Coming Back Stronger (21 page)

As professional athletes, we can sometimes get wrapped up in things like goals and records and championships and trophies. We’re concerned about contracts and bonuses and the business side of the game. We can pay a lot of attention to the media and all the publicity. But what really helps keep us grounded is when we hear from some of our most special fans.

Devan Muller was a little five-year-old with a big smile who came to a Saints practice in the 2007 off-season. He had gone through a major heart surgery, and things weren’t going well for him. Through the Make-A-Wish Foundation, he was given the chance to have one of his dreams come true. He was a huge Saints fan, and his wish was to attend a Saints practice. He wanted to meet some of the players and throw the ball with me. So we brought Devan into the team meeting room during an off-season practice, took him out to the field, and gave him a chance to step into the huddle. He even got to follow alongside us while we ran drills. Afterward Devan stayed out on the field, and the two of us played catch and talked. I’ve never seen a kid grin so big for so long.

We’ve had the opportunity to meet other kids through Make-A-Wish, and one boy even did an honorary coin toss in the middle of the field on game day. We’ll do whatever we can to let those kids live out a dream. Without fail, they’re more of an inspiration to me than I could ever be to them.

We’ve gotten letters from parents saying, “Our son passed away this last week, but what he was constantly talking about until the end was the opportunity to come and be with you and meet the team. It was a dream come true for us. Thank you for giving that joy and happiness to our child.” Letters like that from a hurting parent put everything in perspective. You have a brush with one of those special little guys, and you realize how fortunate you really are. You also realize that others around you are going through tough times—challenges that most people can’t even imagine.

There are also success stories, where parents write and say, “My son is doing great. He was given a couple of months to live, but now he’s doing well and the doctors think he might pull through it. We think when he came to practice and threw the ball with you, it was a huge turning point. It gave him something to look forward to, and he wants to come back again when he’s cancer-free.”

These kids may be our fans, but they are our heroes. Some of them might not have much time left on earth, but they’re fighting every day to live life to the fullest. They motivate us as a team to be all we can be—a team worthy of the special kids who want to be close to us.

I think a lot about the term calling. Brittany and I felt that when we came to New Orleans. I sensed that God was bringing us here for a reason. Most people think they’re called somewhere because of what they can do for a community or a cause. But to me, it’s also because that community can help you along where you need it. The truth is, as much as Brittany and I have invested in New Orleans in terms of football and the foundation, this city has given it all back to us tenfold. I will always be thankful—to the people of this city and to the God who called me here.

Building a Championship Team

Although my shoulder had made it through the 2006 season just fine and had gotten stronger every week, I still felt there was a lot of progress to be made before the 2007 season rolled around. Dr. Andrews had said it would be at least an eight-month rehab process just to get back on the field, but that it would take about two years before I would feel “normal” again. I wasn’t sure what he meant at the time, but I was beginning to understand. I kept working on strengthening and conditioning exercises during the off-season. I had moments when I was throwing the ball as well as I’d ever thrown it, but it was taking time to become as consistent as I wanted to be. It sounds weird to say that after coming off the best season of my career, but even after all the time and maintenance I’d put into my shoulder that year, I knew there was still room for improvement. The retooling of my throwing motion during rehab had made a big difference in my efficiency and the way my arm felt. I knew that with more time and repetition, my shoulder would only get stronger.

My goal for each year is simple: to be better than I was the year before. You can’t always look at the stats to make that conclusion, either. Sometimes you are only able to determine your progress by digging deep and evaluating yourself. As I looked ahead to 2007, I was building from the baseline of where I’d finished the season in 2006. That year I felt like I became stronger each game. Now I felt it was time to focus on raising the bar, setting my sights a little higher.

As difficult as it is to rebuild a shoulder, building a great team is a tougher task. Creating a championship team is even more challenging. To explain how we rose to the top, I have to go back to 2006 and revisit some decisions that were made about me and the other players on the team.

New Orleans certainly had other options for quarterback in 2006. There were other healthy free agents they could have chosen, or they could have stayed the course with Aaron Brooks, their quarterback at the time. They could have drafted Heisman Trophy winner Matt Leinart from USC, or if Leinart wasn’t available, they could have picked Vince Young or Jay Cutler. They knew there were no guarantees that I would be able to rehab and make a complete comeback. But despite the odds stacked against me, New Orleans believed in me. I responded to their belief, and it propelled me to exceed all expectations.

