Should Brett Favre have come back out of retirement to play football for the Vikings?

No

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by Joseph Whalen

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There comes a time in every athlete's life when they must face the fact of their own age and make what is probably the most difficult decision of their careers, should they retire or continue to play. As with all physical endeavors the human body has its limits when it comes to playing football. Only a handful of truly gifted athletes are ever born to play a sport. Of those even a smaller number are ever discovered and properly cultivated into a superstar. Brett Favre is undeniably one of these few.

There are those great players who recognize when they've reached their peak and those who do not. There are those still who recognize they have reached their peak but find it impossible to put behind them something that has been a part of their life for longer than they can remember. Many reasons can be ascribed to the hesitation that great players like Brett Favre, Michael Jordon and others feel when they face the decision to retire or not. These are players that have reached the ultimate pinnacle of their careers, some reach it early and some are fortunate enough to bloom later in their careers. Regardless of the situation they all reach a high point in their careers when they can look back at the struggles they've gone through and appreciate the difficulty in reaching their position. Yet when these same players look to the future the ignore the fact that having reached the top their careers are now on the down swing.

Many of the great athletes can extend their careers for a good period of time after they've reached their peak. Playing at a level far above the average player, even still not at their highest level and still have a respectable showing. Others are less fortunate and their skills and abilities deteriorate as rapidly as they age. The ultimate decision that an athlete must really make is not whether to retire or not but whether to retire gracefully. An athlete that has reached his peak and shown they have nothing more to prove to anyone has the sense and grace to bow out while still on top of their game. There are still others who fail to see the signs of their failing abilities and drag their careers into the gutter, thus casting a shadow on their greatness for the rest of their lives by unnecessarily stretching out a great career so that all too many fans remember their last fleeting years as they struggled to keep pace with a younger generation of players, rather than remembering them for their greatness at their peak.

Brett Favre is not only one of the latter players, but he is now the epitome of that player. Having put the fans through the same unnecessary drama as the past two years of his retirement talk he has not only "come out" of retirement again but chosen to do so with one of the most hated division rivals of his true alma mater. Feigning retirement and failing to see when it is necessary is one of the most terrible things athletes can do, but to do so in the name of money if such a long and lucrative career is a smack in the face not only to the fans who have supported you for the majority of your career but for all fans of the sport. Brett Favre is well past his prime, his continued reluctance to accept this and desire to extend his career beyond where it should go is simply making a mockery of a once great player. Granted his un-retirement stunts will not jeopardize his place in the Football Hall of Fame, but it will jeopardize his place in the hearts of many fans, and that is the saddest chapter of all in an otherwise illustrious career.

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