On the 10th anniversary of the day that launched his legend, Brett Favre sat at the front of the Lambeau Field media auditorium, tipping back in his chair and looking up at a drop-down movie screen. The image projected—an eight-foot-high visage of him in his much younger days—brought a wide smile to the iconic quarterback’s face. “Oh, man,” Favre said, laughing at the sight, “Look at me: shirttail’s out, dual chinstrap…holy mackerel.”
Favre sat there for more than an hour, fast-forwarding, rewinding, slow-moing, and one-lining his way through the game that started it all. The space/time continuum momentarily disrupted. For one afternoon, it was September 20, 1992, again.
Favre watched almost in awe—eyes wide and wisecracks at the ready. “Look at ‘Pookie,’” Favre said, pointing at running back Vince “Pookie” Workman. “You look at some of these names, my goodness: Buford McGee at fullback, James Campen, Sanjay ‘Muscle’ Beach down here at the X receiver, Rich Moran, Ronnie Hallstrom, Harry Sydney, Big Tootie Robbins at right tackle. Man, look at that.”
Then, the Packers’ sixth offensive play that day appeared on the screen. It is the fateful moment, the play before the Favre Era would begin. Quarterback Don Majkowski is facedown, writhing in pain, having just been sacked by Cincinnati Bengals defensive lineman Tim Krumrie. As Majkowski is helped off the field with a sprained left ankle, in comes Favre. “When the ‘Majik Man’ went down, everyone was like, ‘What are we going to do now?’” recalled ex-Packers running back Edgar Bennett, who was a rookie at the time. “But as soon as Brett took the field, the confidence was there. I don’t think a player in that huddle doubted him. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
Or, more accurately, historic. Favre would lead the Packers to victory that day and then start the first game of his NFL career the next week vs. the unbeaten Pittsburgh Steelers. Against the Steelers he completed 14-of-19 passes for 210 yards and two touchdowns—of 76 yards to Sterling Sharpe and eight yards to rookie Robert Brooks—in a 17–3 Green Bay victory.
Over the next 15-plus years, Favre didn’t miss a single start thereafter, ending his Packers career having made 253 consecutive starts before finishing his NFL career with one season with the New York Jets (2008) and two with the Minnesota Vikings (2009, 2010).
Along the way, Favre won three NFL MVPs, lifted the Lombardi Trophy after winning Super Bowl XXXI, and led the Packers to a 160–93 record in his regular-season starts and a 12–10 record in the playoffs. He conquered an addiction to the painkiller Vicodin, starred in TV ads, and transformed himself from a fun-loving party animal to family-loving father and husband. “It’s hard to believe I’ve achieved as much as I have for a kid who just wanted to dress in an NFL uniform,” Favre said after pausing the tape momentarily. “If I was to outline my career—what it would be like or what I would want it to be like—I couldn’t even come close to what I’ve achieved.”
And it all began with the game on the screen, film that Favre swore he hadn’t seen since the day after the game was played. The Packers were 0–2 under rookie coach Mike Holmgren entering that game, having suffered a 31–3 embarrassment at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the week before. Favre had mop-up duty in that game, completing 8-of-14 passes for 73 yards.
“We’d just gotten kicked in Tampa and we thought there was never going to be a light at the end of the tunnel,” said former Packers general manager Ron Wolf, who in February of 1992 had traded a first-round draft pick to the Atlanta Falcons for Favre. “So Majkowski got hurt, and in came the kid. I can still hear [legendary Packers announcer] Ray Scott, God rest his soul, at the alumni dinner that night. He was talking about how many people he met that claimed they were at the Ice Bowl [the 1967 NFL Championship Game]. He said he’d met at least 200,000 people that were at that game. And he wondered how many people would come up in the years afterward and say they were at this game, too. He expected it to be the same amount.”
Favre’s first three quarters against the Bengals were anything but memorable. He completed 13-of-28 attempts for 130 yards, was sacked five times, and fumbled four times. On one play he pulled out from center and got knocked off his feet by McGee. On another, following a timeout, he tried to call another one and was told by referee Dick Hantak he couldn’t do it. “That’s pretty bad, getting knocked down by your own guy,” Favre said after watching a third replay of the play. “See what I mean? Ohhhh, man. Half the stuff I’m doing, you don’t even see rookie quarterbacks do. It’s fun to watch now, but I’m sure the next day, I was cringing.”