Some people still ask me what would have happened if I had gone to Miami instead, but I don’t like to spend time looking back. Because of the way things worked out after the injury, I had the chance to come to New Orleans and make a difference. I believe that was part of God’s plan, and I embraced it with all my heart.

There were other hard decisions the Saints had to make. When Sean Payton got to New Orleans, he knew they had to start over and build the organization up the right way. He convinced the owner, Tom Benson, and the general manager, Mickey Loomis, that the team really needed to bring in guys who would help them build a new foundation and a new core. Together they worked at changing the attitude and culture of the team by bringing in hardworking players who were committed and willing to fight through whatever challenges came their way.

Building a championship team is not an overnight process. It’s not all that different from the reconstruction after Katrina. You have to go through some pain and tearing down before you can get to work on the rebuilding process. Coach Payton knew he had to make some tough decisions about the type of players we didn’t want for the year ahead. The guys from the 2005 season had lived on the road, away from their families for long stretches. They practiced at high schools, stayed in different hotels and apartments, and had no place to call home. It’s easy to lose direction and stray from the course when you don’t have a solid foundation of home and family. These tense conditions caused a great deal of division among the team, and I have heard players refer to this frustration as “Katrina anger.” Unfortunately, that anger brought out the worst in some guys. It became obvious that there were certain attitudes and personalities from the previous season that didn’t fit with the vision they were trying to build. Those players would not be there next year.

For the most part, the guys who were brought in weren’t well-paid free agents. At the time, this was not an easy place to attract high-level players. Instead, a lot of the new recruits were castaways. They’d been told by other organizations that they didn’t have what it took to remain on the team. When they got to New Orleans, they were given a home.

Even though 2006 started out as a rebuilding year for us on all levels, it ended up as a storybook year—the best in franchise history up to that point. We made incredible strides toward building a culture and an atmosphere that was conducive to winning. After we made it to the NFC Championship Game in 2006, that put the pressure on in 2007. We really felt like we could make it to the Super Bowl. We had the talent, we had the confidence, and we believed all the pieces were in place to win everything.

However, team building and personnel are only part of the process. Ironically, handling success can be just as tough as handling adversity—maybe tougher. When you get knocked down, you learn to get back up. Everybody knows that intuitively. When you lose, you learn and grow from the mistakes and figure out how to overcome them. But when you succeed, you have to realize that just because you did it once doesn’t make it any easier the second time. It’s human nature to relax and feel entitled. If you want to win consistently, you have to fight that tendency with everything in you. When you reach the top of the mountain, don’t forget how hard it was to get there in the first place.

In the NFL, each year means starting over. Every season there’s a new team, a new set of challenges, new dynamics, and a new opportunity to grow together. Did we have what it took to handle the success of the previous season?

We began the 2007 season with a game against Indianapolis. According to a new tradition, the Super Bowl–winning team from the previous year hosts the Thursday night NFL Kickoff game to mark the start of the season. We had missed playing the Colts by a game the previous year and felt like we were ready to take on the champs. It was a good game for the first half, and at halftime the score was tied 10–10.

We lost 41–10. To put it mildly, we had a rough second half. It was beyond disappointing. We were embarrassed. Humiliated. That was not the New Orleans Saints on the field. We didn’t remember the last time we had been beaten like that.

Convinced that the Indianapolis game had been a fluke, we headed to Tampa Bay with fresh confidence. Still, we knew this wouldn’t be a cakewalk. Anytime you’re playing a divisional opponent, you have to be ready for a fight. We had beaten the Buccaneers twice in 2006, so they had that extra motivation from the previous season. Going into that game, all of us were in the same frame of mind: we were going to turn things around. No losing two in a row. We were going to show everyone the real Saints team.

We ended up losing 31–14. At one point in the game we were down 28–0. Another embarrassment.

Our expectation was to make it to the Super Bowl that year, and here we had lost the first two games of the season. But that was our problem. We were thinking about the Super Bowl. We weren’t thinking about winning one game at a time and then putting our energy into winning the next one.

After getting a whupping those first two games, we came back to the Superdome for Monday Night Football against Tennessee. Our attitude was Okay, we’re really going to turn things around. Now is the time to step up. Stop the bleeding.

The Titans were a good team that year—in fact, they ended up making it to the playoffs. The final score showed what they were made of. We lost 31–14 for the second week in a row, and we were sitting at 0–3 going into our bye week.

During the bye week each player self-scouts and evaluates. It’s when we consider what we’ve done well and where we’ve come up short. When we looked at our play from the season so far, we had to be honest and say, “We haven’t done anything well.” We decided to wipe the slate clean and start again. The rest during that week was good for us—physically and mentally—and we thought we had some things figured out about how to move ahead.

