stronger, but it needs a lot of work.

00:03:40
Speaker 3: I’m not going to sit here and, and brag, but I do.

00:03:47
Speaker 2: I do know that, that humility is, uh…

00:03:52
Speaker 3: I had to look it up, you know.

00:03:56
Speaker 2: I’m thinking, I’m thinking one thing, and actually, what I was thinking, I didn’t know how to put it in words, and humility was the word I was looking for. There was a time I thought that it was all about me. But it’s like the Oakland Game or my career. And you could say the Oakland Game is like my career. I was just driving the car, you know. God was telling me where to go, when to stop, when to pass, when to…

00:04:36
Speaker 3: Park, and…

00:04:42
Speaker 2: That took a while. I think that I goes back to playing twenty years. At twenty-one, I thought, “Once I got into play, I thought I can be pretty damn good.” And at nineteen… twenty years… You know, I’m like, “That doesn’t matter really.” Y-you need to be thankful that God gave you the opportunity. And, and also, you know, the one thing that I, I f-I feel really good about is that I made the most of it. You know, I, I let him down in a lot of ways. That was one of ’em. I didn’t let him down. He’s like, “Alright, I gave you a gift. What are you gonna do with it?” And I, I actually told my daughter that today. I said, “You got a chance.” ‘Cause she didn’t play very good last week. They played Friday and Saturday. She played pretty good Friday, not so good Saturday. She was really down, and she was beating herself up today, and, uh, “I gotta do this, my weight, so I’m overweight.” And I said, “Look, here’s the reality.” And I said, “This is the truth. You got a chance next week to redeem yourself.” And it starts out, “What are you gonna do with it?” There’s gonna come time when it’s over, and then what do you do? So? And that’s life in general. You know, we, sh-we have chances to. In fact, I say we, you know, you never know when it ends. My dad died at fifty-six, and that was, I was thirty-two or three, and I thought I was, I thought I was really young. Now, I, I, now that… I mean, I’m almost my dad’s age. And, uh, it’s kind of like, “Buddy, you know, I do the physicals and do all the things I need to do.” And he didn’t, in spite of me trying to, said, “Dad, you need to get a physical.” He didn’t take really good care of himself. He just thought he was gonna live forever.

00:07:09
Speaker 3: You know, that, m-that mentality, like that. You know, his age… are definitely before.

00:07:18
Speaker 2: Him. Other generations. I’m sure he say, “You need to go see a doctor.” “Oh, I ain’t gonna see no doctor.”

00:07:26
Speaker 3: I mean, you…

00:07:28
Speaker 2: That.

00:07:29
Speaker 3: I don’t care how tough you are when it’s your time.

00:07:34
Speaker 2: But he had apparently had, had two other heart attacks that no one knew.

00:07:40
Speaker 3: Uh, the autopsy showed that there was a massive heart attack. He was driving down the road again.

00:07:47
Speaker 2: He was fifty-six, which, you know, I’m fifty now. Fifty-six don’t seem that o-. I look, uh, you know, there was a time in fifty, he was like, “He’s fifty sold.” Now I’m like, “Fifty-six ain’t that,” you know? But, you know, it’s really unfair. I look at it as when people are like that, like my dad was, it’s really unfair to everyone else that you would be that selfish that you wouldn’t take care of yourself, you know, for… do it for the kids, your wife, or whatever. If you think about me, you with the kids, if you just neglected, you’d feel terrible. Well, that’s what you do when you don’t take care of yourself, if you just walk away from them. That’s really kind of the same thing. So, I mean, when it’s your time, it’s your time. But I’m gonna try to hang on as long as I can.

00:08:58
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Brett Favre, Part Four of our five-part series, about so much, and my goodness, him talking about humility, having to look up the word so that those words could approximate what he was thinking about. Am I good, looking back at our lives? We can all do that. If we’re not, we’re really not living right, how we looked and did things ten years ago.

00:09:19
Speaker 3: Hopefully, we’re doing better now.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: We have this five-part series from Brett Favre, and no one has anything like it, and that’s what we do here on this show. And whether it’s the life of Brett or Henry Ford, where we talked to great historians about him, or the Steinway family, or my goodness, our Dred Scott, on Spike’s story by George Will about Curt Flood.

00:09:41
Speaker 3: It’s just a beautiful story.

00:09:44
Speaker 1: Brett Favre’s story here on Our American Stories.