(The Toy Department doesn't endorse Wrangler jeans, but if Wrangler wants to throw some money The Toy Department's way for the advertising, cool.)
According to our buddies down the road at USA Today -- have you noticed that The Toy Department really gets along with everyone? -- comes this transcription of a radio interview with Brett Favre in which he reflects on our "media frenzy world."
You know, he's right. He's completely right.
It's not so bad that us media go looking for stories. That's what we get paid to do, and new news is what you pay to read.
What baffles me is when other people in the media accuse athletes of being attention hounds, or read into the swirl surrounding a player something significant about his soul.
It's sort of like eating a ton of potato chips and then blaming the chips for making you fat. And having low character.
(To be fair, a lot of the people chastising Favre for craving eyes and ears wrote for blogs. The irony of this is too much to fathom, as everyone knows that the only point of blogs is to get people to look at you. Often with no consideration for offering anything illuminating or, uhh, true.)
(Except The Toy Department. It's above reproach.)
No matter what Favre did, somebody would have wanted to cover it. As he noted, reporters were literally sitting around his home waiting for him to act.
(Side note: stakeouts are one of the greatest joys of reporting. Once, while waiting for the Indiana athletic director to emerge from his office, we ordered Jimmy John's to the lobby. We'd be sitting there seven hours. Eventually he went out the side. We chased. We caught. We asked. He said no comment. Called it a day. Life of kings.)
It's silly. What was Favre supposed to do? Stay quiet and go to great lengths to avoid reporters? He'd get ripped for that. He couldn't win.
Neither could LeBron James. He was bludgeoned -- mercilessly -- for having "The Decision" televised by ESPN. Meanwhile every national NBA writer in the country -- not to mention the beat writers in Cleveland, Chicago, New York and Miami -- had no doubt been calling LeBron and his entourage non-stop for months. Several of them he probably knew well -- he's been a newsmaker since age 14. Was he supposed to leak it to one of them? Or just call a press conference in Miami after the deal had been finalized? The news would have come out earlier -- it sort of did -- and speculation would have been rampant. Instead, James took control of the situation and ended up raising money for a charity. A lot of the goofiness that accompanied the show has to be blamed on ESPN.
Which brings us to this post by Mark Heisler, which puts the blame for the Favre fiasco rightly on ESPN.
It's not like Favre could have done something to not be news. Had he declared retirement and stuck with it, some intrepid columnist somewhere would have asked to be there with Favre Thursday night, watching the old warrior come to grips with the NFL moving on without him. Gary Smith and Wright Thompson would be trying to arrange to go on hunting trips with Favre so that they could plunge to the never-seen-before depths of Favre's soul. (And I would read every last word.)
You know what's most absurd about this whole thing? The overarching idea that making decisions is easy. That somehow if we were in Favre's or James' place we would have known exactly what to do and then handled it with class and dignity and not ticked off a single person along the way. Flowers and butterflies and smiles and free beers.
In my past life, I covered a lot of basketball recruiting. The way fans and some reporters approached the subject was infuriating. Kids were supposed to have "lists" and then teams were supposed to move up and down the list, and eventually if the kid wore blue on a rainy Tuesday it meant he went from "leaning" toward No. 4 on his list to being a soft verbal for No. 2.
As if anyone makes that sort of decision based on anything other than something inside that they wouldn't really be able to explain anyway.
(It should be noted that Matt Bracken, who has superb hair and runs the Sun's recruiting blog, handles these things with nothing but the aforementioned class and dignity.)
(Yes, he's also my boss.)
Favre was balancing a lot of things. Money wasn't even really a part of it. Guy clearly loves playing football. The end to last season left him feeling unfulfilled. His teammates must mean something to him. But he's old. Football is a dangerous game. And he's got a family that he can't be around if he's putting in practice time.
These were real-life things he was weighing, and that made it a good story. A human story. That his decisions were being made during a dead-time for NFL news -- and within this media frenzy society, where half of all "content" produced seems to be a critique of other content or judgment about what it says about the world -- created a scenario that made Favre look worse than he should have.
Brett Favre didn't need to invite attention.
Nor could he have avoided it.