Coming Back Stronger

by Drew Brees

  By almost all counts it was a forgettable game. But there was one moment I’ll never forget. In the first quarter, Coach called the play—a twenty-yard route run by the receiver across the field. In order to complete the throw, you end up having to throw the ball about forty yards in the air. I took the snap, reading the defense on my way back. The cornerback covering my primary receiver was playing soft, therefore allowing us to throw the deep out. As I hit the last step in my drop, I hitched up, cocked the ball back, and let it fly.

  There’s a feeling unlike any other when the ball leaves your hand just right. You know immediately that it’s a good throw, and there’s a thrill as you watch it spiral downfield into the hands of your receiver. That pass was a good forty yards as it made its way across the field into the hands of Donté Stallworth on the left sideline. He actually dropped it, but I didn’t care. It came out at just the right velocity, perfectly timed with the stride of the receiver, right into his arms. It was just like the old days, before the injury.

  That is what I’ve been waiting for, I thought. I’m back! Whatever you want to call it—the magic, the mojo—it was coming to life again. I had the velocity. I had the accuracy. The ball came off my fingertips, and the second it did, I knew that was the exact throw I wanted. Until that game, I knew I was getting better each day, and I could feel the strength coming back to my arm. I had tried to build on the small successes from the previous day. I’d followed the throw count; I’d done my rehabilitation routine consistently; I’d done my stretching—I’d done everything I was supposed to do. I trusted that as long as I did things the right way, good things would happen, and eventually I would be where I needed to be. But it wasn’t until that one throw that my confidence returned. It wasn’t until that moment, when the ball left my hands, that I felt deep down, This is it. This is what I’ve been waiting for. True, it was the only pass out of thirty in that game that felt right. But this proved it was possible. Now I just need a bunch of those to come in a row.

  Sean must have thought I was crazy when I approached him after the game, completely excited. I had played poorly, and so had the whole team. The third preseason game is supposed to be a dress rehearsal for the regular season, because generally the starters see the most action in this game prior to the season opener and might not even play in the fourth preseason game.

  I walked into Sean’s office after the game with a grin on my face. Scott Fujita has been known to give me a hard time for being “annoyingly optimistic,” and that day was a case in point. There was no reason anyone should have been encouraged by the game we had just played. But I was.

  Sean looked at me with a concerned but hopeful expression as I closed his office door and sat down. “Coach, I know things didn’t go the way we wanted them to today.” I couldn’t quench my optimism, but I did understand his frustration. Ever since training camp he had been working hard to pull us together as a team. Despite all his efforts, our offense just wasn’t in sync. We were trying hard and there were occasional bright spots, but for the most part we kept coming up empty.

  We needed something good to happen—and soon. When you’ve been beaten down for so long, it doesn’t matter how hard you work; it can feel like the next thing around the bend is going to be another blow. Whether it’s in football or in a job or in a relationship or with finances, it often seems like bad things compound on each other. Pretty soon you start to wonder if you can ever get out from under them. On the verge of the new season beginning, we were finding it difficult to believe—not just in ourselves, but in the process.

  My philosophy has always been that it takes only one good thing to break the seal on what lies ahead. Just one positive turn of events can build your confidence and help you get the momentum going in the other direction. Once that happens, one good thing leads to another and then another. Pretty soon you find yourself riding a wave of good things.

  Our team wasn’t anywhere close to playing like we could play, and we all knew it. As Sean and I sat in his office, he looked dejected, which was unusual for him. He has the same positive-attitude DNA as I do. I felt bad about my performance. I felt bad about how we’d played as a team. But the one good moment—my autopilot throw—overshadowed those negative feelings. For all I knew, that well-thrown ball could be our turning point.

  “Coach, we’re going to be all right,” I said. “I’m coming back. I felt it tonight. This game was a milestone for me. I know it.”

  He looked at me with a mixture of incomprehension and concern.

  “Seriously,” I continued. “I’m going to be all right. We’re going to be all right. I know that sounds crazy right now, coming off a game like this, but I think we’re on the verge of something good.”

  And it was true—things did start to improve. The next practice, I threw two passes that felt as true as they have ever felt. The day after that I threw three more, and the next day, four. It seemed like each time out on the field resulted in yet another pass that would come flying out of my hands like a gunslinger. Little by little, the confidence was building and the throws were becoming automatic. Let the season begin.

  Believe

  You hear a lot of players talk about “believing,” and there are several different layers to that. There’s the surface-level type of believing, where you acknowledge that something is true. Then there’s a deeper kind of belief—the type that gets inside you and actually changes you. It’s the kind of belief that changes your behavior, your attitude, and your outlook on life, and the people around you can’t help but notice.

  The way I see it, belief isn’t enough on its own. Once you know the truth, you have to act on it. That’s where real faith gets legs. Other people can tell you the truth, but until you own it, it’s not worth much. It’s only when you move on your belief and exercise faith that real change can come. It’s only then that you’ll yield concrete results.

