Brett Favre and Ron Wolf owe each other a lot.
Favre may never have gotten a chance to become Brett Favre, all-time great QB, if Wolf hadn’t taken a chance and traded a first-round pick to Atlanta for him back in 1992. Ron Wolf may never have become a Hall of Fame general manager and resurrected the Green Bay Packers if it weren’t for Favre.
Fittingly, those two guys will go into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in consecutive years. Wolf was enshrined in 2015 and Favre will be enshrined this year.
Both meant a lot to the Packers.
Favre revealed that he and Wolf both still feel they owe a tremendous debt to each other, on Tuesday.
“The debt of gratitude… is forever payable. I’ve told Ron that over and over again. In fact, had a conversation with him last night. We’re both always so thankful to each other. You’d think we’d get over that at some point. It’s really a wonderful story. In his case, sticking your neck out there at a time when you just got a new job at a historic and traditional franchise like the Packers, boy, what a gamble. I’m forever thankful for that and I know he has said over and over to me how thankful he is that it worked out, obviously.”
It’s interesting that Favre refers to the Packers as a historic franchise.
In the early 1990s, the Packers were still clinging to the Lombardi era. Two decades of losing and personnel mismanagement had all but erased any sort of cachet the Packers had. Not only was the team bad, but no one wanted to play in Green Bay.
That started to change with the arrival of Ron Wolf in 1991.
A great coaching hire and several shrewd personnel moves later and the Packers morphed into the perennial playoff team you know today.
That’s why many of us around here feel we own a debt to Ron Wolf. So in that sense, Brett Favre isn’t alone.
