Favre’s passion appealing to Wilf

Vikings owner Zygi Wilf certainly seems on board with the potential signing of Brett Favre, according to his comments this week to season-ticket holders.

Two days after Brett Favre made it clear during an interview on HBO that if his arm enables him to play in 2009 he will be a member of the Vikings, owner Zygi Wilf told fans at a town hall meeting that the ball is in the court of the retired quarterback.

“Like I’ve said many times before, be it Brett Favre or anybody else, we will do the most we can to get the players we need to be a better team with,” Wilf said at the first-ever “State of the Vikings” event in downtown Minneapolis. “If that means Brett Favre or it means anybody else, we’re going to go out and do that. We’ll just have to wait and see. The interview with Brett Favre [on HBO], although I didn’t watch it myself, everybody told me that it shows the player he is, down to earth and somebody who has a passion for football.

“When somebody has that passion for football, as long as he has it, and the willingness to come back, you have to really look at that and see how they fit with your team. Right now, it’s all up to Brett Favre to determine where his future is at and we’ll just leave it at that.”

Favre had arthroscopic surgery on a partially torn biceps tendon in his right shoulder in late May, performed by Dr. James Andrews, and recently threw passes to players from Oak Grove High School near his home in Mississippi.

“Dr. Andrews said more or less four weeks you should know if [surgery]
was completely successful,” Favre told WDAM-TV in Hattiesburg, Miss. “I threw a couple of balls today where I really felt it ... different places in my shoulder where it’s sore. I threw the ball OK, but OK isn’t good enough in the National Football League. At least not for me, so it’s got to get better.”

And evidently that is going to need to happen before the Vikings report to training camp on July 29. It looks like that should happen after the latest reports from Vikings coach Brad Childress saying that Favre is pain-free.

While it probably would be a mistake to call it a hard deadline, Favre did tip his hand to a timetable on the situation.

“There is time, but there isn’t time, if that makes sense,” Favre said. “I don’t need to wait for camp to say it’s 100 percent. I need to know before then, and so do the Vikings.”

Childress said he is confident that Favre will only return if his arm is far better than it was at the end of last season when he was with the Jets. That now seems to be progressing nicely as well. Favre announced his retirement in February in large part because of the injury.

“I just know this,” Childress said. “He won’t play unless he feels like he’s capable of playing at the level he’s played over the course of years. But I know he’s working hard at it.”