What about Bob? Glauber's NFL Blog

Now that Brett Favre has won the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year award, I figured I'd share one of my favorite Favre stories.

It was a few days before Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans in 1997, when Favre was about to win his only NFL championship, that I wanted to do a Brett Favre hometown story. He grew up about 75 miles east of New Orleans in Kiln, Mississippi, and two newspaper colleagues - Ira Miller of the San Francisco Chronicle and John Mullin of the Chicago Tribune - joined me in a trip to the bayou.

We drove around Kiln for a bit, found the "Broke Spoke" bar Favre used to hang out in, caught a Rotary event in the "heart" of Kiln (no traffic lights, if I recall) and got some decent local flavor. Still, something was missing.

I told Miller and Mullin that I felt we had to find Favre's house, and they agreed, so we kept driving. We happened to pass a driveway with a mailbox that had I.Favre on it. This had to be it. Favre's father's name was Irvin.

We drove down the driveway and eventually came upon a modest, but exquisite home right alongside the bayou. Yes, we all felt as if we were intruding, but being the ink-stained wretches we were - and still are - we had to at least ring the doorbell.

We do, and Favre's sister, Brandy, answered the door.

She took one look at us, rolled her eyes, and said, "C'mon in."

We walked past a room with about a million of Brett Favre's trophies and awards he'd gotten over the years, and then into the kitchen. There were Favre's parents, sitting at the table ... talking to two other reporters!

They told us to sit right down and join in the conversation. They even gave us a tour of the house and backyard.

Wonderful people.

One of the things I remember most about the interview was when Irvin Favre, who died of a heart attack in 2003, telling us that he and his wife, Bonita, would constantly worry about Brett falling into the bayou because he'd always be outside playing. If Brett didn't come home on time, they'd often go to the river just to make sure he wasn't in it. It became especially scary when they'd see dead animals drifting past their home.

That Sunday, Favre led the Packers to victory over the Patriots and was Super Bowl MVP.

Unfortunately for the Favre family, the home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.