How A Prank Led By Brett Favre Once Almost Killed John Madden
On today's Pardon My Take, Mr. Cat and Mr. Commenter welcomed on one of the best quarterbacks in football history: Brett Favre. The Southern Mississippi product took some time to chat with the guys about his football career, his thoughts on the "Bountygate" scandal, some of his memorable interceptions, and much more. The guys also got into it regarding Favre's pranking career. He is a notable prankster, so what were some of the jokes that stood out? There was one involving John Madden. Take a look:
Mr. Cat: I also read one where you, I don't know if it was a stink bomb or something with John Madden when he came to interview you before a game.
Brett Favre: Yeah, I almost killed him.
Mr. Cat: Brett Favre, John Madden, and fake farts is kind of like, that's the pinnacle of football guy humor.
Bret Favre: Yeah, I just told that story to someone a couple of nights ago. We got on the subject of John Madden and they asked me if he was still living and I said, yes, he is getting up there in age. And they said, boy, he sure liked you. He did, I don't know where the fondness came from. He did a lot of my games, but I know that our production meetings the day before the games was always fun. It hardly had football at all involved in the conversation. We just talked about stuff and we had tons of those meetings, you can imagine al the games we did.
Brett Favre: So yeah, this one particular time on this one particular year, I kind of got on the stink bomb. You know, it kind of looks like an ammonia cap that you break, and it's got just a terrible odor of rotten eggs and it's made of sulfur. And I found all this out after the fact. I just knew they stunk and I thought it'd be a cool joke. I would just slip it under the table, step on it, and then watch everyone kind of cringe. And part of the reason that I picked that setting was Lee Remmel, our head of PR. Lee Remmel had been with the Packers over 50 years, and at the time, was probably in his 70s. So he was getting up in age, still sharp, but he had a tendency in those production meetings to fall asleep. So I was going to really kind of play a joke on Lee, but with the whole group.
Brett Favre: I figured when I busted the ammonia cap, the odor got terrible, that someone would think that Lee farted in his sleep. And that may have been true, had it not been for John Madden, as I ease it under the table, step on it, no one has a clue. Within seconds, I mean it reeked of just rotten eggs, but John Madden was not the reaction I was thinking. And Jeff Long and Mark Schiefelbein, when they were with us, and they were the younger PR guys, same age as me. And they encouraged me not to do it before I went it. I don't know exactly why, none of us could foresee what was going to happen.
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Brett Favre: So, John starts kind of choking a little bit and he starts turning red, and now he can sense with each second, it's getting worse and worse, and to a point where this is not funny anymore. And he kind of puts his hand up around his chest, in his throat. And long story short, they take him out of the room, come to find out he's allergic to sulfur.
Mr. Cat: You almost killed John Madden!
Brett Favre: Almost killed John Madden.
Mr. Commenter: He probably laughed about that afterwards.
Brett Favre: I was going to say, so every game after that, we walked into production meetings, he goes, "You don't have one of those sulfur bombs, do you?" Nope, John, I don't, I'm sorry.
Mr. Commenter: Who's allergic to sulfur? That's something that you couldn't have drawn up ahead of time. There's no way to know that.
https://twitter.com/PFTCommenter/status/1367097434736836609?s=20
Oh no. It looks like Brett Favre dodged a HUGE bullet here. Imagine killing John Madden due to an innocent prank via a rare allergy? That would not have been good. Luckily, he sees to have made a full recovery and one of the best quarterbacks ever has a great story to tell out of that wild chain of events.