In the Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay manages to turn the Brett Favre saga into a source of humor. Here, for example, Gay seeks to overcome his resentment of the drama involved in the current rerun of Favre’s return from retirement:
[N]o one has been hurt here. This [is] not an arrest or a positive test. Mr. Favre’s faux retirements are less an affront than a musty punch line, like Larry King’s marriages or Tiger Woods’s cell phone. He is the boy who cried Metamucil. Heyoooo!
This country has a high tolerance for mindless repetition. We’ve endured four iterations of the Fast and the Furious and twelve Friday the 13ths. CBS is remaking Hawaii Five-0.
Athletes are the worst offenders, of course. Air Jordan came back twice. Roger Clemens relaunched three times. Boxers never quit, even in the afterlife. (The MGM Grand would still book Max Schmeling.) The most recent Super Bowl halftime show was played by The Who, a band that first said farewell in 1982, when Mr. Favre was 13.
Gay warmed up for this column with a shorter item on August 4. There he mapped out the stages of the emotions related to Favre’s drama a little like the stages of grief. First comes denial: “Don’t invite us to anything Favre-related, Favre-tastic or Favre-ulous. We’re shutting it down.” He entertained the thought that Favre would return based on the ending of his season last January in the NFC championship game against the Saints: “After a great season, it was an ugly denouement, a grim example of not knowing when to quit. Not as ugly as Willie Mays on the ’73 Mets, or that Rod Stewart album of Cole Porter songs, but ugly.”
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