Today the NYTimes called quarterback Brett Favre the NFL’s “freethinking huckleberry”. I read the article, eager to discover what constitutes a “freethinking huckleberry” in the vast industrial complex that is the NFL. I mean, what does that even mean? What on earth is a ‘huckleberry’, and how is it an applicable term to Brett Favre? For me, it suggests “huckster,” which implies that a huckleberry is one who is used by a huckster, which would seem an apt analogy for a legendary quarterback who comes out of a 3-month retirement in order to join a team as inadequate and, frankly, despicable as Mangini’s NY Jets. But let’s see what the NY Times says.
After the article’s colorful introduction via the Jets’ locker room (“This is Sparta. The rookies and the mack daddies, the hard cases and the head cases, the low talkers and the loudmouths with their tattoos as inscrutable as runes…”), the reporter again invokes the term “huckleberry” in reference to Favre: “He was an absolute natural, one of the best who ever lived, revered even by his opponents as the gunslinging Huckleberry, the last of his line.”
“Gunslinging Huckleberry”!? Huh. From that, I inferred that a huckleberry is a quarterback who can reliably toss, heave, but mostly fire the ball forward towards completion. It’s got a Midwestern twang to it that’s befitting of the greatest Green Bay Packer ever, yet it’s esoteric enough to be the found in an elite East Coast periodical’s ode to their football team’s new “old man.” It’s football romanticism, and I’m a sucker (suckleberry?) for it. Best line in the article: “for all the butch rigor and happy fascism of football, for all the martial metaphor and the ringing bromides about team spirit, the best players in this game are artists.”
