Brett Favre was a guy who would take chances as the quarterback with the Green Bay Packers. He played with reckless abandon. Favre would have no problem throwing the ball 70 yards downfield every play or slant passes at 100 miles per hour. When he was a youngster playing baseball, especially as a pitcher, he was the same. It was go hard all the time. Sometimes, it was go home for the opponent.

Brett Favre’s football career

Brett Favre played high school football at Hancock North Central High School in Mississippi. He played for his father, Irv, who was the head coach. While he threw very little in high school, he was able to earn a scholarship at Southern Mississippi and then became a second-round pick of the Atlanta Falcons.

The Falcons drafted Favre with the 33rd overall pick in the 1991 NFL draft. He threw just four passes in Atlanta, completing none of them. He was traded to the Green Bay Packers before the 1992 season and was inserted into the game when Don Majkowski went down with an injury in a September game against the Cincinnati Bengals. Favre rallied the team to victory he started the next 297 games – an NFL record – of his career.

Favre won a Super Bowl with the Packers and was a three-time MVP. He made the Pro Bowl 11 times and led the league in touchdown passes in four seasons. Favre finished his career with 508 touchdown passes and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2016.

Favre was always a huge competitor

Brett Favre’s competitive nature began early. He was always in competition with older brother Scott and younger brother Jeff. “We didn’t grow up in a subdivision or a populated area, where you have neighbors right next to you,” said Jeff to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2005. “We couldn’t call buddies and meet up in a park or field and in 15 minutes you’ve got some game. That was not available to us, so we played with each other.”

When Favre got to high school, his competitiveness followed him. “I told him when he came through that he was the best quarterback we ever had at that time as far as being a competitor and a good leader,” said then-assistant coach Rody Gaudin in the Journal Sentinel. “But he was not necessarily the best quarterback we’d had in terms of his accuracy. Even though we didn’t throw much, he was pretty erratic.”

Some have said, he wasn’t even the best quarterback named Favre on the team. “It wasn’t that early that I could sit here and say, ‘He’s going to be a professional football player,'” said Favre’s older brother Scott. Scott Favre was also a tremendous high school athlete.

Brett Favre’s best sport in high school may have been baseball

Picture Brett Favre scrambling around and buying time and then rifling a bullet while on the run. In high school, there apparently were some baseball versions of that. Favre was intense, threw very hard, and wasn’t always on the money.

As the starting third baseman at Hancock North Central High School, Favre once cleanly fielded a tough ground ball. He threw wildly to first base, chucking the ball five feet over the first baseman’s head. Scott Favre was pitching. “I looked at Brett and said, ‘What the hell was that?'” said Scott Favre. “He said, ‘Hell, I caught the ball.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but you think maybe you could get the throw to first base?’ He said, ‘I’m working on that.'”

There was a time in Little League when Brett forced a would-be hitter back to the bench without throwing a pitch to him. Favre hit a batter in the helmet with a fastball. The next batter headed to the plate before dropping his bat and sobbing on his way back to the dugout. “There were kids who wouldn’t bat against him,” said Favre’s mother Bonita. “They’d start crying because he threw so hard and, I mean, he may hit you.”