  In football, it’s not enough to believe you have a great football team. I knew we had some great talent in 2006, and that was a start. But until we stepped on the field and put that belief into action, it was hollow. We had to go to work and act on that belief.

  Put another way, belief is represented by the football. It’s an objective thing that exists outside of me. If I hold on to it and do nothing else with it, I can’t lead the team. However, if I have the guts to make the throw to my teammate, I am exercising faith—in myself, in my receiver, and in the coaching staff who put the play together. Faith in action is perfectly carried out on the field.

  I had to trust the process when it came to my recovery, too. It wouldn’t have been enough to simply believe what my doctors were telling me about my arm, to intellectually assent to it being true. I could have agreed with Dr. Andrews that it was up to me to work hard and then retreated to the La-Z-Boy. But I needed something more than a “belief” about my comeback. I had to translate that belief into action and actually do the things they told me to do.

  Over the years I’ve come to realize that living out your faith in God isn’t all that different from living out what you believe when you’re playing a sport. You can’t just talk about it—you’ve got to prove it with your actions. Following God is a day-by-day process, something you have to keep focusing on and practicing. It’s not some detached or compartmentalized thing that only affects your Sunday mornings. Whether I’m on top of the world with a win or stinging from a bad loss or an injury, I know that God is there and that he has a plan. To me, God is more than just “the Man Upstairs” who looks down on us all. He’s concerned about us as individuals. He cares about the people of New Orleans. He wants to be near those living in FEMA trailers. He has compassion for the people who lost their homes and were scattered across the country. He allowed some of these things to happen in our lives so he could shape us and mold us and give us the opportunity to come back stronger. Without the adversity, there would be no opportunity.

  Faith is a gift from God, but it’s also a responsibility. It’s not enough to have it. Y
ou’ve got to live it out, even when times are tough. One of my favorite quotes is “Your actions speak so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.” In other words, don’t just say it; be it.

  F-A-I-T-H

  When I came to New Orleans in 2006, I saw a lot of T-shirts that had the word Faith on the front. It was a buzzword for the people of the region, signifying that they believed in the city, that it was possible to rebuild. A lot of people took that word and applied it to our team that year too. In many ways people saw the Saints as an extension of the city and everything the community was going through. We were working together in faith, believing that things were going to come back even better than they were before. We kept on believing, even when the results were a long time coming.

  As a way to motivate my teammates and give us focus for the season ahead, I often came up with a slogan or phrase to share with the team. That year, my first season with the Saints, I wanted to simplify things and get our minds and hearts in the right place as we started the regular season. I had been thinking a lot about the concept of faith for the past several months, and I decided to break down the word into an acrostic. Each letter of the word held personal meaning for me:

  Fortitude

  Attitude

  Integrity

  Trust

  Humility

  For the first game of the season, we were traveling to the Dawg Pound in Cleveland to play the Browns. The Wednesday before the game we had our first team meeting. I asked Coach Payton if I could have fifteen minutes at the beginning of that meeting to say a few things to the team.

  I’d printed out a bunch of sheets with the word FAITH written on them, and I handed them to the guys. Then I put the same thing on the overhead projector and explained my hopes for the year ahead.

  “The dictionary defines faith a lot of different ways,” I said. “Some of it has to do with religion. Other aspects of the definition talk about allegiance and duty or loyalty. I want you to know what the word means to me, and I also want you to write down what it means to you.”

  All the guys came up with their own working definitions of faith and wrote them down. I encouraged them to put their papers in the front of their playbooks. “When you’re having one of those rough days, take a look at it and remember why you’re here and what we’re working toward.

  “Now I want to tell you what faith means to me,” I said. “Fortitude. Attitude. Integrity. Trust. Humility.” I put the dictionary definitions of all those words on the screen.

  “This is what the dictionary says about these words. But you know what? The way a book defines something can be different from how you view it and apply it in your life.

  “When I think about fortitude, what comes to mind isn’t the dictionary definition. I think of it as toughness and courage. Fighting for something you know is there but you might not be able to see yet.

  “Attitude. To me, attitude speaks to the way you approach life. You can’t always determine your circumstances, but you can always determine your attitude. Attitude is approaching each day with a positive mind-set, a glass-half-full mentality, knowing that as long as we do things the right way together, good things are going to happen. I have confidence that I can do my job, whatever it is, and I have confidence that the guy next to me is going to do his job. And as we grow together, there’s no team that can stop what we’re becoming.

  “Integrity. A person with integrity does what he says he’s going to do. So if you tell me you’re going to show up at 6 a.m. to work out, then show up at 6 a.m. to work out. If you say you’re going to watch extra film after practice with your teammates, then make sure you’re there. We can hold each other accountable to be true to our principles, and that integrity can spread from one person to the next.

