Brett Favre Reveals Rehab Stints, Addiction To Painkillers During NFL Career

Brett Favre may have had an illustrious career as an NFL quarterback, but it wasn’t until this week that he revealed some of the medical issues he struggled with during that time.

Brett Favre Confesses Health Issues

The 48-year-old Hall of Fame star told Sports Illustrated on Monday that while playing for the Green Bay Packers in 1995 — the year he won the NFL MVP Award — he took large doses of painkillers like Vicodin.

“I took 14 Vicodin, yes, one time. I was getting an hour or two of sleep many nights. Maybe 30 minutes of quality sleep. I was the MVP on a pain-pill buzz,” Favre told Sports Illustrated. “The crazy thing was, I’m not a night owl. Without pills I’d fall asleep at 9:30. But with pills, I could get so much done, I just figured, ‘This is awesome.’ Little did I know [fiancée and now wife] Deanna would be finding some of my pills and when she did, she’d flush them down the toilet.”

Super Bowl champion Favre also confessed he went to rehabilitation centers three times — for stints ranging from one to two-and-a-half months — during his football career.

“When I got out, the toughest thing was the first three months, because I had to change my thought process,” Favre explained. “When I played golf before, I realized the only reason I wanted to play was to drink. After a while, instead of thinking, ‘How many beers can we drink in 18 holes?’ I fell into a pattern of what could I do to get good at golf. I realized with each passing day I really didn’t like drinking.”

Since retiring in 2011, Favre has been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2016. He told NBC in April that he has been experiencing “short-term memory issues.” Favre, an 11-time Pro Bowler, has also voiced concern over the possibility of him developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain trauma associated with repeated blows to the head and concussions. The neurodegenerative disease has been discovered to have affected hundreds of football players.