Brett Favre has earned the right to write his own ending

Brett Favre has earned the right to write his own ending
He's getting a lot of advice after less-than-stellar finish to his season with the Jets, but the gritty, grim quarterback deserves NFL's respect and admiration.

The multi-award winning "All Pro Sports Football Series" ... featuring Brett Favre, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Reggie White and seven other outstanding NFL players and Coach Don Shula ... is available at http://www.allprosportsfootball.com and 1 888 79 FOOTBALL ...

the most innovative football ... see http://www.allprosportsfootball.com ... , basketball and automobile racing series ever produced for home entertainment featuring: eleven of the greatest NFL football players and the most successful coach in NFL history; five of the greatest NBA basketball players and one of the most successful coaches in NBA history; and six internationally recognized automobile racing champions ... . sharing their life stories and demonstrating their skills in a very entertaining setting of upbeat music, three dimensional digital graphics and NFL Films action footage

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-erskine15-2009jan15,0,2017690.column
From the Los Angeles Times
CHRIS ERSKINE / FAN OF THE HOUSE
Brett Favre has earned the right to write his own ending
He's getting a lot of advice after less-than-stellar finish to his season with the Jets, but the gritty, grim quarterback deserves NFL's respect and admiration.
Chris Erskine

January 15, 2009

I have been, for many years now, a connoisseur of great endings. Ice Bowls, Kirk Gibson home runs, and Dorothy discovering it was all only a dream. I'm a sucker for such stuff. But what are the alternatives? Cynicism, then death? I've been in California too long for that to happen. I prefer unbridled optimism and the sunshine with which to find it.

Which brings us to the happy-or-sad saga of Brett Lorenzo Favre, a quarterback of some distinction who last year left the Great White North for the friendly confines of New York City, where the munchkins are now hovering all around him, offering their sage, munchkinly advice. Just insane, isn't it?

You've got that snot-bubble Thomas Jones calling him out after the Jets' collapse down the stretch. Apparently Jones, a middling running back who had his first Pro Bowl year with Favre at the helm, is too stoned on his own wonderfulness to remember the Jets' going 4-12 last season.

Before Favre arrived, the Jets were the French Foreign Legion of football, an outpost, a place of misfits and crushed souls. Under Favre, they started out an amazing 8-3, till someone banged up his right wing, after which Favre couldn't throw a gum wrapper out a car window without Brandon Flowers picking it off.

Admittedly, it was a not-so-great ending to what looked like a fairy-tale year. But I guess that's New York for you. Only Amy Adams and Meg Ryan find happy endings in the concrete apple. For the rest of us, there is only disappointment and midwinter slush.

Thing is, Brett Favre is a national treasure, ask almost anybody. Forget the recent interceptions for a moment and think about whom you'd rather watch. Brett Favre or Jake Delhomme? Brett Favre or Joe Flacco? Kyle Orton? The estimable Kellen Clemens (Favre's backup)?

No, I'm guessing most fans would prefer to turn on the tube to find No. 4 performing on a wintry day, when the dark sky makes it look as if the world is about to collapse -- conditions are muddy, war-like, and there is the very real possibility that you might witness the greatest ending ever. For all his wear and tear, you still get that feeling with Favre, that you might see something just extraordinary.

Because the NFL, at its very best, isn't computer graphics and referees studying replays, in those weird hooded cubicles (like priests). The real NFL is the gritty, grim and whiskered visage of Favre squinting at the strong safety, playing poker in the snow. That's magic. That's football. That's the kind of moment that has made No. 4 the most popular player of the modern era.

With all its technology, the NFL should be trying to figure out how to copy and paste Favre across the league, not ways to drive him out.

As I often do to get through a day, I have been making lists -- shave, get dressed, breathe deep, that sort of thing. In this case, I'm making lists for Favre. Does he stay or go? Pro and cons. Pluses and minuses. It's almost impossible not to have a little fun.

Reasons for Favre to retire

* Keeps falling asleep in huddles.

* During coin flip, refs offer him an AARP discount.

* CBS planning new show: "CSI: Brett Favre."

Reasons for Favre not to retire

* A little gut looks good on a quarterback.

* There are still 29 teams he hasn't played for.

* Even in wheelchair, can always beat Chicago.

