The Green Bay lunch crowd is slowly filling up this sunny, strip-mall joint, a Chinese restaurant Deanna Favre suggested for our interview, but she doesn’t seem to notice. When a server refills her water glass, plops down a plate of egg rolls, she says thank you, but doesn’t turn her head. Her eyes are locked on mine. The directness of her gaze is startling.

Her hazel eyes don’t falter when the questions become personal. And she doesn’t feel the need to fill the space between her answer and my next question. When she’s done speaking, she’s done. Dead air.

Yet her steely composure is belied by her soft voice, her casual attire, the way she pushes waves of long, dark hair from her forehead. Dressed in knee-length denim shorts, a finely ribbed V-neck and wedge flip-flops, her build is more athletic than it appears in photographs. She is beautiful in the larger-than-life way of movie stars, her tanned face bearing only a hint of makeup.

Midway through our interview, she tells me she almost didn’t wear makeup at all. “I didn’t know – I didn’t know if you were going to be all dressed up. I was like, ‘What should I do?’ ” she says, her voice trailing off. “Well, I’m just going to wear shorts, but I threw on makeup at the last minute.”

It’s an odd and endearing confession from a woman who seems so self-possessed. But it suggests something of the Deanna described by friends and family. She is a widely inspirational figure who dreads the spotlight; tougher than any linebacker, yet still one of the girls; a woman who nurtures and accepts others, but is unbelievably hard on herself.

In many ways, Deanna Favre lives a quiet, even ordinary life. She’s a good cook, whipping up chicken and sausage gumbo, roasts and cornbread dressing. An athlete in high school and college, she works out regularly, jogging, attending spinning and yoga classes. She is just as likely to shop at Banana Republic or The Limited as at an exclusive boutique. A devout Catholic, she has a deep sense of faith. She’s incredibly close to her mother – “the apple didn’t fall far from that tree,” friends say – and calls her sister, Christie Ladner, her best friend. Her network of friends stretches across many states, and because so many know each other through Deanna, talking to them is like entering into a large family: They crack jokes about each other, tell overlapping versions of the same stories.

And yet, whatever normalcy Deanna enjoys is hard-won. “You have to understand, in this town, the Favres are the first family, practically,” says Deb Niesen, a Green Bay friend. Even the simplest of activities – a dinner out, a movie in a theater – are compromised, if not impossible. Dotsie Cook, a high school friend, recalls the parade of gawkers’ headlights that sliced through a row of squat fir trees into the house each evening when the Favre family lived on a cul-de-sac.

Although she’s gracious about it, the attention has always made Deanna uncomfortable. Gayle Mariucci first got to know Deanna when her husband Steve was quarterbacks coach for the Packers. Her initial reaction to hearing about this feature, she says, was, “Oh my gosh, she agreed to have an article done on her?” For the shy Deanna of a decade ago, this would have been unthinkable. Yet she’s come a long way since those days, seeing her family through a series of tragedies and enduring tremendous personal struggle. “It’s time for Deanna to speak,” says Kent Johnston, former Packers strength and conditioning coach. “She has been through so much adversity, she’s at a point where she can impart her life to other people.”

In launching the Deanna Favre HOPE Foundation, Deanna harnessed the attention – something that for so long made her cringe – to benefit a cause she believes in. The move made her a public figure in her own right. “People in Wisconsin look to Brett, but down here, we all look to Deanna. She’s one of the greatest humanitarians ever to come out of this area,” says Patricia Bayles-Myrick, executive director of Foundation Hope, a hurricane recovery organization in Kiln, Miss.

But long before her name was known, Deanna was a rock for those around her; a determined competitor who, whether facing a life challenge or an opposing player, did not like to lose. Although some friends question the personal toll her strength exacts, it’s a quality that has played a profound role in shaping the lives of those she loves, as well as her own.

* * *

She was born in December 1968, the child of a single mother in Kiln, Miss. When her mother Ann married Kerry Tynes a few years later, he adopted Deanna and raised her as his own. She prefers not to discuss her birth father. To her, the relationship with Kerry has always been clear-cut: “He’s my dad,” she says, simply.

