Continued from previous week
“(Ron Wolf) comes up on a Tuesday or Wednesday of the week that we hired him. (We) had a press conference at Lambeau. When he was finished, he said ‘Bob, you guys are in Atlanta this weekend. I’ll come in and join you in the press box on Sunday, watch the game with you, fly back with the team that night, go to work here on Monday morning,’” Bob Harlan recalled.
“I said, ‘Ron, that’s perfect.’ So, we’re in the press box Sunday morning, Ron comes up, puts a briefcase down next to me, and said ‘Bob, I’m going to go down and look at Atlanta’s back-up quarterback. If he’s as good now as he was coming out of college, we’re going to go after him. So, Ron turns and walks away, and I turn the flipcard over, and I thought the guy’s name was Fav-re; never heard of him in my life.”
Wolf came up later and said, “Okay, Bob, we’re going to make a trade for Brett Favre. Are you okay with that?” Harlan recalled.
“I said, ‘Ron, I just gave you total authority over the football team. I’m not going to make a change on the first thing you want to do.
“I never got so much ugly mail and bad phone calls in my life as I got when the story came out that Green Bay is going to take a No. 1 Draft choice to Atlanta for a third-string quarterback who couldn’t play in Atlanta, named Brett Favre; but by gosh, the kid was marvelous.
“He had the perfect coach in Mike Holmgren, but the thing is that it probably turned out to be certainly the best trade Green Bay ever made, maybe one of the big trades in the history of the National Football League.”
“We were very fortunate there, to get a player the caliber of Brett Favre,” said Packers Former General Manager Ron Wolf.
“I mean, just think about that. That switched the whole thing; that changed the playing field. He changed the playing field in college for his team, and it's an interesting thing about him. Being retired now and right down there in Southeastern Conference country, they have these shows on the radio and there was a show — the guy’s dead now — Pat Dye. Pat Dye was asked, ‘Who is the best player you ever played against while you were coaching Auburn?’ Guess who he said? Brett Favre. I mean, it didn't take him 10 seconds, Brett Favre, because he went in there and beat him.
“But, to get a player in that caliber. And then, you know, slowly but surely, we started getting other players. And we were fortunate when I got here to have a player like Sterling Sharp. And then we added to that, you know, Robert Brooks, Mark Chmura, Keith Jackson, Dorsey Levens, Edgar Bennett, Donald Driver — all exceptional receivers and players.”
To be continued
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