Life After Favre: A Season of Change with the Green Bay Packers and their Fans by Phil Hanrahan

From the Publisher

The 2008 football season was one of transition for the Green Bay Packers and their legion of loyal fans. For the first time in seventeen years, the Packers were entering the season without three-time league MVP Brett Favre under center. After a whirlwind summer of rumor and controversy, Packers' management decided traded the thirty-eight-year-old gunslinger to the New York Jets, leaving "Packer Backers" worldwide to cope with life after Favre.

Wisconsin native Phil Hanrahan moved from Los Angeles to Green Bay for the 2008 season. He watched games at Lambeau Field and followed new starting quarterback Aaron Rodgers as he attempted to follow in the footsteps of Favre, a Green Bay immortal. Immersing himself in the worlds of team and town, Hanrahan is reborn a full-blown Cheesehead; living in a hotel that decades earlier had served as the Packers offices, observing training camp practices, interviewing players, attending the Packers' annual shareholders meeting, tailgating in arctic cold, shoveling snow at Lambeau for $8 an hour, celebrating Packer great Fuzzy Thurston's 75th birthday at Thurston's bar, and, at every turn, befriending the scores of die-hard Packers fans he encounters along the way.

Hanrahan also journeys far from Lambeau in his pursuit of adventures in Packer Land. He attends road games in Minneapolis and New Orleans and catches others on TV in small-town Wisconsin taverns. He watches one game in a bar and grill owned by rookie receiver Jordy Nelson's parents in rural Kansas, another at Mabel Murphy's, a year-round Packers bar located in Scottsdale, Arizona. He also visits Kiln, Mississippi, Favre's hometown.

With energy,insight, humor, and vividcolor, Life After Favre tells the story of a singular team and town. Hanrahan reveals the incredible scope and breadth of Packer Nation, and in doing so demonstrates how, when you bleed Packer green, even a 6-10 season can be something special.

Library Journal

Brett Favre's long-anticipated first retirement in the spring of 2008 was greeted by three lavishly illustrated tributes that were rendered premature when the dithering quarterback changed his mind a few months later. This book was begun with the question of how the Packers and their devoted fans would deal with the brave new post-Favre world after 16 years of remarkable stability behind center. Freelance writer Hanrahan moved to Green Bay to live the life of a Packer fan, enhanced with a backstage press pass for player interviews. Favre's dramatic peregrinations added significantly to the tension underpinning the author's study of the team and its fan base with their partially divided loyalties. While Hanrahan's profile of personable new Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers is particularly good, his strongest emphasis is on the delightful fans he meets not only in Wisconsin but also in far-flung Packer outposts in Kansas, Arizona, and Mississippi. VERDICT A literate, fresh take on the unraveling Favre yarn that will be of interest to all football fans.—John Maxymuk, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Camden, NJ

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