Not seeing
Brett Favre under center for the Packers next season is going to be a tough adjustment for many Packer fans. A 16-year career is remarkable for any NFL player, let alone a quarterback.
Favre took over the starting job in 1992, a few days shy of my daughter’s fourth birthday. She’s now a freshman in college. My son was in second grade at the time. He’s now a senior in college. Like them, there is a generation of Packer fans who have never known anyone else to be the team’s quarterback other than Favre.
By comparison, in the period between the time I was in grade school and finished college, the guys who were leading my favorite NFL team included the likes of
Jim Del Gazio, Scott Hunter, David Whitehurst, Jerry Tagge, John Hadl, Lynn Dickey and
Randy Wright. These kids don't know how rough us older folks used to have it.

For what it’s worth, my favorite Favre card in my collection has a price guide value of about $2. What makes it so special? In 1996,
Pinnacle Trading Cards was the sponsor of an event called the NFL Quarterback Challenge. It was a made-for-TV skills competition that was held at Walt Disney World in Orlando. In the days leading up to the event, Pinnacle held a photo shoot, where they would get exclusive access to the top QBs in the game, which in 1996 included Favre,
Troy Aikman, Boomer Esiason, Warren Moon, Drew Bledsoe and others. Pinnacle would get the players to pose for a variety of pictures that were then used on its cards the following season.
Pinnacle invited our company to have a representative on hand during the photo shoot and publicize the cards prior to their production, and I was lucky enough to land the assignment. Pinnacle’s PR staff asked me for some assistance with a particular photo – they wanted to photograph Favre wearing a foam cheesehead and holding a “cheese” football. So they asked me to buy one of each from a store here in Wisconsin and bring it down to the photo shoot.
A week later, I arrived in Orlando with the requested props. Pinnacle asked if they needed to reimburse me, and I said no reimbursement was necessary if I could keep the cheesehead (to be honest, I don’t know whatever happened to the football). Pinnacle agreed and even allowed me to ask Favre to autograph it.
The card featuring Favre wearing the cheesehead and holding the facsimile cheese football appeared as card No. 200 in the
1996 Pinnacle set. Many people probably own the card, but it's kind of neat to know that only I own the cheesehead wedge he wore in the photo.