Buzz Bissinger is Far From a Fan of Brett Favre

Buzz Bissinger has largely dropped off the sports blogosphere’s radar since his blow-up at Deadspin’s Will Leitch almost two years ago. Oh, sure, he gave former TSBer Spencer Hall a wonderful interview in the wake of that moment, and has popped up to promote his book with LeBron James and smack Tiger Woods, but he’s made waves more for what he’s been talking about than what he has written.

That might be because his recent output merely matches this piece for The New Republic on Brett Favre -- totally subtle title: “Cheesehead” -- for myopia, cynicism and spleen.

⇥The more Favre got whipped, the more you could hear the brains of the sportswriters sifting for the clichés of glory and tragedy that have passed for analysis since the days of Grantland Rice. The next day, John Feinstein wrote on the Washington Post website that Favre had “come to embody Hamlet” and described him as “heroic” and “tragic.” Larry Canale wrote on a New York Times blog that Favre “was as game as ever, and he would not quit.” James Penrice at Catholic Online wrote that it was time to “give Favre his due as a man whose spiritual strength overcomes the weakness of mind and body.”⇥⇥⇥⇥Oh My God ...⇥⇥⇥

⇥⇥Brett Favre wasn’t heroic. He was a hubristic fool. He wasn’t a warrior. He was an arrogant braggart who, whatever the homespun hokum of his Mississippi roots, perversely reveled in his pain to the point where his agent publicly disseminated pictures of his injuries like cheesecake photos--a deep-purple ankle lumpish and swollen, an equally deep-purple hamstring. The pictures did what Favre hoped they would: further reinforce his image as The Gladiator, The Samurai, The White Knight for whom guts in football, however stupid and wanton, is what counts.⇥⇥⇥

Bissinger has a couple of salient points at his disposal when writing about football and violence. Favre and other athletes, especially football players, do cultivate a culture of pain-as-war-wounds, and the appetite for the violence of football helps keep it popular and dangerous, both for the players who use their bodies as gristle for the mill and the youngsters who look up to them. But the piece Bissinger wrote seems more like a hit job on Favre than a fully-fleshed argument for his view.Bissinger calls Favre “clinically grandiose,” labels the removal of his uniform in the locker room after this year’s NFC Championship Game a “slow striptease,” and accuses him of masochism. Bissinger also throws out the tired “can’t win the title” charge against Favre -- “If the goal is to win it all, which it is, Favre should have done it more than just once in 19 seasons” -- without anywhere making mention of even one of Favre’s teammates, and charges him with spinning the decision to play a day after his father’s death in 2003 as “that’s what pappy would have wanted,” italics Bissinger’s.

Disagreeing with Bissinger’s argument on its merits is hard. Football has chewed up and spit out players for almost its entire existence. But disagreeing with Bissinger eviscerating Favre, his ad hominems saturated with spite, is easy. Bissinger wrote what amounts to a takedown of a man at the expense of making a more complete indictment of the system, which includes the fans who love violence and the writers who aggrandize the “warrior” players as much as it does Brett Favre.

Just as he did with his rantings at the coarseness of a few select bits of the blogosphere in 2008, Bissinger missed the forest for an easily-felled tree.

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