Asked what he remembers feeling that day, Favre smiled. “More than anything, I remember how nervous I was,” he said. “It doesn’t look like it, but I’d studied as much as I possibly could in preparing myself because I’d played a little bit the week before against Tampa. So I was as ready as I was going to be. I wasn’t nervous that I didn’t know what to do; I was nervous because I knew that this was what I’d always wanted to do, and that this was my opportunity. I knew most of the learning was going to be on-the-job training.”
That on-the-job training began in earnest with eight minutes, five seconds to play in the game after a Jim Breech field goal had given the Bengals a 20–10 lead. Favre moved the Packers 88 yards in eight plays, hitting Sterling Sharpe for a five-yard touchdown with 4:11 to go to make it 20–17.
The Packers then forced a punt, which Terrell Buckley fumbled to set up another Breech field goal for a 23–17 Cincinnati lead with 1:07 left. On the ensuing kickoff, Brooks fielded the ball along the left sideline but stumbled out of bounds at the 8-yard line, leaving Favre with 92 yards to cover in 67 seconds—and no timeouts. “I thought to myself, Shoot, here I am, I finally get to be a head coach in this league and I’m not sure I’m ever going to win a game,” said Holmgren, who coached the Packers from 1992 through 1998. “Brett was all over the place. He called plays, he did things I didn’t even know were in the gameplan. But he made two of the most beautiful throws I’ve ever seen at the end of that game to win it.”
The drive began with a four-yard swing pass to Sydney in the right flat. Then came the first of the two beautiful throws Holmgren alluded to—a 42-yard bomb down the right sideline that a wide open Sharpe caught at the Bengals’ 46. “You’d hate to miss one like that, especially as excited as I was, because he was so open,” Favre said, watching the play. “I’m sure—before that completion—no one gave us a chance. I don’t know if I even gave myself a chance.”
With Sharpe having re-injured his bruised ribs on the catch, Favre hit Workman for 11 yards before downing the ball to stop the clock. Then with :19 showing on the scoreboard clock, he dropped back to pass. “This is the first time in the game where I actually had an inkling of what was going on and what I was going to do,” Favre said, pausing the film. “I’d just hit Sterling on this same play against Cover-2 and I said, ‘I don’t foresee them changing.’ The only thing I was thinking was: the safety knows I’ve thrown it over there, so this time I’m going to pump [fake] him in the middle just to try to buy a little time.”
Kitrick Taylor had replaced Sharpe and he ran the same go route that Sharpe had run two plays earlier. Favre pump faked to tight end Jackie Harris across the middle and found Taylor down the right sideline, launching a laser into Taylor’s arms for the 35-yard touchdown with 13 seconds left. The game was tied at 23. “Old Kitrick,” Favre said, smiling.
He finished the day 22-of-39 for 289 yards and two touchdowns with no interceptions for the first of his 28 career fourth-quarter comebacks. On those final two drives, Favre was 9-for-11 for 159 yards and two touchdowns. Of his two incompletions, one was dropped, and the other was the intentional spike to stop the clock. He ended up going 8–5 as the Packers’ starter that year, earning the first of his six Pro Bowl selections. “It feels every bit 10 years ago—maybe more,” Favre said that day, wistfully. “It has been a long time obviously, but more than that, because of all the things that have happened in between because from this game until now, it’s been nothing but good things. Yeah, there’s been bumps in the road, but it’s always gotten better and better and better. Even today, looking at this, it’s funny because you almost forget where you had to come from to get to where you are now. Boy, it’s a long ways.”
After the game film tape is removed, a copy of the NFL Films footage from that day is played. The final sequence shows Favre holding for kicker Chris Jacke’s ensuing extra point, which would provide the winning margin. Before Jacke’s foot enters the frame, Favre, who had never held for a placement before, takes both hands off the ball, so it is standing up on its own for a split-second in the Lambeau turf. The ball somehow goes through the uprights anyway, and Favre leaps in celebration.
The final shot is of Robbins, heaving a huge sigh of relief and smiling as he walks off the field. “Look at big Tootie,” Favre said, laughing again. “He’s thinking, Man, that was fun, but we have a lot of work to do. We have to polish this kid up.”