The Tynes had two more children and worked hard to provide for their close-knit Catholic family, Kerry at the local DuPont plant and Ann as a quality inspector at the John C. Stennis Space Center. The oldest, Deanna took on household responsibilities from an early age. She would clean the house, cook dinner under the guidance of Ann (who would call from work with instructions), and look after her sister and brother. Five-and-a-half years older than Christie and 12 years older than Casey, “she was more of a mother figure,” Christie recalls.

She was also a role model. An honor student and varsity athlete at Hancock North Central High School in Kiln, Deanna excelled at basketball and softball. “Anybody that was younger than her [on the team], she took them under her wing,” says Sherri Favre (no relation), a former classmate. Christie, who also played softball, remembers Deanna teaching her to play catch on the front lawn. “A lot of younger siblings try to participate in other activities, different from their older sibling, because they want to find their own way,” she says. “But I wanted to be like Deanna.”

Even as she went out of her way for others, Deanna was quiet and shy, a tomboy who preferred athletic competition to battles for prom queen. “She was a natural beauty,” says good friend and classmate Dotsie Cook. Although others saw her as pretty, “Deanna didn’t want them to. Still to this day, she doesn’t recognize herself as being as beautiful as she is.”

Because Hancock North Central schooled students from first through 12th grades, Deanna and Brett Favre had known each other since childhood. But when Deanna was a sophomore, she suddenly began to see Brett, 10 months younger and a year behind her in school, in a new light. Relating the series of chance encounters that brought them together in December 1983, Deanna’s voice turns nostalgic, investing her story with all the innocence and yearning of first love. “I didn’t care if I had a boyfriend or not,” she says. “But I remember thinking that week, ‘He’s really cute. I think I could like him.’ ”

In one episode, Brett got shoved into the girl’s locker room and came face-to-face with a bewildered Deanna; in another, she guarded him in a game of two-on-two. At an evening basketball game, some friends dared her to ask Brett, seated two rows back, about his sloppy, unlaced shoes. “Why do you wear your shoes like that?” she asked with the feigned disdain of a teenager with a crush. “I don’t know,” he replied.

When Brett’s mom Bonita invited the varsity basketball teams to his brother’s surprise birthday party, Deanna found herself alone shooting hoops. Brett joined her, and a game of H-O-R-S-E gave way to a courtship.

The pair became inseparable. Brett was then 14, Deanna 15. Christie, who was scared to sleep alone as a child, remembers her sister wasn’t supposed to be on the phone after 8 p.m. “Every night I slept with Deanna, and after my parents went to sleep, she would sneak on the phone and talk to Brett all night long.” Christie would lie in bed listening – “all their sports stuff” – until she, and then Deanna and Brett, nodded off. In the morning when the girls awoke, the phone would still be in bed with them.

Their mother Ann adored Brett, Christie says. “Even when they were in high school, she thought Brett was just the greatest thing. And she still does.”

Before Deanna’s final year in high school, her parents moved 50 minutes north to Poplarville. Not wanting to switch schools her senior year, she stayed in Kiln with an aunt and, after graduation in 1986, attended community college in Poplarville on a basketball scholarship. Two years later, she planned to transfer to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg to finish her degree. Brett was already there, a sophomore and starting quarterback on the football team.

* * *

Christie found out her older sister was pregnant when she was helping her move to Hattiesburg. Deanna picked up a box and Brett told her to put it down. Christie looked at her sister, confused. “Here’s this woman who exercises all the time and lifts tons of weights, and Brett is telling her she can’t lift something I didn’t even think was really heavy,” Christie says. When she asked, Deanna told her the truth.

Deanna, then 19 years old, dreaded disappointing her parents. The thought of telling her grandparents was even more upsetting. “My grandmother would always say, ‘You have to go to college, make something of yourself,’ ” she explains. “I thought, ‘She’s going to think I’m going to quit and be a failure.’ ” Deanna’s mother ultimately told the grandparents, but first, Deanna had to break the news to her. She decided to do so when her mother was on her way to work. “I think she thought if she told her right before she had to leave, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” Christie remembers. The plan backfired. Ann broke down and cried.

