Brett Favre wasn’t heroic. He was a hubristic fool. He wasn’t a warrior. He was an arrogant braggart who, whatever the homespun hokum of his Mississippi roots, perversely reveled in his pain to the point where his agent publicly disseminated pictures of his injuries like cheesecake photos--a deep-purple ankle lumpish and swollen, an equally deep-purple hamstring. The pictures did what Favre hoped they would: further reinforce his image as The Gladiator, The Samurai, The White Knight for whom guts in football, however stupid and wanton, is what counts.Bissinger has a couple of salient points at his disposal when writing about football and violence Favre and other athletes, especially football players, do cultivate a culture of pain-as-war-wounds, and the appetite for the violence of football helps keep it popular and dangerous, both for the players who use their bodies as gristle for the mill and the youngsters who look up to them But the piece Bissinger wrote seems more like a hit job on Favre than a fully-fleshed argument for his view.