Jacques Derrida Explains Brett Favre

by Jeff Johnson and David Roth

The conversation continues. WARNING: Only as valid, logical and relevant as two confused men yammering at a tavern. Do not use this as a tool from which to make wagers.

Jeff: Are we supposed to know Pete Carroll is coaching in Seattle this year? And by we, I mean anyone in North America.

David: I only vaguely remember that Seattle is in the NFL anymore. I now have two of their crummy RBs on one of my fantasy teams. But that’s about it.

Jeff: To me it seems like was maybe just hanging out in the Pacific Northwest with his Irish Setter, Kaitlyn, riding a Huffy Sea Pines around, checking shit out. Wearing male espedrilles.

David: “There are so many great trails up here!! Also, did you Matt Hasselbeck is still playing?”

Jeff: And now he coaches the team! As part of the witness relocation program. Only he’s created a new title for what he does. “I don’t want to be called coach. I’m just here to foster a winning environment.”

David: “I want you to think of me more as like a cool dad. Like a friend’s dad who gives you rides places and doesn’t judge.”

Jeff: The Seahawks go to Chicago. This week. They will lose. And the Bears will be 5–1, with a lot of easy games ahead of them.

David: I didn’t see it, because I apparently need to get the NFL Season Ticket, but it sure looks like Todd Collins had one of the worst games ever by a quarterback on Sunday. He was I think 6–13 passing, and four of those incompletions were intercepted.

Jeff: Was his first NFL game in 1987?

David: I know he’s 51 and was Elvis Grbac’s backup at Michigan and all, but shouldn’t he be running a car dealership?

Jeff: He used to slam Genessee Cream Ales with Frank Reich somewhere.

David: At the Jeff Rutledge Inn, out in Northern Virginia.

Jeff: But not with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

David: They used to discuss which type of clipboards were most ergonomically advanced.

Jeff: He seems like an easy guy to anger. Any QB named Todd or David, they have short fuses. Speaking of which, you were talking about 49ers head coach Mike Singletary the other day. Is he going to get fired?

David: I don’t think anyone’s willing to do it. I mean, yes, he should be fired. But I think they’re just going to wait until he moves on. It’d be like approaching an enraged bear and being like “I don’t like your approach here. You need to stop shitting on my campsite. I’m sorry. Please leave.”

Jeff: Only if the bear could talk: “Let me EXPLAIN why I won’t stop shitting on your lawn! There’s more that’s going into this other than needing to defecate!!”

David: “The problem is Vernon Davis!”

Jeff: Slow burn in a mock turtleneck. Softball coach from a Lifetime movie.

David: With that giant 1:1 scale wooden crucifix bouncing on his chest. Designed to the actual specs of the original. Alex Smith in that game was like Brett Favre without the mythos and milestones. Totally terrible, then oddly Cornholio-freakout excellent. Then returns to earth just in time for the backbreaking pick. But they have a ton of good players, and their defense is really, really talented. They should be better. That guy on the Lions who did the Carlton dance after scoring a touchdown on Sunday was a 49ers second round pick they traded for lint and old pads because they were too stacked.

David: They might get better, but 0–5 is tough. Although in that division… with that lucky raffle winner playing QB for the Cardinals.

Jeff: Kurt Warner having to run ads on local television letting people know he won’t be coming out of retirement. Each week.

David: Every week a name gets pulled out of a jar at a Glendale Nissan dealership and that dude gets to play QB. And then have Jonathan Vilma erase six months of his memory on some ill-advised scramble. That division is: Pete “Kashi” Carroll’s Seahawks, the Cardinals, the 49ers and the Rams. Magnifique.

Jeff: What is most is exciting for me to read about last week was that Randy Moss got in an argument with Tom Brady about his hair.

David: They’re both denying it, but I will never believe that didn’t happen. I am sure that happened. And happened just like they said it did. Starting with Brady telling Moss to cut his beard. “If you’re not going to shave it, will you at least shape it? Take this beard conditioner. I’m serious.”