Meanwhile, down deep in the swamps, where the best quarterbacks seem to emerge from the ooze, they're getting ready to appoint Favre's air apparent. Tim Tebow -- rhymes with TiVo -- is Florida's rhapsody in blue and orange. By the time he's done next season, Tebow may be the first collegiate player to win both the Heisman and the Nobel Prize. A little too good to be true, Tebow is, but if I have to choose between him and Pacman . . . well, you know.

Yet, for all his considerable gifts, I get the nagging feeling that the young Gator might be the next Bobby Douglass, a big southpaw who's neither a true thrower nor runner, the kind of hybrid who always puzzles the pro game's offensive geniuses. Hope I'm wrong, which has happened (check preceding paragraph). Honestly, I hope Tebow reinvents the game.

Till that happens, I'm praying to get another 100,000 miles out of Favre, a quarterback with more arm and a herculean heart. (Talk about dream matchups, how about Favre against Tebow? In the snow, of course.)

See, Favre loves football the way I love raindrops on roses and meatballs on toothpicks. This retirement of his is a complicated saga, deeply personal and compounded by the fact that even when he goes, he sometimes ends up staying. There is something marvelous and vaguely Shakespearean in his grinding passions for our national game.

Hamlet in chin-strap . . . refusing to ever take a knee.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

Erskine's Fan of the House column will appear Thursdays in Sports. His Man of the House column appears Saturdays in the Home section.

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Chuck Daly dies at 78; basketball coach led Pistons, Olympic team

Chuck Daly dies at 78; basketball coach led Pistons, Olympic team
The Hall of Fame coach whipped Detroit's Bad Boys into shape to win back-to-back NBA titles. In 1992, he led the Dream Team to Olympic gold.

the most innovative football ... see http://www.allprosportsfootball.com ... , basketball and automobile racing series ever produced for home entertainment featuring: eleven of the greatest NFL football players and the most successful coach in NFL history; five of the greatest NBA basketball players and one of the most successful coaches in NBA history; and six internationally recognized automobile racing champions ... . sharing their life stories and demonstrating their skills in a very entertaining setting of upbeat music, three dimensional digital graphics and NFL Films action footage

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-chuck-daly10-2009may10,0,3911604.story
From the Los Angeles Times

Chuck Daly dies at 78; basketball coach led Pistons, Olympic team
The Hall of Fame coach whipped Detroit's Bad Boys into shape to win back-to-back NBA titles. In 1992, he led the Dream Team to Olympic gold.

By Mark Heisler

May 10, 2009

Chuck Daly, the Hall of Fame basketball coach who led the Detroit Pistons to back-to-back NBA titles and the U.S. Dream Team to an Olympic gold medal, died Saturday in Jupiter, Fla. He was 78.

Retired since 1999, Daly was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two months ago. In his honor, NBA coaches have worn "CD" pins during the postseason.

"Chuck did much more than coach basketball games," NBA Commissioner David Stern said in a statement. "He positively impacted everyone he met, both personally and professionally, and his love of people and the game of basketball helped develop the next generation of coaches."

Born in 1930 in St. Marys, Pa., Daly was a Depression baby, literally and figuratively, who used to tell a young Doug Collins, "I don't trust happiness."

Collins, who would consider Daly a mentor throughout his career as an NBA player and coach, jokingly called him "the prince of pessimism."

Daly's rise was as improbable as that of his Pistons, a widely hated team that reveled in its nickname, the Bad Boys, as it unseated Larry Bird's Celtics and Magic Johnson's Lakers.

Daly attended Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and served two years in the Army, then joined Jack Ramsay as the only two coaches to win an NBA title after starting at the high school level. He began humbly, if colorfully, at Punxsutawney High School, in a town best known for its groundhog, where he spent eight years teaching English and speech as well as coaching the golf and basketball teams.

In 1963, dazzled by his first trip to an NCAA Final Four game, where he bought a ticket from a scalper and sat in the last row, Daly wrote a blind letter to Duke University Coach Vic Bubas, whose Blue Devils had lost in the semifinals, applying for an assistant's job.

Hitting the lottery, Daly got the job, joining a three-man staff with Hubie Brown, who would also go on to become a Hall of Fame coach in the pros, winning an American Basketball Assn. title with the Kentucky Colonels.