  “Trust. My last coach, Marty Schottenheimer, used to say, ‘Trust is the cornerstone of every meaningful relationship.’ You have to be able to trust your teammate. Your teammate has to be able to trust you, and you have to earn that trust and respect every day. And so in everything you do, you have to build that relationship, that trust. You have to give your teammate a reason to believe in you, so make sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. And make sure you’re doing it the right way.

  “And finally, humility. This really sums up the meaning of teamwork. President Harry Truman said, ‘It is amazing how much you can accomplish in life if you don’t mind who gets the credit.’ Guys, if we approach this game and this season with a selfless mentality—doing whatever it takes to help this team, fulfilling the roles we’ve been given, completing our tasks without worrying about who gets the glory in the end—then we will truly be winners. And we will accomplish great things as a team.”

  We left that meeting fired up about the season and the team. In the days that followed, one of our team mottoes became “Keep the faith.” Faith in each other, faith in the process, faith in our fans, faith in our coaches. And for some of us, faith in the God who had made all of this possible in the first place. The Bible puts it this way: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1, NIV).

  Just One Game

  For lack of better terminology, we’d gotten our tails kicked in preseason. We’d managed to win the first game, but we’d lost the other three. Basically we had been whupped up one side and down the other.

  As we headed into the 2006 season, most critics wondered if we’d win even a handful of games. Pundits said our team would probably improve from 2005’s 3–13 record but that with a rookie coach like Sean Payton and a quarterback barely off the injured list, things didn’t look too promising. The Carolina Panthers were the favorite to win our division, and no one had much hope of us finishing anywhere but the cellar of the NFC South. Honestly, in the locker room, we were all looking at each other and saying, “Let’s just try to win one game, all right? Then we’ll worry about the rest. Just one game.”

  Still, we were on the lookout for something good to happen. Those commentators hadn’t really seen us yet. They didn’t know what we were capable of doing. We had a passion for the game, we had worked hard, and we genuinely cared about each other. We might not have been expecting a Super Bowl ring, but we were serious about winning, and we wanted to do whatever it took to make our goals become reality. And we knew you can’t reach a goal if you don’t set one.

  One of our goals was to return to our home field with pride. For the first time since Hurricane Katrina hit, we’d be playing at the Superdome again. We committed to do everything in our power to win that first game back there—and every home game, if possible. We were going to stand our ground at the Dome. No one was going to come into our house and push us around.

  Our offense set goals about being balanced with the run game and the pass game and taking care of the football. Our defense set goals for being aggressive and taking the ball away. We had team goals and individual goals—concrete ideas about how to move forward and put our beliefs and faith into action. We were motivated to win and give it our best. But inside each of us was a question: how long would it take to win just one game? And inside of me another question burned: how well would my shoulder hold up?

  We were about to find answers to those questions in Cleveland.

  Chapter Nine

  The Aints

  There was another blessing in disguise that came out of being forced to slow down during my recovery. In the midst of getting my arm back into shape, I also had time to learn more about the history and people of New Orleans. I suppose it’s possible to play for a team and not have their story impact you, but that’s not the kind of person I am. I like to immerse myself in the team’s history and culture and put everything happening now into context. When it comes to football, whether it’s for better or for worse, there’s no team with richer history than the New Orleans Saints.

  The Saints were organized in 1967. Since music is a big part of the city’s ethos, it made sense to name the team after the well-known jazz song “When t
he Saints Go Marching In.” Ironically, the team was formed on November 1, 1966, which also happens to be All Saints’ Day. In the four decades following, the team had a reputation around the league of being hard workers but not being able to put together many wins. They didn’t have any Super Bowl appearances, despite the talented players and coaches who had been part of the franchise over the years. But to me, out of all the players in the club’s history, the one name that rose above the others was Archie Manning.

  Archie played with the Saints for ten full seasons after getting drafted out of Ole Miss in 1971. Sadly, his teams didn’t win a lot of games. In fact, during Archie’s best season with the Saints, the team only went 8–8. Despite that, he went to the Pro Bowl twice and garnered many awards for his outstanding play.

  But Archie Manning is more than a football player. He’s an outstanding citizen of New Orleans and an exemplary humanitarian. Archie has made his home here and has supported the team over the years. I was told early on that none of the Saints players since Archie have ever lived in the Garden District or Uptown, where we bought our home. He and his wife, Olivia, welcomed us to town with open arms.

  “Hey, anything you need, let us know,” Archie said.

  He was true to his word. If I needed to know where to take Brittany for a nice night out, Archie gave me guidance. He and Olivia are such classy people, and as soon as we arrived in the city, they extended us an invitation to dinner at their house. They were role models to us in reaching out to the community, as they were integral to New Orleans’s rebuilding efforts after Katrina. Their presence alone gives people hope and a sense of pride in their city. They raised three sons who grew up cheering for the Saints and have deep roots in this area.