Sunday night brought the annual telecast of the ESPYS, which is just my way of saying, obviously, run for your lives, but in an oversight of truly staggering proportions, no ESPY will be awarded to Brett Favre.
There was an ESPY for Santonio Holmes.
There was an ESPY for skateboarding/snowboarding sensation Shaun White.
There was an ESPY for Nelson Mandela.
But no ESPY for Brett Favre?
ESPN, having for years been heroically proactive on the urgent cultural crisis in which there are just not enough award shows on television, should simply know better than this. ESPN should present Favre with a lifetime achievement ESPY for Best Reliably Recurring Story Line By An Aging Diva Quarterback We Can Milk Around The Clock And All The Way Around The Bloody Calendar If We Feel Like It.
If that's not a category, make it one for next year right now.
I can see the crawl next summer: FAVRE REPORTEDLY SETS JULY 10 DEADLINE TO INFORM ESPN WHETHER HE'LL BE AT ESPYS RED CARPET SHOW.
For the moment, the next big fat Favre deadline looms the 30th of this month, when the former Green Bay Packers and New York Jets quarterback says he'll reveal to the Minnesota Vikings whether he'll join them for training camp by, you know, joining them for training camp, or failing to do so.
In the meantime, he is whipping passes with a surgically repaired arm at a high school in Hattiesburg, Miss., at least when he's not cavorting in those pick-up games near the pick-up trucks where he throws not-to-be-picked-off passes to guys falling into big puddles while helping him to sell real ... comfortable ... jeans.
Which, you have to know, would not happen in a million years were it not being charged to Wrangler's advertising budget. I mean are you nuts? This guy wouldn't even dress in the same room with the New York Jets. He is going to take one of the few million dollar arms on earth out to horse around in the mud with random Mississippians?
Meanwhile, Vikings owner Zygi Wilf and his coach, Brad Childress, have been lured into another Favre Danse Macabre, apparently because neither ever saw any of the films in the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" franchise.
Last summer at this time, Favre was torturing his beloved Packers with his now classically hypnotic un-retirement dance, which ESPN covered as though Favre were not a beat-up old quarterback as much as a nuclear weapons trafficker carrying grudges and launch codes.
That Favre wound up with the Jets and coaxed them to eight wins in their first 11 games might not have been foreseen by many, but the fact that Favre's team dropped four of its last five and missed the playoffs as he damaged his right bicep, was a lot more predictable. So even if Favre turns up on the campus of Minnesota State University next week, the chances that you'll see him starting in September and beyond aren't much better than 50-50.
All the Vikings had to do to avoid all this was get word to Favre that they weren't interested, which they reportedly did at one point in early June. They just didn't mean it.
Now they're stuck with the opening of single-game ticket sales this week without being able to promote the fact that Favre is their quarterback, Wilf has had to explain to gatherings of season ticket holders that he has no control whatsoever over the situation, and Childress has found himself called "disingenuous" by ESPN for claiming not to know that Favre even had surgery May 22.
It's like they still don't know what he did last summer.
What they know, and what the Packers knew last year, is that Favre very well might give them a better chance of winning in the near term than anyone on the depth chart at quarterback, which in Viking World reads Tarvaris Jackson, Sage Rosenfels, John David Booty and Sean Glennon, all of whom are going to view their months of off-season preparation as a sick charade if Favre turns up next week.
It's almost hard to know what to wish for at this point.
If Favre goes to training camp, the ESPN coverage will rival O.J.'s ride for intensity. The network probably will charter a plane to shadow Favre's chartered plane into Minnesota air space, and another to follow the private jet of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as he arrives to take back the giant BROADWAY sign and the $4 MetroCard he gave Brett the Jet at last summer's City Hall news conference.
If Favre stays home, we'll always know what he did last summer, because he might do it again next summer.
I'd like to see them deny him an ESPY then.
(Contact Gene Collier at gcollier@post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
columnMust credit Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Post new comment