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Irv was everywhere.
Irv was at the Packers' bus when it arrived at games, his No. 4 jersey stretching
wide across the waist. Irv was at the hotels, in the hallways, outside pregame
dinners. He was on the radio, too, old Irv braying on in that Mississippi twang
saying all the things that everybody else wished they could say.
When Green Bay got Brett Favre, it got his father, too.
And when Irv's heart gave out 10 days ago as he drove his pickup across his
Bayou hometown, radio station WTMJ in Milwaukee stopped all programming and
broke the news in a special report. Bill Michaels, the host of the Packers'
postgame show, announced Irv's death, and, as he did, he could feel his voice
tremble.
"He was a character," Michaels said on his cellphone the other day
as he drove to work.
Irv was also a coach and a good one, too. A short, stout bull of a man with
an astronaut's buzz cut who was so tough and so respected back in Kiln, Miss.,
that he made his most gifted son, the one with the golden arm, a wishbone quarterback
at Hancock High.
Maybe it's hard to imagine Brett Favre, who has won so many games with passes
like lasers, plowing forward into the line 15 times a night. But that was Irv.
He had a team of runners, so running was what they would do, no matter what
potential his son might possess.
"The thing Brett got from his father was his competitiveness," said
Seahawks offensive coordinator Gil Haskell, once a Packers assistant coach.
"You know that toughness he has? That came from Irv."
Irv loved to talk. Once on a trip, not long after Green Bay had traded for Brett
back in 1992, the team's president, Bob Harlan, stepped into the hotel elevator
barely noticing the man in the corner wearing a Packers shirt. As they started
to descend, the man leaned forward and said, "I'm your quarterback's father."
Thus began one of the most unusual relationships a player's parent ever had
with a sports team.
It only made sense that Irv would find his way onto the radio. He had so many
stories and such a blunt, rustic way of expressing himself. The national media
found him in January 1997 when the Packers played in the Super Bowl in New Orleans,
just an hour away from Kiln. A bus trip was arranged and dozens of reporters
descended on the town awed by the charm of the little village with folksy taverns
that carried names such as "The Broke Spoke."
They went looking for Irv that day and they found him in the family home on
a street that carried his own name "Irv Farve road" and when they
asked Irv why the sign was misspelled, he just shrugged and laughed. It was
part of the charm of the father of the league's best quarterback. There was
no pretension about Irv. Even as his son became a big star and famous people
such as auto racing's Pettys or country music's Faith Hill or Tim McGraw started
to fill the family's suite at Lambeau Field, Irv wasn't awed. Sometimes he'd
leave, standing instead in the hallway outside the suite, watching the game
with the waiters on a 12-inch TV.
"Oh, the damn Pettys and Faith Hill are in there," he'd say. "You
know me, I just want a damn beer and watch the game."
In Green Bay, Irv became a star. Michaels put him on the postgame show about
three years ago and he was a hit. The show is held in Curly's Pub, a new restaurant
that was built into the atrium of Lambeau Field and it's one of the biggest
things going in Green Bay after games.
Irv would sit next to Michaels and his co-host, sipping Miller Lite from a coffee
cup and breaking down the game, rarely holding anything back.
While Michaels might say something like "Boy, the Packers came out flat
today," Irv would say "The Packers sure sat on their asses all day
and finally needed someone to kick them to get going."
Needless to say, the fans couldn't get enough of Irv.
"Whenever he spoke, one of us had to hold his finger over the delete button
because you never knew what he was going to say," Michaels said. "I
think we pretty much held our breaths."
When it came to his son, Irv never held back, offering frank assessments that
even the Green Bay coaches would never breathe in public. After one recent game,
in which Favre was intercepted three times, Irv said the first came on a throw
that just wasn't perfectly made, the second was because the safety made a great
play and on the third, "well, Brett just never should have thrown that
one."
This season, a jewelry store in Wisconsin began a promotion in which the postgame
show hosts would choose an MVP for each game. Each host had a selection, and
the fans gathered in Curly's Pub would have a voice, too. At the end of the
year, the player with the most votes would get a $5,000 ring that looked almost
like the kind of ring you would give the winner of the Super Bowl.
Only Irv would never pick Brett. He figured it showed favoritism, so he always
chose someone else, even when he knew his son was the best player on the field
that day. But secretly Irv had a hope, Michaels said, he hoped that Brett would
be the one to win the ring even without his votes and that he would be the one
to present it to him after the last game of the year right there in Curly's
Pub.
"It was huge with a hearts on fire diamond, it was custom-made for Brett,"
Michaels said.
Irv never got to give the ring to his son. Michaels instead handed it to Harlan
in a brief and muted ceremony.
"That was tough, on Sunday, knowing this was what Irv had hoped all season
to do himself," Michaels said.
Emotions are frayed around Green Bay these days. A lot of people who have nothing
to do with the Packers or have ever met Brett Favre have been crying. In part
they have cried because of the way Favre walked out onto the field in Oakland
the night after his father died and threw four touchdown passes in the first
half.
They wept, too, last Sunday when it looked like the Packers would miss the playoffs
and then suddenly, magically, the Vikings lost on a last-second pass in Arizona
and Lambeau erupted in a huge roar. After the game, Favre talked about angels
and divine intervention.
"There's something going on here, but it's beyond my comprehension,"
he said that day.
Suddenly everybody's casting an eye to the clouds and wondering if Irv is playing
tricks with the rest of the NFC.
"I think Irv would be delighted to know people think he was controlling
the game," Michaels said.
Last week, WTMJ set up a memorial for Irv on its Web site. Fans were encouraged
to e-mail condolences or talk about their favorite memories of Irv. The station
would then print the messages and put them in a binder that would be forwarded
to the family. After two days, there were 5,000 messages and the e-mails poured
in so fast that there were too many pages for a binder or even 20 binders.
"It wasn't just for Brett," Michaels said. "Because Brett Favre
is Brett Favre. He could run for governor of Wisconsin on any platform and he
would win hands down. But people just loved Irv. He had that Southern drawl,
he was honest and open, he pulled no punches. They loved the guy."
By Sunday it all seemed to catch up to Brett Favre: the funeral, the long flights
from Oakland to Mississippi to Green Bay, the playoffs. He leaped in the air
and waved his fists to the fans as he ran out of the stadium, but once in the
locker room he was suddenly very quiet.
Mike Sherman, the Packers' coach, gathered the players in the middle of the
locker room, right on top of the giant green-and-gold "G" in the center
of the carpet. They started to jump up and down celebrating the win and Sherman
urged them into a tighter and tighter group until every one of them was actually
on the G.
All of them but one.
Brett Favre did not jump on the G. Instead he sat on a stool in front of his
locker, facing away from teammates. His head was drooped forward and he did
not look back.
Harlan walked up to the quarterback and said quietly, "I think Irv helped
us today."
Favre smiled. There was nothing more to say.
Three weeks before, Irv had made his last rounds of the place. He only did the
radio show in person when the team was at home, which is why he was in Mississippi
rather than Oakland on the day he died. Chuckie Nwokorie, the Packers' gigantic
defensive end, had just finished an interview and laughed about how he was headed
out for a huge steak dinner. Irv laughed.
Michaels asked if he was going to stay for one last segment that night. Irv
shook his head.
"Nah, I'm going to go out and hang with the big guy here," he joked,
pointing to Nwokorie.
"I'm going out in style."
It was the last thing Green Bay ever heard him say.
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