Brett Favre: Hall of Shamer?

As a Green Bay Packer loyalist, I used to marvel at the way NFL superstar quarterback Brett Favre would connect with Sterling Sharpe, Mark Chmura, Robert Brooks, and Antonio Freeman et al on some seemingly improbable pass plays. He was the maestro, the conductor of a symphony of talent that made beautiful music together.
Now, though, the name Brett Favre only produces sour notes.
The so-called Jenn Sterger scandal involving Favre and a former New York Jets “game hostess” has turned the prolific career of one of professional football’s most endearing figures upside down. If the allegations turn out to be true—that is, the voice in those voice messages, and the, uh, pictures in those “sexts” indeed belong to Brett Favre—then he will be enshrined into the hall of shame long before he makes it to Canton, Ohio.
I only hope for Brett and Deanna Favre’s sake that the allegations aren’t true, and that the perpetrator was an imposter.
But if recent history has proven something, it is that professional athletes are capable of anything. Just a year ago, professional golfer Tiger Woods went from mega sports idol to chump all in one night.
The same thing could happen to Favre, too, in much the same way.
A lot of people have thrown in their two cents about Favre, Sterger and the entire sleazy mess. I guess I’ll put mine in, too.
I don’t know how far Favre took this. There aren’t enough facts about the case yet. What we do know is that Favre has admitted to leaving the voice mails on Sterger’s phone, but he denies sending the “sexts.” Of course, if the telephone number used to send the voice mails and the “sexts” turns out to be the same, then Brett will have a lot more explaining to do. I figure the chickens will come home to roost eventually.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t have an opinion about the whole mess.
Brett appears to be guilty of flirting with the “game hostess” by his own admission that he left the voice mails for her. Considering that Brett is a married man to a wife battling cancer, a father, grandfather and a role model—whether he wants to be or not—to millions of youth, this doesn’t speak well for him, his character or his credibility.
There is a lot of noise out there in cyberspace complaining about how the scandal is really nobody else’s business except for the parties involved. If these were obscure, private individuals, then I’d agree.
However, Brett Favre is a public figure; he has been for 20 years. He implicitly accepted this responsibility when he signed his first professional football contract back in 1991. Privacy is traded for wealth, fortune, glitz, glamour, fame and notoriety.
I want to laugh when a celebrity insists on privacy—to which they are entitled, but should have little expectation of—when they spend so much of their time in the public eye, influencing what people see, hear and ultimately think. While privacy should be respected for everybody, public figures should expect much less if only because the very nature of their work puts them under the scrutiny of the public eye to begin with, and they can often have a great deal of influence on public opinion and behavior.
Former NBA basketball star Charles Barkley once remarked that he is not a role model, and that children shouldn’t be looking to him as a role model. Instead, children should be looking to their parents and others in their communities to be role models for them.
I don’t disagree with Barkley on this; but his expectation is also unrealistic. Professional athletes, movie stars and entertainers all have a responsibility to act and behave in a manner that is appropriate for the people who admire them. This is because they are public figures, which are positions of great power and influence over others. People become captivated with celebrities, and as such, they can easily become a captive audience for a public figure to influence with his or her speech, actions and behavior.
We can tell our children until we are blue in the face who real role models are—and we should—but ultimately it is up to the child to decide who to admire and emulate. As such, every adult has an implicit responsibility to model positive behavior for impressionable youth who will one day become adults, leaders and role models in their own communities. If we don’t insist on responsible behavior from ourselves, then how can we expect future generations to do the same? All of a sudden, society faces a slippery slope.
As Uncle Ben once told Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Athletes like Barkley, Favre and others should heed this advice, because it applies directly to them.
Do I really care whether Favre flirted with a former Playboy model a third of his age? No, not really. I don’t want to know the salacious details of the voice mails or the texts. But what I do care about is that Favre’s behavior is a model for the youths that follow him—in some cases religiously—every Sunday afternoon. I certainly don’t want my own little boys admiring a professional athlete who disrespects his wife by playing around with other women.
Having said all of this about Brett Favre, I also have to wonder the extent to which Jenn Sterger was involved with Favre. Was she really the innocent victim of unwanted solicitations, or did she perhaps flirt with him at first and the whole situation got out of hand?
Does anyone else wonder why it took Jenn Sterger two years to release the “sexts” that allegedly came from Favre? If the voice mails, texts and images were that disturbing to her, then why didn’t she report them right away and file a harassment complaint against the perpetrator?
In addition, there are two former New York Jet team massage therapists who both claim Favre made advances toward them, or looked at them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable.
But why are we hearing about all of this now? Does it not hurt the credibility of the accusers if they wait two years before saying something? It isn’t as though anyone was holding a gun to their heads and threatening to kill them if they talked.
Therefore, I must ask: Why now? Why not then, when it actually happened?
