Brett Favre is coming home. The Green Bay Packers will retire the former quarterback's jersey on Thanksgiving, the same day the team hosts the Chicago Bears.
Favre spent 16 seasons in Green Bay where he amassed a 160-93 record, and led the Packers to a Super Bowl title following the 1996 season. And now the team will rightly honor the future Hall of Famer, who, it turns out, was also a Hall of Fame prankster.
Current Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who arrived in Green Bay in 2005 and served as Favre's backup through 2007, recounted one such incident where he was the unwitting butt of the joke.
Details via ESPN.com's Jason Wilde:
Before one midweek practice, Favre placed a helmet on a table inside the Packers' locker room with a couple of markers, as players often do with memorabilia they need signed for charity events or their own collections. Except this helmet wasn't a replica -- it was the backup QB's helmet for practices and games.
"Everybody signed it, and I had to go down to practice with [it]," Rodgers remembered Tuesday. "Everybody had signed it, including myself, on my own helmet."
Then it occurred to Rodgers that the helmet was a piece of Packers history.
"I realized, 'That's got Favre's and some other guys' autographs -- don't wipe it off,'" Rodgers told the team equipment manager, though most of the names had already been removed.
The bottom line: "You just had to watch yourself sometimes around him because [he was] always trying to incite some pranks," Rodgers said. "So you had to be careful."
It was no secret that Favre and Rodgers weren't particularly close during their time together, but the awkwardness softened when both men appeared on stage together at the 2013 NFL Honors ceremony to present Peyton Manning with the NFL MVP award.
"At the time, I think it was about having some fun. We both are friends with Maura [Mandt], who is a producer of the show [and] came up with the idea," Rodgers said. "We actually met the night before and talked about it, kind of ran a couple lines, and then we got out there and it was an ad-lib. It turned into a fun deal. The fans enjoyed it.
"I think the people in the audience didn't maybe at first know that it wasn't as awkward as it might have seemed in the beginning. We were having some fun with it, but it's good to do things like that and be comfortable with what you've accomplished and move forward. I think the healing process is great, [and it's great] to really honor him for what he accomplished here and move forward together."
