I have magical powers! First Tiger Woods was rocked by a hilarious/tragic sex scandal after I wrote a semi−glowing column about him last fall. Now the same fate has befallen Every Announcer's Favorite Ancient, Overrated, Retiring and Unretiring and Ununretiring, Wrangler Jean Wearin', Just Plain Ole Fun Havin', AMERICAN quarterback.
That's right ladies and gentlefriends, we've got ourselves a Brett Favre sex scandal. Or more accurately, a Brett Favre sexting scandal. And despite the fact that both parties will readily admit there was no actual sex occurring, it might be even worse than the Tiger Woods saga.
For those of you who don't spend hours a week on Deadspin, what basically happened is this: Brett Favre — during the season he was playing for the New York Jets in 2008−09 — left a number of voicemails for Jenn Sterger, a former ‘Gameday Host' for the team, suggesting that she contact him to schedule a rendezvous. Sterger declined this opportunity of a lifetime, telling Favre through another team employee that she wasn't interested. Both Favre and Sterger admit that this much occurred.
According to Sterger, however, Favre was undeterred, and the Ole Gunslinger proceeded to send her a series of photos of, well, his Lil' Gunslinger. To date, Favre has denied that these lewd messages were sent by him. Sterger has thus far refused to speak to the NFL in their ongoing investigation, and it seems unlikely that any punishment will be doled out to Favre without her cooperation in the matter. So how was this relatively tame — for our day and age — sex scandal worse than Tiger's?
First of all, the voicemails themselves are almost hilariously adolescent. He might as well have written a note asking: Do you like me? Yes, no or maybe. His pathetic attempts to organize a rendezvous in a hotel room suggest the demeanor of a man who genuinely has not hit on a girl in 15 years — Favre has been married since 1996.
Sadly enough, there is a right way and a wrong way for a married athlete to go about discreetly seducing a much younger team employee, and Favre did it the wrong way. And for a fly−by−the−seat−of−his−pants quarterback like Favre, this makes perfect, stupid sense.
Now look back in retrospect at Tiger's ridiculous string of extramarital affairs. He conducted them like the sociopath we never knew he always was. The most instantly recognizable, famous athlete in the world was having sex with literally dozens of women who weren't his wife, and no one knew a thing, including his own wife. Except really, we should have had some inkling of Tiger's sociopathic tendencies all along.
Everything we knew and loved about Tiger revolved around his hyper−competitiveness. Sure, his family was an important part of his image, but they were there more to assure us of his normalcy rather than to present him as warm and cuddly. The only Tiger Woods commercial I can recall off the top of my head is one of him hitting golf balls in the rain on what was supposed to be his day off.
Tiger Woods was a sociopath, but one who we respected, in the same vein as Michael Jordan, because it drove his almost inhuman competitive streak. Until one day, the wheels came off. It seems the wheels have come off for Favre as well, albeit in a somewhat different way. But given the kind of athlete we have always seen him as, this stupid sequence of events should have been completely predictable.
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Ethan Frigon is a senior majoring in economics. He can be reached at Ethan.Frigon@tufts.edu.