But the Tynes and Favres quickly rallied around the couple. There was never a question for Deanna of whether to have the child. Neither set of parents pressured them to marry. “I was very surprised that didn’t happen,” admits Dotsie, given the strong Catholicism of both families. “But I do believe now it was a smart thing. … I think they set them down and said, ‘If you’re going to end up together, you’ll end up together, but you don’t have to do it right now.’ ”

Deanna gave birth to a daughter, Brittany Nicole, on Feb. 6, 1989. Brett was with her at the hospital. “He was supportive,” Christie says, although, she laughs, “He was throwing up.”

* * *

And so Deanna set outon what would be a six-year odyssey as a single parent, returning to school part-time that summer. Both families helped her in caring for Brittany, but she took the responsibility of parenting, like most things in her life, very seriously. She bristles at the suggestion she might have felt resentful at having to take time out from school while Brett’s education and football career went uninterrupted. “It was my choice, I felt like it was my responsibility, I had to deal with it. So I dealt with it,” she says. Working a series of jobs to support herself and her daughter and taking classes off and on, Deanna completed her studies in December 1994, graduating from USM with a degree in exercise science.

She lived with Dotsie for some of that time, and with Christie after her sister started college in Hattiesburg. By the end of Brett’s time in college, the relationship had grown rocky. “He always did things for her, I think he just wasn’t there emotionally,” explains her sister. “He liked to go out and drink and [party]. Even then, he was a big superstar at USM.”

Things didn’t improve when Brett was drafted by the Atlanta Falcons in 1991, nor when he was traded to the Packers in ’92. Rumors swirled that he was seeing other women, cheating on Deanna. Christie openly professes her love for Brett, but recalling Deanna’s struggles during those early years, admits, “I wanted her to break up with him. I thought she deserved better than that. I would get so mad because she would go back to him and feel sorry for him.”

But Deanna stood by Brett, albeit from a distance, at a time of genuine uncertainty in his life. A young man in his early 20s, he was confronted with newfound fame and sudden wealth, the pressures of the NFL, and unbeknownst to her, a burgeoning addiction to painkillers.

“She truly loved him, even when he wasn’t treating her right,” Christie says. “I don’t think she could see her life without him.”

In 1995, Deanna agreed to move to Green Bay full-time to be with Brett, bringing Brittany, who would start first grade there. Packing up and leaving Hattiesburg and her family that August, she could have no idea what struggles lay ahead.

* * *

Most wiveshave trouble adjusting to life in the NFL. Although there are now services to help families acclimate, that wasn’t always the case. “You were just plopped down in a completely unfamiliar location, and it was sink or swim,” says Mindy Bennett, wife of current running backs coach Edgar Bennett, who started playing for the Packers the same year as Brett.

For a shy girl from small-town Mississippi whose relationship with her boyfriend had been off-and-on the past few years, this proved doubly difficult.

“She didn’t want to embarrass herself, she didn’t want to embarrass her family, she didn’t want to embarrass Brett,” says Joy Gray, a Green Bay friend.

“When I met Deanna, she was an extremely, almost painfully shy person,” says Sue Romppanen, a former neighbor whom Deanna came to call her “Green Bay Mom.”

Some friends say Deanna was simply unprepared for the spotlight that zeroed in on Brett and, now by extension, her.

“I don’t think she realized what it was going to be like,” says Kristin Noskowiak, a close friend who babysat Brittany for years. “Because to her, it was just Brett, someone she had known all her life. And then to come here and see how everyone…” She doesn’t finish the thought, and she doesn’t need to.Brett Favre’s celebrity goes without saying.

Deanna quickly began to realize he was no longer the Brett she had known as a teenager. In her book,Don’t Bet Against Me!, published in October by Tyndale House Publishers, she is candid about the struggles of that time. The Brett she knew was quiet and caring, but this man “was loud, rough, and often hateful,” she writes. “He didn’t seem to care that Brittany and I were in the house. He started to ignore us soon after we arrived.” Erratic, moody, he would often leave without saying where he was going.

Sue, who lived down the street from Deanna and Brett, remembers the drama playing out in quiet shifts. “I used to see them leave their house. Brett would go out with the guys, and then Brittany and Deanna would go out to get a bite to eat or go to a movie.” The experience led to a strong bond between mother and daughter. “Brittany is very much like her mother, a tower of strength and independence,” Sue says. “I think that comes from the two of them sort of forging their way together.”

