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Saving graceDrew Brees has helped rebuild the Saints and their city, now it's their turn
 By David Fleming
ESPN The Magazine
A Conversation with Drew Brees Dave Fleming interviews Drew Brees
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A Conversation with Drew Brees
This column appears in the January 25 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
Drew Brees places his foot on the end zone line, looks out across the dark, cavernous practice field in front of him and shivers at the unfamiliar feeling in his stomach.
Just 18 hours earlier, the Saints were upset at home by the hapless Bucs. As a result, instead of possibly getting today off, Brees and his teammates line up shoulder-to-shoulder for the one thing they dread most: Monday-morning wind sprints -- in this case, 100-yard striders, 10 of them, at a pace between a jog and a sprint. Brees usually owns this drill; after crossing the line first (always), he'll bolt an extra 10 yards, tap the next downfield marker with his foot and sprint back to the start, long before most of the other Saints arrive. But right now, New Orleans' record-breaking QB is tired and sore, and the field in front of him seems to stretch out endlessly to the horizon.
As the players quietly ready themselves, the coaching staff strolls onto the field. On some level, this is the most important moment of the Saints' season. How will a team that was once chasing perfection respond to its first taste of adversity, with the playoffs looming? Whatever the answer is, it will come from the captain of the offense. Many people think Brees saved New Orleans when he signed here in 2006. Brees insists it's the other way around, and he sees every game as his chance to return the favor.
A whistle cracks the cold silence.
The mass of bodies pushes forward, together, off the line. Brees moves with them, slowly.
Let's finally call Drew Brees exactly what he is: one of the NFL's all-time great passers. In 2009, he became the second player in league history (after Peyton Manning) to throw for 4,000 yards in four consecutive seasons. He also set the NFL record for completion percentage (70.6%), while finishing with a league-best 109.6 QB rating. But nothing is more impressive than the way Brees has transformed the Aints. This was a franchise with one playoff win in its first 39 seasons, a team that had turned the brown paper bag into a fan fashion statement. Now the top-seeded Saints are the NFL's most explosive and entertaining team.
Brees has accomplished all this despite standing a shade under six feet -- a "handicap" that left him overlooked for much of his football career, dating back to his high school days in Austin, Texas. His parents divorced when he was in elementary school, and he and his younger brother lived with their mother, Mina Brees, an attorney. Mina's father, Ray Akins, is a legendary Texas prep football coach, and her brother, Marty Akins, was a standout QB at Texas from 1975 to 1977. When Drew was a sophomore benchwarmer at Westlake High, Mina appealed to that heritage while talking him out of quitting football. "Never give up," she said at the time. "That's our family motto."
 Tom DipaceDrew Brees prepares to lead the Saints -- and their city -- out of the tunnel.
Brees got his shot the next year and responded by going 28 0 1 as a starter while leading his team to the 1996 Texas 5A state title. But that only kicked off a pattern that left him feeling unmoored for the next decade: results followed by rejection. He wasn't courted by Texas or any other major school in his home state, so he landed at Joe Tiller's fledgling Purdue program. There, Brees broke all the Big Ten passing records, then in the draft fell to San Diego in the second round of the 2001 draft after running a 4.77 40 at the combine and measuring nearly two inches below his listed height of 6'1".
By the end of his fifth season with the Chargers, height be damned, Brees was a Pro Bowl passer and less than 40 minutes away from reaching free agency and a massive payday. But late in the first half of the season finale against Denver, 320-pound defensive tackle Gerard Warren crushed the QB, dislodging his shoulder like a turkey wing at Thanksgiving. Brees had damaged his rotator cuff and suffered an unheard-of 360° tear of his labrum. Labrum tears typically require three or four surgical anchors; Brees needed 11. "The last game of the season, no contract -- it's the worst thing that could ever happen," he says.
Concerned about his recovery, and with bonus baby Philip Rivers waiting in the wings, the Chargers lowballed Brees with an offer that essentially amounted to backup money. The open market was even less hospitable. Only Miami and New Orleans showed any interest, and the best the Dolphins were offering was a wait-and-see approach while flirting with their eventual choice, Daunte Culpepper. The Saints, at least, flew Brees in. It was six months after Hurricane Katrina, and the 3 13 team had just hired a new coach, Dallas assistant Sean Payton, who specialized in coaching QBs. In Brees, Payton saw what many scouts still couldn't, someone with the ferocity, drive and work ethic of two men. New Orleans put an offer on the table: a six-year, $60 million contract with $10 million guaranteed in the first year.
Still holding out hope that the Dolphins would come around, Brees didn't jump at the deal. Then, he says, fate intervened. While Payton was driving Brees around New Orleans, the coach took a wrong turn off I-10 and got lost for 45 minutes in some of the worst parts of the ravaged city. The air still reeked of raw sewage, and mountainous piles of debris dotted a landscape straight out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. At some point during their wanderings, Brees felt a calling. "I realized the city, the Saints and me, we all had something to rebuild -- and we could all do it together," he says. "It was a defining moment of my life."
 Nigel Parry for ESPN The MagazineDrew Brees isn't this relaxed on the field.
