Brett Favre plans to "wing it" at Packers HOF speech

By Jess Kleinschmidt
FanDuel

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Brett Favre will be inducted into the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame on July 18th. While this is no surprise, he says he's not going to write anything for the speech that he will be giving.

He told Rob Demovsky of ESPN he plans to just "wing it."

"I think what I'll probably say initially is, 'I thought about writing something down. I thought about writing a script,'" says Favre. '"but you know what? I figured I'd wing it sort of like I played, so just bear with me,'It's only fitting."

It seems as if the multi-time MVP award winner put a lot of thought into this "speech that isn't really a speech."

"I don't want to sit there and make it longer than the whole event is anyway — and it's going to be long — but I do want to acknowledge a lot of people and just maybe tell a few funny stories, kind of keep it as lighthearted as possible. It could be 20 minutes, it could be an hour, I don't know."

While he doesn't know how long his speech will last, Favre does know he is anxious and nervous, and compares accepting the Hall of Fame honoros to his playing days.

"I've thought about that a bunch, and I guess the best analogy that I can think of is it's the closest thing to playing. My feeling right now when I think about it is nervous, not scared but anxiety, good anxiety," Favre says. "Heck, when it sold out so quickly, I got goose bumps. If I had any doubts whatsoever leading up, which I really didn't, that was all answered with that. I don't mean this in a negative way, but I'll be glad when it's over because the buildup has been so big."

According to Brandon Gaille 74% of people suffer from public speech anxiety. I can imagine the number of people that suffer from playing professional football in front of millions, make the Hall of Fame, and retire several times is a wee bit smaller, but we don't have much a sample size now do we?