With Brett on the brink of superstar status, women flocked in droves, calling him, flirting with him, sometimes in front of Deanna. Although his actions didn’t always suggest it,
then-strength coach Kent Johnston maintains Brett never forgot what was what. In one of their “daily bull sessions,” he recalls Favre telling him, “I know Deanna loves me for who I am. I’m at a point in my career where anybody else who comes into my life – you gotta wonder.”

Deanna was in a class of her own, as far as Johnston was concerned. “There was no pretense about her, no jockeying for position. She was very natural,” he says. “There was no buying into the glitter and glamour.”

Grounded in a way Brett was not at that time, and knowing him better than anyone, Deanna could penetrate the haze of fame and deception that masked his problem. Suspecting he was misusing painkillers, she confronted him, but it only led to further strife. Kristin Noskowiak, who was 14 years old when Deanna and Brittany moved to Green Bay, recalls a night when she slept over while babysitting. The next morning, Deanna asked her if she’d heard anything the night before; Kristin said she hadn’t. Deanna told her they’d had a huge fight after arriving home, and broke down, confiding Brett was “on drugs.”

Kristin didn’t fully comprehend at the time, but recalls thinking, “Wow, everyone thinks he’s this god almost, and look at what Deanna’s life is like.”

It was a realization few others seemed capable of.Making no headway with Brett, Deanna tried alerting others in the Packers organization. She was routinely dismissed as a jealous girlfriend.

“That about killed her,” recalls Pam Johnston, Kent’s wife. “Nobody would believe that somebody of Brett’s magnitude could have problems.”

It seemed things couldn’t get any worse. But then the season ended, and most of the wives Deanna had gotten to know returned to their off-season homes in other parts of the country. Brett, too, headed back to Mississippi, leaving Deanna to see their daughter through first grade, and a winter and a loneliness unlike any she had ever known.

Through it all, she didn’t let her family know what was going on, Christie says. It was a pattern in Deanna’s life, to try to shoulder what she saw as her responsibility no matter the toll it would exact on herself.

But strong as she was, even Deanna was beginning to have doubts. She questioned whether she should have ever come to Green Bay. She didn’t know whether she should stick it out. She didn’t know if she could.

* * *

In May 1996, Brett went public with the news that he had been addicted to Vicodin. He made the announcement with Deanna at his side, then entered the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., for 46 days of rehabilitation.

Friends – and Brett himself – credit Deanna for getting him there; had she left, they don’t know what would have happened. “Through everything, even when he tried to say he didn’t need her, he knew he needed her there,” says Gayle Mariucci.

However buried this knowledge was before, it became crystal clear to Brett as he was recovering. He asked Deanna to marry him. At first, she was skeptical. “I thought, ‘I don’t know if he really means that or if he’s just thinking this is going to give him a stable foundation.’ I didn’t know what his intent was,” she says. So she blew it off. Just before preseason training began, he brought it up again. This time Deanna told him if that was what he wanted, he needed to take the steps to make it happen. She wasn’t going out on a limb again. So he did. “He called me on his way to the stadium,” she remembers, “and he said, ‘I went down to sign for a marriage license; they said you need to come in and sign.’ ”

That night, the Tuesday before practice started, Deanna called on her friend Sue Romppanen. “She said, ‘Brett really wants to get married and he wants to do it before the season. Can we have the reception at your house?’ ” Sue recalls. Together, the pair scrambled to find dresses for Deanna and Brittany, to pick out flowers and hire a caterer. On Sunday, July 14, 1996, Deanna Tynes and Brett Favre were married at St. Agnes Catholic Church in Green Bay, with the Johnstons standing up as best man and matron of honor. That evening, after a small, private reception, the Favres drove to Kohler, Wis., for a brief honeymoon at the American Club. They would return at 6:30 the next morning so Brett could start training camp.

The following years brought plenty of cause for celebration. Brett had kicked his addiction and the Packers made it to the Super Bowl two years in a row. They defeated the New England Patriots to win Super Bowl XXXI in 1997 in New Orleans, just an hour from Kiln, in a storybook comeback for Brett after the dark times of the previous spring. He won the Associated Press NFL MVP award three consecutive times, the only player ever to do so, and began to break record after record.