Daly spent two years as head coach at Boston College and six at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to the NBA as a 48-year-old assistant under Billy Cunningham, who had just been hired as coach of the Philadelphia 76ers.

In 1981, Daly took the head coaching job in Cleveland under madcap owner Ted Stepien, who fired him after 41 games.

In 1983, Daly went to the Pistons, who had been through five coaches in six seasons with a high-scoring circus led by Isiah Thomas, Kelly Tripucka and Vinnie Johnson.

Introducing a new notion -- defense -- Daly turned them around, although it wasn't always smooth. It took an intervention by Thomas, the owner's favorite, to keep Daly from being fired in his fourth season.

Making up in competitiveness what they lacked in athleticism, the Pistons played defense by whatever means necessary.

Today's NBA controversy about flagrant fouls and suspensions stems from moves by Stern that began in the early '90s to protect stars, particularly Chicago's Michael Jordan, from being physically assaulted by the Bad Boys, who targeted him in a scheme Daly called the Jordan Rules.

Aside from Daly's toughness, perseverance and charm -- he had big hair, a big personality and favored expensive three-piece suits -- he was a shrewd realist.

Brendan Suhr, who arrived in Detroit as a young assistant from college where coaches rule, recalled seeing Thomas mess up over and over and asking Daly why he didn't take him out.

"He's our guy," Suhr says Daly told him, "and tomorrow, he'll still be our guy."

The Pistons, who had never won a title, broke through in 1989, sweeping the Lakers. A year later, Detroit beat the Portland Trail Blazers to become only the third team to repeat since the Bill Russell Celtics of the 1960s.

With the Bad Boys aging or gone, Daly left Detroit in 1992, subsequently coaching two-year stints with the New Jersey Nets and Orlando Magic.

His greatest honor, however, may have come with the U.S. Olympic team in 1992, the first one made up of NBA players.

The process was thorny, with Jordan reportedly dead-set against inviting Thomas, Daly's star, who was left off the team. Confident that Daly could soothe any personality conflicts that might arise, U.S. Olympic officials named him coach.

Retired since 1999, Daly lived with his wife, Terry, in Jupiter, Fla., golfing daily. The Pistons in 1997 retired a No. 2 jersey in honor of Daly's two titles.

Rick Mahorn, one of the baddest of the Bad Boys, said of Daly: "Without you, there wouldn't be us."

In addition to his wife, Daly is survived by a daughter, Cydney, and two grandchildren.

mark.heisler@latimes.com


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Brett Favre could be considering another comeback

Brett Favre could be considering another comeback
The multi-award winning "All Pro Sports Football Series" ... featuring Brett Favre, Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Reggie White and seven other outstanding NFL players and Coach Don Shula ... is available at http://www.allprosportsfootball.com and 1 888 79 FOOTBALL ...

the most innovative football ... see http://www.allprosportsfootball.com ... , basketball and automobile racing series ever produced for home entertainment featuring: eleven of the greatest NFL football players and the most successful coach in NFL history; five of the greatest NBA basketball players and one of the most successful coaches in NBA history; and six internationally recognized automobile racing champions ... . sharing their life stories and demonstrating their skills in a very entertaining setting of upbeat music, three dimensional digital graphics and NFL Films action footage


http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-newswire6-2009may06,0,3680314.story
From the Los Angeles Times
NEWSWIRE
Brett Favre could be considering another comeback
ESPN reports the quarterback will meet with Minnesota Vikings Coach Brad Childress later this week.
Staff And Wire Reports

May 6, 2009

Could Brett Favre wind up in purple after all? The quarterback could be mulling another unretirement, this time with the Minnesota Vikings, a nightmare scenario for fans of the Green Bay Packers.

ESPN, citing an unnamed source familiar with the situation, reported Tuesday that Favre and Vikings Coach Brad Childress are planning to meet later this week at an undisclosed location to discuss another comeback. The New York Jets cleared the way for that by granting Favre his release after drafting USC's Mark Sanchez.

Minnesota offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell is Green Bay's former quarterbacks coach, and the Vikings' playbook is very similar to that of the Packers.

Minnesota's quarterbacks are Sage Rosenfels, Tarvaris Jackson and former USC starter John David Booty.