Sterger herself isn’t exactly a paragon of credibility, either. After all, her claims to fame (until Favre) were nude or nearly nude photo spreads in Playboy and Maxim magazines. She was discovered in the stands during a Florida State University football game by a television camera man, who probably wasn’t thinking at the time that she would qualify as a New York Jets sideline reporter.
In short order, several magazines subsequently solicited her for modeling opportunities that accentuated her, uh, assets. Among them were Maxim and Playboy, well known as either smut or borderline smut material.
Somehow she got hired by the New York Jets as a “game hostess,” whatever that is.
Frankly, I’m not really sure how someone gets hired as a “game hostess” for a professional football team. My best guess is that it had less to do with any credentials or qualifications—either academic or intrinsic—she may have had, and more to do with her magazine spreads.
What’s more, Sterger is now supposedly a sports reporter who hosts her own cable sports show. She also identifies herself as an entertainer, actress and model (no surprise) by profession.
Is there anyone naïve enough to think that Sterger got to where she’s at because of what she has between her ears? The truth is, Sterger can attribute her success to what’s below the neck and above the knees.
Sorry, but that’s just the cold, hard truth of it all.
I don’t mean to knock Sterger here. This wasn’t meant to be a roast of the woman who claims to be the victim in this “sexting” scandal co-starring Brett Favre.
But to ignore the obvious might just be to dismiss some mighty big clues.
Sterger claims the salacious voice mails and texts were unsolicited and unwanted. Strange, though, that she has been silent about these disturbing phone calls and “sexts” for two years until just last month.
According to media reports, Sterger had given her phone number out at the request of an unnamed New York Jets football player. Why? The player who requested her telephone number remained unidentified to Sterger, and yet she released it anyway to someone she did not know or even recognize.
All right, maybe as a “game hostess” it was her job to talk to the players on her phone. I don’t know. Somehow, though, I doubt it.
Based on the limited information out there about Sterger’s actual duties, she was a “hostess” in the fundamental sense: She greeted customers (fans) at the place of business (in the stands of the stadium). This means her contact with players would have been minimal, at best, because her contact with the general public was maximal.
So, assuming that Sterger’s job with the Jets primarily involved fan contact, then why was she so willing to give out her telephone number to an unidentified player? For all she knew, the person wasn’t a player at all, but some deranged fan who was stalking her.
How stupid is that?
Perhaps most strange about Sterger’s involvement is her apparent complete naivete in the whole matter.
This is a woman who flaunts her sexuality the way Arnold Schwarzenegger used to flaunt his muscles as a former bodybuilder and Mister Universe.
It isn’t as though sex and the sale of it are new to Sterger. After all, she has uninhibitedly taken most or all of her clothes off for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine and Maxim, having known full well what both her body and the magazines publishing images of it were selling. A woman doesn’t agree to pose for smut publishers and not know the purpose of those products.
Yet, somehow, she was shocked and surprised to receive flirtatious voice mails and dirty text messages?
Okay, I’ll cut her some slack here. Unwanted sexual advances are exactly that: Unwanted. If she didn’t want them, and she got them anyway, then that is harassment. Period. I don’t care how “hot” Sterger is or that she is a sex symbol and a bimbo. If she didn’t want it, then the perpetrator shouldn’t have forced it on her.
On the other hand, do we really know that the “Favre” flirts were unwanted? She insists that they were; but then again, we have to consider Sterger’s credibility here, too.
She knows that she’s got it where it counts. She has used her body to her advantage. She has willingly sold sex with it. Then, she gives out her telephone number to an anonymous football player, and we are supposed to believe that this was all done innocently?
Either Sterger is not being entirely truthful in the matter, or she has got to be the epitome of bimbo naivete.
Her brain may be the least exercised part of her body, because she didn’t have the sense enough to report the harassment when it happened. She didn’t have the sense to avoid selling sex with pictures of her naked body and still insist on being taken seriously as a sports entertainment intellectual. And, she certainly exercised poor judgment by giving out her telephone number to an unnamed and unidentified player, who, for all she knew, wasn’t a player at all but a stalker.
What is with the news media these days hiring former models to “pose” as reporters? Whether it’s TV Azteca reporter Ines Sainz or Jenn Sterger, there seems to be a bimbo eruption going on in the media industry these days. I guess the sports news media has reached the same conclusion that advertising did years ago: Sex sells.
Jenn Sterger evidently knows this, too. Her notoriety with Playboy and Maxim speaks volumes about her understanding of the direction sports entertainment has been heading. Otherwise, she wouldn’t dress the way she does at games or in the studio where she hosts her cable sports show.
Because sex sells, then maybe—just maybe—that’s why this so-called “scandal” surfaced in the first place.
Could it be a set up? Hmmm.
If, by chance, it is then Brett Favre is perhaps more naïve than Sterger. It sucks to go from champ to chump. Just ask Tiger.