Barstool Sports

PFT - If Brett Favre had retired for good after the 2009 season, he would have left near the top…one of the most respected men in the NFL. Instead, Favre came back to the Vikings for one more season in 2010, and it was a mess… So why did Favre return? He did it for the same reason most people do their jobs: For the money. “First of all, the money was too good,” Favre told Deion Sanders on NFL Network. “The money was too good, and I hate to say it’s about money. But, you know, I felt the money was a lot.” Favre initially signed a two-year, $25 million contract with the Vikings that paid him $12 million in 2009 and $13 million in 2010, but as the Vikings tried to convince him to return for the second year of that deal, they gave him a pay raise to $16.5 million that year, plus $3.5 million in incentives tied to postseason performance. That postseason performance never came, of course, and Favre told Sanders that he hadn’t expected to make the playoffs in that final year.

To be perfectly clear: I have no problems whatsoever with someone admitting they do something for the money.  I’m not just a capitalist: I’m a prostitute.  I’ll write a 1,000 word blog post in a dark alley somewhere or give you 20 minutes of comedy in the back seat of your car is the money’s right.  And I respect that BrettFavre’s finally coming clean and admitting what I said throughout that whole final Retirement/Unretirement phase of his career.  That he was in it for the sheckels.  I knew it.  You knew it.  Packer fans knew it.  He knew it.  The only ones who couldn’t were BrettFavre’s legion of fanboys in the press who couldn’t take his junk out of their mouths and stop ever-so-gently cupping his balls long enough to admit what was obvious to the rest of us.

It’s amazing to me that here we are in 2012, with a sophisticated public that has thousands of alternatives to get their information literally at their fingertips, and the media still thinks they can create these fictions around certain favored athletes like it’s 1960.  Willie Mays is the “Say Hey Kid” who loves playing stickball with street urchins and not some miserable fuck who hates everybody.  Mickey Mantle is a cornfed, crew-cutted All American boy, and not an unrepentant drunk trying to bang every Baby Boomer female in America.  Michael Jordan left the NBA in his prime to fulfill his dad’s wish to be a baseball player and not to take the heat off his ties to organized gambling.  BrettFavre is a fun-lovin’ good ol’ boy who plays for the love of the game and his teammates who’d play the game for free, those ginormous contracts he always held out for notwithstanding. Again, I don’t care what his reason for playing that last year was.  I’ll just always be grateful for the chance to see him fall flat on his face and to see Ron Brace knock the Relaxed Fit Wranglers right off the Old Gunslinger.  But this admission he was only in it for the dough is going to break the hearts of everyone at ESPN.  @JerryThornton1