As Brett’s career soared, Deanna, now in her late 20s, was coming to a deeper realization about what was truly important in life. “I didn’t want to always be out in a bar till 2 o’clock in the morning,” she says. They had Brittany at home and it wasn’t fair to her. “I decided I wasn’t going to have that lifestyle,” Deanna says, “and if I wasn’t going to have it, then the person I was with couldn’t, and if he did, then we couldn’t be together.”

Her husband had beaten his painkiller addiction, but Deanna knew that alcohol could compromise his judgment, leaving him open to fall back into old ways. Brett knew it too. “He kept telling me, ‘I want to stop all this, you’re going to have to help me. Whatever you do, don’t let me drink.’ ” She was “silly and naive,” she sees now, to think she could change him on her own.

The issue came to a head in the spring of 1999, when Brett’s younger brother got married in Mississippi. Deanna, hugely pregnant with their second child, attended the Friday evening reception with the injunction to keep Brett sober. “All of a sudden, I looked at him and I could tell he’d been doing something, but he wasn’t doing it in front of me,” she says. The realization enraged her. He came over and told her he wanted to go out after the party with a group of friends. She said no way. But he slipped out, not returning until the next morning. After they fought, he went out for the next two nights, not showing up at their home in Hattiesburg until Monday.

Deanna had his bags packed and waiting in the courtyard. “I said, ‘Take your stuff and go. I’m done,’ ” she remembers. He begged, refusing to leave, so she called his agent. “You need to come get him, I’m not putting up with this anymore. He needs to get out of my house or I’m calling 9-1-1,” she said.

It turned out to be the shock Brett needed. His agent picked him up; he went back to rehab; and he hasn’t had a drink since. His second daughter, Breleigh Ann, was born July 13. Looking back, Deanna says it wasn’t easy to draw such a hard line. “But I meant it,” she says slowly, enunciating, “and when he looked into my eyes, he knew that I meant it. And it totally changed the quality of our life.”

Deanna wanted her husband to read all mentions of his addiction in her book, including an account of their final standoff, before it was published. If he didn’t want her to write about it, she wouldn’t. The experience was eye-opening. “You know, this is so painful for me to read,” he told her. “I cannot believe I ever was this person.”

Friends describe the Brett of the past eight years as a family man who has breakfast with his wife and daughters and drives Breleigh to school each morning; who’s home every night, content watching a movie or relaxing over a quiet dinner, far from the din and drinks, the wild escapades that consumed him in his 20s.

“Brett’s matured, as we all do,” says Pam Johnston. “We all make stupid mistakes when we’re younger.” Deanna sees not only growth in her husband, but a kind of return. “The person he is now,” she says, “that’s the person I knew in high school.”

* * *

In the coming years, family criseswould play out in an increasingly public arena. On a Sunday four days before Christmas 2003, Brett’s father Irvin Favre died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Brett was in California, preparing for a Monday night game against the Oakland Raiders. Deanna couldn’t get there fast enough, recalls Sue Romppanen. “She wanted to be with him so badly.” Jeannie Pederson, wife of then-backup Packers quarterback Doug Pederson, offered to take care of Breleigh and Brittany so Deanna could make the trip. She remembers Deanna springing into action, making arrangements for her family. “In situations where most people would fall apart, she’s still being strong for the people around her,” Jeannie says. With his wife looking on, Favre would play the most memorable game of his career, throwing for 399 yards and four touchdowns in honor of his father.

Less than a year later, Deanna received another blow. Her 24-year-old brother Casey was killed in a freak accident, flipping an all-terrain vehicle on the Favres’ property in Mississippi. Upon hearing the news, she immediately called Sue, her Green Bay Mom. When Sue arrived at the house, she found a woman whose grief was uncontrollable. “That was the most I’ve ever seen Deanna cave,” she says. “She was heartbroken. She just sobbed.”

Four days after her brother’s funeral, Deanna drove to Milwaukee for an annual gynecologist’s exam. Sue went with her. When Deanna showed her doctor the small lump she had found in her breast during a self-exam, he wanted her to get it checked out right away. A long afternoon seeing specialists made it clear she could have cancer.

