The man inside Brett Favre

Brett Favre overcame his off-the-field struggles and became one of us. (Derrick Z. Jackson/Globe Staff)

IDOLIZING ATHLETES is silly when you are 52, especially when many of them act like they are 2. And until recent years, Brett Favre was much closer to being a toddler of manhood than a towering athletic intellect like Arthur Ashe or Bill Bradley.

But Favre did more than survive marauding blitzers for 275 consecutive starts and the most touchdown passes in National Football League history. He is endearing for how he came to the line of scrimmage when it was fourth and long in the privacy of his home. He grew from self-destruction, forsaking the distant pedestal of stardom and the privacy of stoicism for a public connection to common struggles. By the time he called it quits this week after 16 seasons for my homestate Green Bay Packers, not even a Chicago Bears fan could hate him. As much as an athlete can get these days, he was one of us.

The more recent examples of Favre's human side are well known, such as his wife Deanna's struggle with breast cancer and the sudden deaths of relatives, including his father. Sports Illustrated named Favre its 2007 Sportsman of the Year, noting his Make-A-Wish Foundation visits on most Fridays before home games to children suffering from terrible illnesses.

"It's an honor to be asked," Favre told the magazine. "But I'm not going to lie. It's hard. There are times when it takes a lot out of me. These kids are so cool, but you can't ignore what they're up against and what their families are going through."

Favre did not have the ability to support others until he righted himself. In spring 1996, Favre checked into rehab for an addiction to painkillers. The NFL's then-most valuable player held a press conference to say, "It's very serious. It's something I have to take care of." A few days later, Sports Illustrated detailed exactly how serious the problem was, with an anecdote of then-girlfriend Deanna screaming at a barely coherent Brett to admit that he had just taken 13 tablets of Vicodin and Favre waking up from a seizure to hear a Packers physician tell him, "People can die from those."

Favre came out of rehab to lead the Packers in the 1996 season to a Super Bowl title. But even though he confessed about Vicodin, "I ended up telling some serious lies to get more pills," he kept drinking alcohol at a level that nearly destroyed his marriage.

He would admit in a 2005 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel feature, "I've never been completely diagnosed as an alcoholic. I consider myself one. When I drank, I drank to get drunk. There were times I had two beers, but that was because the other 10 were not available. I knew I drank for a reason. It wasn't the social aspect of it. If I was going to have a beer, I was going to have 30 or however many I could drink. That's an alcoholic."

At one point in 1999, Deanna - who had considered leaving Favre over his Vicodin abuse - had Brett's bags packed and planned to start divorce proceedings. In a book she published last year, she wrote, "He was going to lose me. There was no question. There was no way I could stay. . . . There were things that he was doing that just didn't make him quite the family man that he is now."

Those "things," she said, were "drinking and bars and women following him into the bathroom or whatever."

Brett quit drinking, became a better father to his two daughters and encouraged Deanna to put that episode in the book. Deanna told ABC's Robin Roberts, who also is dealing with breast cancer, that Brett told her, "People need to realize that sometimes it gets worse before it gets better. And you can pick yourself up, no matter where you are, no matter how low you are in life, you know, you can always turn things around."

As much as I loved to watch him for his durability, his incredible escapes from the grasp of linemen, and returning the Packers into the ranks of the NFL's elite, Brett Favre's ability to finally look in the mirror and see that an athlete is not necessarily a man was his most important scramble of all. "I'm not going to win Man of the Year," Favre quipped to the Wisconsin State Journal last season. Given where he was a decade ago, simply being a man is good enough.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.