Some fans would probably turn on their team at 0–3. The boobirds would come out, and you’d hear them as you went into the tunnel. But our fans were the opposite. They kept encouraging us, and their attitude was Look, we know you’re playing hard; we know you’re trying. We’re still here for you; we’re still pulling for you. They reciprocated the support we gave them in the hard times after Katrina. There’s a unique back-and-forth between our team and New Orleans that’s hard to explain. We gave them strength when they needed it, and they gave it right back to us. We help each other fight through whatever we’re facing.

They were behind us when we faced Carolina the next week. But that game turned out to be a heartbreaker for all of us. We were leading in the fourth quarter, deep in Carolina territory, and we couldn’t get the ball in the end zone. We lined up for an easy field goal, but it was blocked. Carolina came back to tie us, and as time expired, they kicked a fifty-two-yard field goal. They eked out a win, 16–13.

Now we were 0–4 for the first time since 1996. Numbers aren’t everything to me, but in those first four games, I had thrown only one touchdown . . . and nine interceptions. Those are stats you don’t like to remember. As we headed off the field after the Carolina game, the air went out of the Dome. We’d been to the championship game the year before, and here we were bringing up the rear in our division. We were facing a huge amount of adversity again—but this time it was because we had dug our own hole. We were pretty shell-shocked by the whole thing and wondered what had happened. We were losing confidence in our own abilities.

I had thrown only eleven interceptions during the whole 2006 season, and I threw nine in just the first four games of 2007. Everybody trusted me to take care of the ball. I had let them down. I knew that was not me. That was not the type of player I strove to be. I wanted my team to be able to count on me.

Before the Carolina game, one of our receivers, David Patten, had pulled me aside. DP, or the Big Chief, as we all called him, had been signed by the Saints that year from Washington and had been a key part of New England’s offense for all three of their Super Bowl wins. He was a veteran player who had seen a lot, and he became a great friend and mentor for me over the next two years. In that moment he showed me some tough love. He told me that people were saying I had lost confidence, and he felt like I needed to step up a bit more as a leader and as the quarterback of our team. This lit a fire under me that still burns today. The fact is, he was right—I had lost a little confidence and was beginning to put undue pressure on myself. Had 2006 been a fluke? I was so desperate for us to succeed that I was trying to make it happen as opposed to letting it happen. I was trying to force every play instead of just feeling and reacting to the game. When you hit a stretch like that in your career, it’s vital to focus on the little things and fall back on the fundamentals of the game. If you can’t do that, you can’t play. Trust the process, trust your routine, and trust your preparation—that’s what gives you the confidence to relax and play at a high level on game day. I needed the Big Chief to remind me of that.

The next Sunday we played at Seattle, and they were heavily favored. We scored three touchdowns in the second quarter and won 28–17 in front of a national audience. Just what we needed to get back on track.

The next week we came out on top against Atlanta and continued the streak by beating San Francisco. In the next game we faced Jacksonville, another eventual playoff team and heavy favorite. We put up forty-one points and won. That meant we’d won four in a row. We’d evened out our record, 4–4. I remember guys from the media asking, “Who wants to play the New Orleans Saints now?” We fed on that kind of talk, and our confidence rose a little. We were down but not out. We’d been hit, but we were fighting back. The Superdome was rocking, and people were fired up. In the last twelve games I played some of the best football of my career, throwing twenty-seven touchdowns to nine interceptions. Quite a change from the one to nine ratio from the first four weeks. I was also approaching the two-year mark since the surgery, and my arm was feeling stronger than ever, even before the injury.

Unfortunately, though, the hole we’d carved for ourselves was pretty deep. In order to stay in contention for the playoffs, we had to win almost every game left in the season. It was not meant to be. Despite our best efforts to recover from a bad start, we finished the year at 7–9, missing the postseason entirely.

Like it or not, you can learn a lot more from losing than you typically do from winning. Our record may not have been pretty that year, but we came away with some valuable lessons about not taking anything for granted and about finishing well. In that sense, 2007 and 2008 were very similar—both seasons had high expectations, and both seasons were disappointments. But there were foundations being laid that we couldn’t see . . . yet.

Ha-ooh!