Returning to Green Bay, Sue struggled with her own sense of despair. “It was unbelievable. It was like the sky had fallen.” She had made a point not to cry, not to show Deanna how upset she was. But 35-year-old Deanna wasn’t focusing on herself. “She was worried about how Brett would take it, and how to tell him. She was more concerned about Brett and the girls than for herself,” Sue says. “It was not a breakdown,” she adds, describing Deanna’s reaction. “It was almost like an affirmation of strength.”

When Deanna’s biopsy results confirmed her breast cancer, Brett went into panic mode. He researched extensively on the Internet; he asked every doctor he knew for advice. What would they do, if it was their wife? He called Christie, a nurse practitioner, rattling through what he’d learned: types of breast cancer, how Deanna’s compared to others, what to expect from treatment. “He was really scared,” Christie says.

With her husband madly investigating care options, Deanna, usually the tower of strength, shut down. “I was like, ‘He’ll tell me what I need to do,” she remembers. “He’ll make an appointment wherever I need to go.” Soon, Brett, Christie and Sue were on their way with Deanna to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Recalling the moments before Deanna underwent her lumpectomy, Christie suddenly begins to cry. “I’m getting upset, I don’t know why,” she says, her voice cracking. “I could see for the first time that she looked scared. Because she was never – she’s always put on a front and she’s really strong. And I’m the one who cries all the time. As you can tell.” Christie held her older sister’s hand, and told her everything was going to be OK.

Ann wanted to be with her daughter for her first chemotherapy treatment in Green Bay. But her mother had been through so much already with Casey’s death; Deanna didn’t want to burden her more. So she told her cheerfully there was no need. She was young, in good shape; chemotherapy would be a snap. “Wow, was I in for it,” she says now. Achy, exhausted, incredibly nauseous, Deanna called her mother soon afterward, asking plaintively, “Do you want to come up the next time?”

In addition to the pain and weakness it induced, the chemo would soon ravage Deanna’s long, thick hair. She had a series of haircuts – a gradual relinquishing – but her friend Laura Lawrence helped her arrange for the final one. They would do it at Laura’s house, a place Deanna was intimately familiar with. Laura and her husband had bought the home the Favres lived in during Deanna’s first year in Green Bay, and the two struck up a friendship soon after. Sitting in the kitchen that day, a stylist doing away with what remained of her hair, the struggles that had played out in these rooms almost a decade ago must have seemed very far away. “I had been friends with her for many years, but I didn’t quite know the depths of her strength until that day,” Laura says. Like Sue, Laura found herself overwhelmed with sorrow, but tried to hold it together for Deanna’s sake. In truth, Laura says, it was more like Deanna supporting her.

After two months of chemotherapy and several twice-a-day radiation sessions, Deanna was pronounced cancer-free. Looking back, she realizes it was only then that she began to deal with the emotional fallout of her illness and her brother’s death. Counseling helped, she says, but she sometimes wonders, “Is it still a grieving process that I’m going through? Is it just all the stuff that’s happened to me? What’s making me feel so sad?”

* * *

Ask any of Deanna’s friends what got her through her considerable trials – compounded by the devastation Hurricane Katrina wrought on her home state and the recent death of her mother’s second husband, Rocky Byrd – and they are likely to cite her strong faith. “I’ve seen her reach for that faith time and again,” says Sue. “It has maintained her through the darkest times.”

Deanna has come to see her diagnosis of breast cancer in particular as a kind of calling – an opportunity to help others struggling with the disease and raise awareness for early detection. Struck by the staggering expense of cancer treatment, Deanna wondered how other women managed. A single mother herself for years, she knew she couldn’t have afforded it. So she launched the HOPE Foundation to benefit underinsured women battling breast cancer. Ironically, the success of her efforts – she has raised around half a million dollars through speaking and appearances alone – depended upon her embracing what she dreaded most.

“It’s so interesting to see somebody who could not stand getting in front of a bible study group and saying her name, now standing and talking to thousands of people,” says Pam Johnston.

Friends note other changes that adversity has brought in Deanna. “She has an undeniable resolve now that she did not have when I first met her,” says Sue. “She has realized her own strength, and I think that has brought her to this place in womanhood.”