Jeff: “I was on the cover of Details!! I should know!” It all seems very Johnny Damon of Brady now. Always having to take his helmet off to show his new ‘do.

David: Flipping his hair around like he’s in a Salon Selectives commercial.

Jeff: It’s something to grow your hair out when you’re undefeated, but when you might be 8–8 it’s kind of suspect. Plus, he’s 30-something, which in real life is like a 61 year-old growing out his hair.

David: Yeah, but he’s still pretty great. And while I spent like 2500 words trashing Belichick last week I’m sure he’s got some sort of plan. But yeah, I think Brady’s brand is getting a little too present. The next news to leak will be a $1 million Lloyds of London insurance policy on his chin.

Speaking of brands obscuring other things, and in acknowledgment that we can’t just keep doing thousands of words on Favre every week… But how big a dork was he the other night? Leaving aside the totally predictable pick and everything. He seemed to me to be playing to the cameras so badly.

Jeff: He had… problems? One awesome quarter. Three horrid ones. And Peterson always seems to get lost in the drama.

David: It was an incredibly awesome quarter. But all the elbow-grabbing and histrionics and all that. Peterson is so good, too. I know you can’t really use him when you’re trying to make up two scores in six minutes.

Jeff: Screen pass to the guy. They did it one time!

David: Peterson had some amazing plays, then just stopped being used. Other than that, it’s just a series of super-high BB’s in the direction of Shiancoe.

Jeff: They had some drops and Favre had some bad passes. We were talking the other day about how he makes 16 million or 20 million bucks a year. Known throughout the world… It’s realistic to think he called the girl, but texting cock shots? Is he that stupid?

David: Kind of baffling. But that’s always baffling to me.

Jeff: “There’s a rumor going around that I don’t have genitals. If that is what is preventing you from hooking up with me…

David: Rest assured!

Jeff: He seems so calculated, as you said earlier, in his approach to everything else, why would he make such a gaffe? Unless there are gaps in the story we’ve yet to fill in (or it is untrue in some way)…

David: Those Internet rumors can be killers, though. Brett Favre has no penis. Aaron Rodgers is a warlock.

Jeff: Aaron Rodgers’ older brother played Kelley in The Bad News Bears: Breaking Training. And he killed a mailman.

David: The only thing I can think of is a sense of total impunity… Like it just wouldn’t occur to him that this could somehow ever get him in trouble. “It” = his ween, photographed.

Jeff: I could see where he felt a sense of total impunity, but sending a penis pic is going to be the thing that seals the deal?

David: That part… I’ve got nothing on that. But it shouldn’t be that hard for Brett Favre to sell the idea of sleeping with Brett Favre. You don’t need to include illustrated instructions. You’re not building a TV cabinet from Ikea. You’re fucking a Wrangler model.

Jeff: I gotta go to my theory of gaps. Like Jacques Derrida suggested.

David: Oh, go there.

Jeff: Maybe they had something… a relationship? And he missed her? Or she missed him? And he sent this stuff? And the entire story is more than what has been leaked?

David: It would be funnier if it were just on its own, but I think that’s true. If it was just his standard icebreaker, that’d be great.

Jeff: …because the compressed version of this story…

David: Don’t make no sense!

Jeff: Makes him look desperado, and that doesn’t jibe with the rest of his persona, though actually he does just “put a lot of stuff” out there to see what sticks, too. I have no idea. It’s very sad.

David: Trying to map this over his on-field persona is almost too easy. Gambling, too enthusiastic, finally kind of ridiculous. But that can’t be it.

Jeff: I have no idea. I just wanted to sound smart with the Derrida thing. I’ve used it to describe my own writing: “What’s interesting about this story is what’s missing!! Like plot, any action by any characters, or any character that’s more than one dimensional.”

David: But on the acting-smart tip, the Favre thing really does highlight the limits of what we actually know about what we’re seeing. How packaged it is….

