favre-vikingsBrett Favre, the one time great American Green Bay Packers hero, is at it again. Into retirement. Out of retirement. Back into it, and out again.  Reports have now been confirmed that Favre has reversed his reversal about joining the Minnesota Vikings, and instead will undergo another surgery to reconstruct both of his weathered shoulders with a new medical composite made of walrus muscles…after which he plans to compete on the mens’ professional tennis circuit instead of in the NFL.  Alright alright, you got me, I’m kidding!  But it’s hard not to poke a little fun at Favre’s inability to stick with a decision, right?  His waffling on retirement has become a kind of yearly ritual, just another boy who cried wolf story.  Why should we ever believe Favre is retiring at this point, after he’s faked on us so many times?  We shouldn’t.  He’ll still be in the NFL when he’s 65, I’m pretty sure.

But even though we may think him foolish at this point, he still deserves a small killin’ it nod too.  Favre’s yearly rise and fall offers us the same high-impact narrative each time.  The hero, bruised and battered, resigns, but then rises again, restless, denies his defeat, and returns to battle once more, addicted to the thought of squeezing just a little bit more victory out of life.  People, myself included, can’t ever get enough of that story.  And we also can’t help but be at least mildly inspired by Favre’s relentlessness.  It’s almost like good ole Brett knows we need his broken-fix it tale each year; perhaps he retires and re-emerges just to show us that quitting is always reversible.  You can quit and then decide not to quit.  And in fact, you can do it again and again.

Killing it, believe it or not, is not simply knowing when to quit, but also realizing that you have to quit quitting.  Favre may have overextended the number of times we fans can take his quitting seriously, but America never gets tired of his rebounder’s killin’ it spirit.