Still, those who know Deanna best know it’s not easy for her – not just the act of public speaking, which Christie describes as a continual “ordeal,” but the scrutiny that accompanies the spotlight. The high standards Deanna sets for herself make the task that much more difficult. “I’m pretty hard on myself,” she admits. “I always find things wrong with me. If I say something in an interview that I feel like I shouldn’t say, maybe it sounded like I’m not very smart or something, it keeps me up for several nights. It’s very stressful.”

Brett is always telling her to give herself a break, to stop beating herself up. “And I really try not to,” she says. “But I just can’t help it.”

There’s also the issue of how she copes with the stress. “If I was honest, I’d say she internalizes a lot of it,” says Pam Johnston. “She’s such a good-hearted person that she wants to please everybody, and that adds more weight on her shoulders.”

“She really hides her feelings a lot,” Christie adds. The act might be one of self-protection, “but I think she does it to protect others, too.”

Yet Deanna carries on, inspiring countless admirers in the process, not the least of which is her husband. Last year at a foundation dinner in Green Bay, all eyes were on Deanna as she delivered a speech, but Sue’s were on Brett. “It was so interesting to watch his face as she spoke,” she says. “It was as though he, too, was amazed at her fortitude. He listened so carefully; he was so proud and had this little grin on his face like, you know, she is so very strong.”

* * *

Twelve yearsafter her
life-altering move to Green Bay, Deanna finds her family once again on the brink of change. Their oldest daughter Brittany started college this year. Meanwhile, at 38 years old, Brett finds himself leading what is for the second year in a row the youngest team in the league. As he’s surrounded by players not much older than his daughter, Deanna is surrounded by their wives. “We kind of have to laugh every year,” says Mindy Bennett, “because the players come in and they seem so incredibly young. We look back and think, ‘Oh my gosh, that was us way back then.’ ”

When the Pedersons returned for a second stint with the Packers in 2001 (Doug retired in 2004), Jeannie says she saw Deanna as a kind of role model, able to offer guidance to other wives. But now, Deanna admits, “I’m not real interactive with [the wives] anymore, because I’m just so much older.” As Packers friends have come and gone, Deanna has also seen some of her Green Bay friends move away, including Sue Romppanen and Laura Lawrence.

Still, she has a church and a network of friends in Green Bay. She has her mother, who is staying with the family for the season. She has the task of raising 8-year-old Breleigh and managing her foundation along with the Brett Favre Fourward Foundation. And she has the comfort of feeling settled in her role there. “I think Deanna would agree each year you just become more of yourself, and enjoy that,” says Mindy Bennett.

Although Brett’s retirement is something they “don’t talk about right now,” the issue looms. “We’re all sad. We know it’s coming,” says Christie. Others who’ve gone through it talk about the toll NFL retirement can take on a family. Many couples don’t make it through; the post-career divorce rate is high. “I’ve seen it over and over with professional players. It’s always hard to leave the only thing you’ve ever known,” Pam Johnston says. Players miss the camaraderie and the thrill of the game; both spouses miss their friends. Together, they are forced to reinvent themselves and their lives. “When you retire, you think of growing old together, but we’re still in our 30s,” Jeannie Pederson laughs.

At a juncture when so many couples find out what their marriage is really made of, friends say the Favres already know. “It’s hard to separate the two of them now, because I’ve seen them grow so much more closely together over the years,” says the Rev. Richard Getchel, who married them. Deanna has always valued “family, church, the kind of stuff that carries on,” says Gayle Mariucci. As for Brett, “the foundation of his life is not built on football like it might have been the first year he came to Green Bay,” says Kent Johnston. Retirement, he adds, will be an adjustment, “but my lord, they’ve faced a lot tougher things in life than that.”

Despite the superficial differences, Deanna sees in her husband a person very much like her. They share a love for sports; a commitment to their daughters and family; an affection for the close-knit and laid-back ways of small towns. And they share another quality, onethat’s crucial, given the traumas of the past and the uncertainty of the future. “We can’t live in the past. The past can ruin you, if you dwell on it,” she says. “We’re those kinds of people who just keep taking steps forward.” n

Caroline Goyette, formerly an assistant editor at Milwaukee Magazine,is now a freelance writer based in New Orleans. Write to her via letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.