Each year I’ve tried to do something new during the off-season to inspire my teammates and help bring us together. The chants we do during the pregame are not for anyone but us, so we don’t talk about it to the media or explain it until after the season is over. The chant may come to me while Brittany and I are traveling or while I’m in the car or at some other random moment. Or I’ll read something that really resonates with me or hear a story that sparks an idea. From there, I figure out a way to communicate it so the whole team can take part and then get feedback from other leaders on the team about how to tweak it to fit our profile.

As we were getting ready for the 2008 season, I felt like we needed something fresh; we needed to shake things up a bit. I’ve heard that the definition of insanity is to continue to do the same things the same way and expect a different outcome. We’d been doing the same thing the last two years, and it was time to let the guys know that this was a new team, aiming for new results. We’d had a disappointing year in 2007, and we didn’t want to fall short of our ultimate goal again. We were switching gears, and 2008 was a new year and another chance for a fresh start.

I thought about it a long time. How could I bring something different, unexpected, and a little surprising to help the team? It clicked with me that the pregame chant was the perfect avenue. Usually a quarterback isn’t doing that type of thing—it tends to be the defensive players who take the emotional lead. They’re traditionally the ones who get in people’s faces and butt heads to get everyone fired up before the game. I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum—in terms of both position and personality. I tend to slow things down and stay calm, cool, and poised. A quarterback can’t let the emotion of the moment affect his methodical, precise movements. But that year I felt like, as a leader for our team, I needed to get outside my comfort zone. I needed to be the one to get in there with the guys and get them hyped up for the game.

A movie called 300 was released about that time. It was loosely based on the Battle of Thermopylae, which was fought in 480 BC. I was inspired by that film, particularly by the scene where the Spartans are marching to the sea to meet the Persians. They come across the Arcadians, another tribe of Greeks willing to join the fight. These men make a fierce presence—there’s a huge crowd of them, and they are decked out with weapons and helmets. But the leader of the Arcadians seems disappointed that there are only three hundred Spartans. He says he thought Sparta would at least match their commitment in terms of the number of soldiers.

In response, the Spartan king Leonidas points at one of the Arcadian warriors and asks his profession. “I’m a potter.” He asks another, who responds that he is a sculptor. The third is a blacksmith.

Leonidas turns to his warriors and says, “Spartans! What is your profession?”

As one they hold up their spears and say, “Ha-ooh! Ha-ooh! Ha-ooh!”

“You see, old friend,” Leonidas says to the Arcadian commander, “I brought more soldiers than you did.”

I loved the mentality of the Spartans: We are soldiers. That’s our identity. That’s what we were trained to do. And we won’t waste our time looking at who or what we don’t have; we choose to look at what we do have.

I will never relate football to war, nor will I refer to football players as soldiers. The men and women of our military risk their lives every day in the line of duty, and we play a game. But at the same time, our game is violent. So you’d better have something to get your mind right before stepping onto that field.

Here’s the chant I came up with based on that scene:

I would say, “Who are we?”

And the response from my team was “Saints!”

I would repeat, “Who are we?”

“Saints!”

Then I’d say, “Are we ready?”

The team would respond, “Ha-ooh!”

“Are we ready?”

“Ha-ooh!”

Then I would repeat the whole thing again: “Who are we?”

“Saints!”

“Who are we?”

“Saints!”

“Are we ready?”

“Ha-ooh!”

“Are we ready?”

“Ha-ooh!”

Another pivotal scene in the film shows a Persian messenger wearing the skulls of dead enemies. He basically tells the Spartans they have to surrender or they’ll all be killed. King Leonidas has a problem with that, and he pulls out his sword and points it at the messenger, who backs up toward a gaping well. The messenger says, “This is blasphemy!”

King Leonidas screams, “This is Sparta!” and kicks the messenger into the hole.

So to our pregame chant I added, “This is New Orleans!”

And the team responded, “Ha-ooh! Ha-ooh! Ha-ooh!”

That routine got us ready to play each week. It started the adrenaline pumping, and it gave us the mind-set that we were a band of brothers who wouldn’t back down from anyone or anything.

To be honest, it felt strange at first, motivating my team that way—it’s much more loud and emotional than I tend to be. But then again, in order to accomplish something you’ve never accomplished before, you have to do something you’ve never done before. You have to take it to the next level. You have to let go of your security blanket and take a chance.

This was a small thing, but when it comes down to it, it’s all the little things added together that lead to victory. The road to a Super Bowl win is a process of bringing a team together and accomplishing your goals, step-by-step. We were teammates, bound by the blood, sweat, and tears of many years of struggle, and we were ready to fight. We’d go onto the field, stick together no matter what, and do all we could to defeat a worthy opponent. Ha-ooh!