Brees accepted the team's offer, then he and his wife, Brittany, moved into a storm-damaged 100-year-old home in the historic Uptown section of New Orleans. For the first month or so afterward, fans left brownies, biscuits and even gumbo on their front porch. The Brees Dream Foundation, in turn,has raised $1.8 million to help rebuild parks, playgrounds and schools, including the athletic complex at Lusher Charter School. "We came together when both sides desperately needed someone to believe in them," says Kathy Riedlinger, principal and CEO of Lusher. Adds Brees: "The strong sense of faith in this city makes you think this is destiny, that we're going to achieve what we set out to achieve. It's only a matter of time."
For the Saints, that time is now. After a magical run to the 2006 NFC title game, New Orleans got soft on defense and one-dimensional on offense and failed to make the playoffs the next two years. On the first day of off-season workouts in 2009, Brees announced a new team slogan, complete with engraved plastic wristbands: "Finish Strong." Then came the speech. Every day. Every practice. Every rep. Give everything you have, until the very end. Just about anybody except Peyton Manning or Tom Brady would get heckled out of the building for such a Rudy-like sapfest, but the Saints ate it up because Brees so thoroughly lives what he speaks. "That dude is a beast, an animal," says guard Carl Nicks. "His drive for perfection is contagious. If he told me to jump off a cliff in order to win a game, I'd do it. I would do it."
Nicks recalls a practice in June when Brees completed 10 straight passes, missed on the 11th and screamed "F -- !" loud enough to make people on the next field jump. Teammates occasionally sneak into the weight room to watch Brees jump rope like a maniac. The QB himself likes to end each day by watching film ... of his practice throws. It's no coincidence that the two things that set Brees apart as a passer are his flashbulb-fast decision-making and his downfield accuracy, rare abilities that can be developed solely through mind-numbing levels of repetition and study.
Cut to the Saints' Week 12 rout of New England. With a 10-7 lead, Brees is on his own 25 when he glances to his right and sees Patriots cornerback Jonathan Wilhite lined up on wideout Devery Henderson's inside shoulder, even though Wilhite's deep safety help is in the middle of the field. Only someone who had locked himself in the film room would recognize such a miniscule tell for a corner blitz. Sure enough, Wilhite charged upfield at the snap. Brees kept his eyes glued on the left side of the field and pump-faked once in that direction to move the safety away from Henderson. By the time Brees delivered the ball, Henderson was so wide open he could have driven a Mardi Gras float to the end zone. "Drew is an absolute machine," says Saints linebacker Scott Fujita. "He's so intense and driven, it's creepy almost."
Brees simply refuses to be distracted or deterred, even by personal tragedy. In 2001, when he made the decision not to hire his mother as his agent, their relationship became "nonexistent," he says. (Brees would not talk about her for this story.) In 2006, when Mina ran for a seat on the Texas court of appeals, Brees ordered her to remove his likeness from her ad campaign. She complied, but the incident hurt her image and she lost the election by a few percentage points. Last summer, the Texas attorney general subpoenaed Mina's business records after she had allegedly sent letters to prominent restaurants in Austin and Houston informing them they had lost the legal right to use their business names but could get them back by paying her up to $25,000. On Aug. 7, four days before the deadline to produce the documents, Mina committed suicide by taking an overdose of prescription pills. She was 59.
On Aug. 16, shortly after practice, Brees and a handful of teammates used the Saints' private plane to fly to Austin for the funeral. He returned to camp a few days later, when he addressed the issue, briefly, during a team meeting. "It was good to get back to work and get my mind back on football," Brees told the media upon returning to the team. "It was a long weekend. A tough weekend. But this is a big part of my family, too."
Brees felt a calling when he drove around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. "I realized the city, the Saints and me, we all had something to rebuild."
On Aug. 22, Brees started the Saints' second preseason game. The team then rolled off 13 straight regular-season wins before losing three in a row heading into the playoffs, including a nail-biter against Dallas in Week 15 and the finale against Carolina, when Brees and several other starters rested. But it was the Week 16 overtime loss to Tampa that had the most potential to upset the Saints' good vibes. After the game, sensing the team's mood wasn't right, Brees walked to the center of the locker room and raised his hand. Teammates claim he has a knack for saying the perfect thing at the exact time people need to hear it. This was one of those times. "I was talking to a mentor of mine the other day," Brees began. "He told me sometimes we get so caught up in the prize that we forget the process. So let's forget about the prize for now and refocus on the process." Just like that the oxygen returned to the room.
Leaving the Superdome that day, Brees was stopped by a fan offering rosary beads that had been specially blessed for the Saints. He added the gift to a growing pile of religious trinkets he's been handed this season, including prayer cards, crosses, Mardi Gras doubloons (Brees was recently named King of Bacchus for the festivities) and medallions of St. Peter and St. Michael. There are also T-shirts circulating in New Orleans that say "BREESUS."
Those artifacts, and the symbiotic connection between the quarterback and his city, are still on Brees' mind the next morning when the Saints line up for their Monday penance. Ten strides into his first 100-yard sprint, Brees is actually thinking about dialing it down a bit. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he sees a receiver moving to the front. Instinctively, the QB kicks into high gear, pulling the entire team along with him. "In this town, you're playing for so much more than yourself," he says later. "So I wouldn't ever forgive myself for not doing all the right things. I just couldn't not run, you know? I'm not built that way."
Out on the field, Brees sprints through the end zone, touches the back line, pivots and leaps back to the front, eagerly awaiting the next whistle. The message couldn't be more clear. He still has 900 yards to go, his work just beginning.
David Fleming is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. |
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