Jeff: Maybe this comparison has been made before but to me he’s a lot like Michael Jordan. Persona-wise.

David: …And how strange that (um) package is. So you get the same narrative over and over, even when it doesn’t make sense. Can X come back from Y, even if X is irredeemable and Y is totally self-inflicted? We’re definitely into this semantic zone where everything he does is Classic Brett Favre. Which is to say: the long wait for Roethlisberger is finally over!

Jeff: It’s only classic because we have ghost Favre playing 18 years past when he said he would. Favre is calculating. And Roethlisberger is too idiotic.

David: No argument on either of those.

Jeff: Favre operates with the media as his “handlers” in a way (maybe not in this most recent case)

David: Like McCain back in ’00. Taking him off the record when he strays…

Jeff: and Roethlisberger has morons for handlers.

David: Yeah, Roethlisberger’s “team” of dudes is amazing.

Jeff: Your meal ticket has his penis out and is chasing an underage chick into the bathroom. You don’t applaud that. Especially when something as simple as a deli tray of ham could have proven a worthwhile and legal diversion.

David: I sense Roethlisberger could have been redirected by cold cuts, yes.

Jeff: “You don’t even have to put your pants back on!”

David: “Hey, check this out, champ! It’s a ‘Family Guy’ episode! Maybe put your dick away now?”

Jeff: “No, you’re not going to ride your motorcycle!” …REX RYAN NACHO-CHEESE INFUSED VODKA. I don’t know why I typed that, but I sense it is coming.

David: I can only hope. The margarita that’s also nachos. Available only at New Meadowlands Stadium. Random sentence from Todd Collins’s Wikipedia page: “He completed one of two passes in the Rose Bowl as a redshirt freshman on January 1, 1992, after netting 15 completions on 24 attempts for 135 yards during the regular season.”

Jeff: He may have showed his junk to someone, too.

David: Via fax.

Jeff: In the 1970s, Fran Tarkenton went to a Fotomat in Bloomington and had a guy print pictures of his penis after hours and then he sent them registered mail to a woman he met at a Baskin-Robbins in Landover, Maryland. Plausible?

David: This was back when Deadspin was just a column in the Sacramento Bee. “We hear: Reds OF George Foster was out late last week… at a restaurant!” Checked by two independent sources.

Jeff: “We can’t just go running this shit about non-filtered Camels and Jack Tatum.”

David: “This is the Bee, goddammit! Not some repository of cock shots and bro-culture anthropology on something DARPA hasn’t even invented yet.” I can only hope SI has someone on a feature-length history of the athlete cock shot. Because I can’t believe that existed even a few years ago. It is everywhere now.

Jeff: I am sure Gisele has asked Tom Brady for one. “(1) Grow your hair. (2) Take a picture of your dong. (3) Learn Portuguese. Or it is over.” In that husky voice of hers.

David: I’m sure Brady has an iPhoto folder comprised solely of cock shots. Different angles and lighting. Some with the “We’ve Got Lasers” effects jumping off in the back.

Jeff: “I am going to be in Milan for a week, and I will put it under my pillow. Where is our child by the way?”

David: That whole conversation is taking place at Graydon Carter’s restaurant. Whatever that place is called. Cafe Elite or whatever.

Jeff: Tom is arm wrestling with Mario Batali.

David: Batali’s little vienna sausage fingers give him a huge advantage.

Jeff: I am sure Belichick sent one to that housewife he got a house for in Sheepshead Bay or wherever.

David: “Thinking of you, Bill.”

Jeff: Belichick’s would be on one of those grainy 8×11’s in a packet otherwise filled with aerial game photography. “Just thought you’d wanna see what we’ve been up to on offense also.”

David: “Review these. We will discuss all of them soonest. XO, Coach.”

Jeff: “How’s that for tenderness?”

Jeff Johnson has long complained and cheered about sports, while making little sense. Follow him here. David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website.

Photo by jvstin, from Flickr.