Nothing But Iron: The Second Coming of Favre by Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. July 12, 2008 Rumor has it–and I qualify this statement by telling you that the rumor is hearsay–that Brett Favre wants to play more football. Bad idea, you say. Bad idea, everyone else and everyone else’s mom and dad and brothers and sisters and cousins say. What could Brett be thinking? Well, maybe he is thinking about how he loved playing football, and how he had a really good season the last time he played it and how his body feels better after a few month’s respite from the constant pounding inflicted by ogres and personified missiles, and how he has a Bowflex machine that will make him twenty-nine again. Let’s make an analogy and then you tell me what you would do and whether or not people who didn’t know you should judge your choice. Let’s say someone very close to you died. Afterward you cried when you talked about it. And let’s say that a few months into the grieving process you find out you can miraculously get that person back for a year, maybe two, without any guarantees that your relationship will be the same or that they won’t suddenly die again, or that you won’t somehow be worse off in the end. Would you do it? If you said no then feel free to criticize Favre for wanting to come back, you big fat liar. If you said yes, then logic would dictate that you respect Favre’s ever-evolving desires without judgement. If you want to say that Favre’s return as Packers quarterback is a bad idea, I can accept that, as long as you admit you don’t know that for sure either. Remember, a lot of people thought he should have quit last year. Those were the same people who waved their green and gold flags drunkly and proudly the week before the Packers almost beat the eventual Super Bowl champs. I agree that no player is immortal and the organization must move forward at some point. On the other hand, what is the likelihood that Aaron Rodgers is not just the first in a long series of successors who cannot fill some of the biggest shoes ever to walk Lambeau Field? In other words, should I really worry about hurting Rodgers’s feelings by resurrecting Favre even in Green Bay? Speaking of Rodgers, I have this to say about his so-called controversial get-on-board-or-shut-up statement to the media: It didn’t bother me. If he said the Vikings were the best team in the NFC North or that he was just biding his time in Green Bay until Tom Brady retires or that he hated my Filipino brothers because of they are lazy and unsophisticated, that might bother me, but it could be that he’s got a good point. By the way, my Filipino brothers are not that lazy. Maybe it wasn’t smart or diplomatic to call out (potential) fans like that, but I like a quarterback with a little fire. If Rodgers throws a bunch of touchdown passes, the controversy will die fast. If he throws a bunch of interceptions, it will die too, because everyone will instead talk about how the organization screwed up by not accepting Favre's latest return attempt. You up for a little baseball coverage? The Brewers are winning more than losing. In baseball, that is excellence. (Coincidentally, we use the same definition in anesthesiology.) The Crew got a cool new pitcher who is 9 feet tall and has two identical letters for a first name. Cool. I am not sure what CC stands for, but it is a registered trademark and I had to pay a $35 licensing fee just to have it in this sentence. More on the Brewers when they reach the World Series several months from now. I mention the Series because I don’t want to be accused of bandwagon jumping in October or November or whenever it is. Let the record show: I am practically riveted. More importantly, our newspaper reports that sausages outsold hotdogs at Miller Park. I don’t have an opinion on that, but you might want to know that sources close to NBI report that beer outsold Vitamin Water and the annual Miller Park rivalry between toilet paper and napkins is just too close to call. I apologize for predicting Tiger Woods would finish second in the U.S. Open. I should have known better, but my prediction was based on faulty information that his ACL was fine. Had Woods actually been healthy he would not have bothered to win because winning with intact ligaments would have been mundane. Hardly the stuff of super heroes. Win the U.S. Open with a torn ACL? That kicks butt. Next predictions: 1) Tiger will not win the British Open. 2) The surgeon who fixed Tiger’s ACL will get an autographed driver. 3) Tiger might win the British Open. Permit me an excursion from the realm of sports into the realm of front-page news that I don’t really care about, but find interesting only because someone considers it front-page news. A WSJ article illustrated the plight of dead-pet owners, whose dead pets resided in a cemetery that would soon be sold, perhaps for commercial development or maybe to plant biofuel corn for our latest environmental boondoggle (property’s future use is my speculation). The dilemma is that it is costly to move dead pets, some of which have expensive headstones and caskets, and nobody knows what to do about the bodies of pets whose dead owners reside in their own human cemetery plots. I apologize profusely for my lack of empathy, but does anyone else out there think we are a population of priority-starved lunatics for having subterranean dead-pet preservatories in the first place? In my youth we buried all of our dogs, frogs, turtles and bunnies au naturel in the back yard with headstones fashioned from tree branches. Most noteworthy was, Bishop, our American Eskimo milk truck (finally caught one) chaser killed in early winter. He was not able to be buried deeply because of frozen ground. Family legend has it that my sister remedied his protruding leg bones the following spring with the riding lawn mower. Though this could be a fabrication, I swear it is not my fabrication. Not even I of substantial imagination could have made that up. Either way, the story helps you understand how I came to my current philosophy on dead pet disposal. I know I will probably get hate mail for saying this, but it if it were up to me, I would give the dead-pet owners a couple unsubsidized weeks to exhume the remains of their beloved dogs, cats and parakeets, then I’d fire up the bulldozers. I apologize now for my obvious bias toward readers who have a healthy sense of humor. Speaking of the environment, I figured out a way to fix high gas prices. This is actually my second idea about that. My first idea was to use less gas. That was based on a zany notion of supply and demand. I had this idea that decreased demand, even if modest would cause a glut of gasoline that would ultimately cause prices to fall. I tested this theory by riding my bike to work twice last week. On the Friday before the Fourth gas went from $3.99 to $4.07. So I guess that flopped. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea about me, I park my infinity-MPG bike next to one of our three SUV’s. Two are smaller training SUV’s with mid-twenties gas mileage and the other, a Honda Pilot that we bought in 2003 to transport tribes of basketball players, is slated for replacement, but we figure its trade-in value will net us just enough for a fill-up of our new Smart Car or Harley so we have yet to move it. I have yet to tell Kelly she’s getting a Smart Car or Harley. Anyway, my new anti-high-gas-price plan is to get a globe, find the spot exactly opposite Saudi Arabia, buy some land there, then drill a well all the way through the center of the earth into the bottom of the Middle East’s oil reserves. If successful we would have the option of exporting oil to our former suppliers at grossly inflated prices or we could just keep it here and squander it ourselves at a much discounted rate. Tell me that wouldn’t be just a whole lot of fun. And now, a musical, or at least lyrical conclusion: Please release me, let me go. For I can’t play here anymore. To waste my arm would be a sin. Release me, and let me play again. Apologies to Engelbert Humperdinck for this bastardization of his classic pop hit. __________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports and other stuff publication written for the entertainment of those who are not too serious to be entertained. The author, once a 29-year-old and a dog owner, but never an elite professional football player, receives no corporate support from Bowflex or any other company making expensive would-be exercise contraptions that could be kept in a closet, attic or unused corner of the guest room. The author denies rumors that he will soon receive a nice note from Brett Favre, along with an autographed purple No. 4 jersey. (Yuck.) ©2008 DrTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.