Brett Favre turned 48 years old on Tuesday, and thankfully he didn’t mark the occasion with an un-retiring comeback announcement.
Yeah, the legendary ol’ gunslinger seems at last content just to mow his lawn, appear in compression-sleeve and razor commercials and dabble in coaching, broadcasting and business ventures.
But to celebrate No. 4’s 48th birthday, the guys over at the sportsbook betonline.ag put together a morphing GIF that shows Favre aging through his 20-season NFL career – from 1991, as a fresh-faced rookie with the Atlanta Falcons, to his All-Pro prime with the Green Bay Packers, and his grizzled final years with the New York Jets and (shudder) the Minnesota Vikings.
Favre was indisputably great and a whole helluva lot of fun to watch, but he certainly battled some demons during his early Green Bay days – in 1996 Favre was temporarily banned by the NFL from drinking alcohol, and he spent time in a drug rehab clinic after admitting he was addicted to Vicodin – so it’s interesting to examine (admittedly, over-analyze) his appearance and face shape from those years.
The iron-man holder of almost every Packers passing record was traded to the Jets in 2008 after an initial retirement and falling-out with Green Bay, and he joined the Vikings the next season. Last October, during a game against the Cowboys, the Packers honored Favre's induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame with a halftime ceremony, recognizing him on the field and unveiling his name on the Lambeau Field stadium façade.
Last month, we brought you BetOnline’s morphing GIF of Aaron Rodgers, and now the good people over there have given us the aesthetic evolution of his Hall-of-Fame predecessor.
Just like with Rodgers and Tom Brady, though, the handsome-quarterback aging curve is enviably unquestionable. And it’s nice to see that Favre, like Rodgers, went through a fun little moustache phase, before settling into his stubbly, salt-and-pepper veteran look.
According to Ryan Taylor, who handles public relations for Sports Betting, the animated GIF is produced by manually lining up similar points between two images (corner of the eyes, corners of the mouth, hairline, etc.), repeating that process over and over and over, and then layering the images on top of one another. Special software then generates the transition effect between each image.
Anyway, I still think Favre's mountain-man retirement look is his best:
Who do you want to see a morphing GIF of next, Milwaukee? Ryan Braun? Sam Cassell? Let us know in the comments!
Born in Milwaukee but a product of Shorewood High School (go ‘Hounds!) and Northwestern University (go ‘Cats!), Jimmy never knew the schoolboy bliss of cheering for a winning football, basketball or baseball team. So he ditched being a fan in order to cover sports professionally - occasionally objectively, always passionately. He's lived in Chicago, New York and Dallas, but now resides again in his beloved Brew City and is an ardent attacker of the notorious Milwaukee Inferiority Complex.
After interning at print publications like Birds and Blooms (official motto: "America's #1 backyard birding and gardening magazine!"), Sports Illustrated (unofficial motto: "Subscribe and save up to 90% off the cover price!") and The Dallas Morning News (a newspaper!), Jimmy worked for web outlets like CBSSports.com, where he was a Packers beat reporter, and FOX Sports Wisconsin, where he managed digital content. He's a proponent and frequent user of em dashes, parenthetical asides, descriptive appositives and, really, anything that makes his sentences longer and more needlessly complex.
Jimmy appreciates references to late '90s Brewers and Bucks players and is the curator of the unofficial John Jaha Hall of Fame. He also enjoys running, biking and soccer, but isn't too annoying about them. He writes about sports - both mainstream and unconventional - and non-sports, including history, music, food, art and even golf (just kidding!), and welcomes reader suggestions for off-the-beaten-path story ideas.
