Coming Back Stronger (3 page)

A Few Good Men

Many people would define the “good life” as one that’s free of pain and hardship and heartache. But I’ve learned that adversity is actually an opportunity. It’s a gift, though it may not look like it in the moment. The difficulties life throws at you can be a doorway to something better—something you hadn’t even dreamed was possible.

After I tore my ACL on a fateful day in December 1995, I had surgery, which resulted in my having to wear a knee brace and walk with crutches for six weeks. I felt like I was at a dead end—or at least, had hit a huge roadblock. But at the same time, something unexpected was happening internally. The injury had stirred me up inside, and I was filled with questions: Do I have a purpose? Is there a reason I’m on this earth? Do I have a destiny, or is everything just chance?

I remember hobbling with my dad into First Baptist Church of Austin, Texas. Usually I didn’t pay much attention during the sermon. I would nod off or elbow my brother or check out the girls. I had been taught from a young age that church was important, but like most sixteen-year-olds, I didn’t see how it connected with real life. Church was just something you did on Sundays and maybe Wednesday nights if you didn’t have practice.

For some reason the message that day wasn’t normal. I had a different feeling as I listened. And this time I was really listening.

I was sitting in the pew with my crutches next to me and my knee brace on, thinking about the future. It had been about two weeks since the surgery, and I was lost in all the questions. I wasn’t only thinking about my football future—I was thinking about the direction I wanted to go in life. This injury had stopped me from pursuing my sports dream, and it was this crisis that created a defining moment for the rest of my life.

As I sat there thinking about those deep, huge questions that everyone faces at some point, the pastor, Dr. Browning Ware, was preaching about what God desires us to be. As an illustration in his message, he mentioned the movie A Few Good Men. He said that God is looking for a few good men to carry on his teachings and to walk the walk with Christ. That’s when the lightbulb came on for me. He’s talking to me. I want to be one of God’s few good men.

It was an epiphany. Life finally made sense—this was not some random existence here on earth. God had a plan for me, and he wanted me to be in a relationship with him. If I would cultivate that relationship, good things would spill over to others in my life. I knew I wanted to be one of God’s few good men no matter what happened with my sports career.

At that point I didn’t know if I would ever play quarterback again. I didn’t have a clue what the future would hold. But I knew that no matter what happened, I wanted to do things the right way—to please God and live my life for him.

I didn’t see a vision, and lightning bolts didn’t shoot out of the ceiling. I didn’t walk forward at the end of the service either. But there was something going on inside of me—something I can only explain as God moving in. A calmness came over my life because I finally understood that God had a plan for me. He was in control. I still approached every day with determination, and I tried to use the gifts and talents he had given me to be the best I could be at everything. But in the end, I knew it wasn’t about my striving and clawing my way to the top. I knew God would take care of me. And I knew I had to trust that whatever path he led me down was the path I was meant to be on.

This belief immediately carried over into my daily approach to life as I was propelled into my studies and my rehab. All that pressure I used to feel started to disappear as I learned to give it my best and then commit the rest to the Lord. I couldn’t escape the sense that God’s plan for me was to come back stronger and lead my team again.

When I went down with the ACL injury, I was six feet, 170 pounds—skin and bones. I had a bum knee. I was on crutches. In other words, I looked pretty pathetic. But I began rehab, throwing myself into it every day after school.

Before I knew it, I was going into my senior year of high school, which is when colleges ask for commitments from players. But my prospects looked bleak. I was coming off the ACL injury, plus I was a little smaller than most quarterbacks—not the prototype a lot of schools are looking for. Texas A&M and the University of Texas already had their quarterbacks. Baylor said no thanks. TCU and Texas Tech were a no go. Rice ran the option, and that wasn’t my strength. SMU was still struggling to recover from the “death penalty” they’d received from the NCAA ten years earlier for recruiting violations. Every school in Texas seemed closed to me.

Six months after my surgery, I was fully healed and once again starting as quarterback. Because of the weights and rigorous training, I now weighed 195 pounds. I had gained twenty-five pounds of muscle, so I was physically much stronger. But for me the real difference wasn’t in my body but in my head and my heart. I had a new sense of confidence because I knew I had worked hard to fight through the injury. I’d pushed myself past limits I’d previously thought I could not go beyond. I was physically, mentally, and spiritually tougher because of what I had endured in order to get to that point.

We won every game in the regular season, and we were now in the playoffs, preparing for our fourteenth game of the year. When we were on the practice field, our offensive coordinator, Neal LaHue, approached me.

“Drew, is anybody recruiting you?”

“No, Coach.”

He just looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face, as if to say, They don’t know what they’re missing, kid.

I laughed. “I’m not worried. Anyway, I’m going to get a baseball scholarship.” I still had my heart set on baseball.

We won the next two games and went 16–0, winning the first 5A state championship in the history of our school. That season was a turning point for me. A year earlier, before I’d torn my ACL, I was just a high school kid whose world revolved around whatever sport was in season and who I would ask to the prom. At the time, I’d thought my ACL tear was the worst-case scenario. Now I realized that injury was really the best thing that could have happened to me. I was stronger. I was more focused. And best of all, I was starting to understand more about God and how he wanted to lead me.

I might have been young, but I knew what had gotten me to that point. And it certainly was not my own doing. It was the fact that God was with me every step of the way. I had a strong belief that no matter what happened, things were going to work out for the greater good. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a truth I was going to need to cling to in the months and years ahead.

After having a perfect season my senior year, a few teams started showing interest in me. But by now it was December, and most schools already had their commitments from players. I ended up being recruited by a few Ivy League schools, along with Purdue and Kentucky.

Purdue and Kentucky both had new coaching staffs, hired at the end of the 1996 season. Joe Tiller moved to Purdue from Wyoming, and Hal Mumme came from Valdosta State to Kentucky. Both coaches ran spread offenses, so they needed a quarterback who could pass it around. They had to throw together a recruiting class in a month and a half, and I was one of the few quarterbacks who hadn’t signed on with other schools.

The very week after Coach LaHue had shaken his head about my not getting recruited, Purdue and Kentucky sent scouts to Westlake—to the same practice. David White, our receiver and one of my best friends in high school, leaned over and whispered, “They’re here to see you.”

I shrugged him off. “That’s pretty cool. By the way, where’s Purdue?” For all I knew, Purdue was an Ivy League school. Princeton, Purdue . . . it all sounded close enough.

The truth is, I was still thinking about a baseball scholarship. I didn’t want to get too excited about football because I figured I’d focus on baseball in college and then work my way up to the major leagues. Even after I signed with Purdue, my hope was that I would get drafted really high in baseball or receive a baseball scholarship to a Texas school. After it became clear that neither of those things would happen, I figured I was truly meant to go to Purdue.

I took trips to Brown, Kentucky, and Purdue. After doing some research, I wound up choosing Purdue because of its academic reputation (some call it the Ivy League of the Midwest) and also because of the opportunity to play in the best conference in the country at the time: the Big Ten. Plus, I loved Joe Tiller and his spread offense and knew it would be a perfect fit. True, it was a basketball school . . . until we made it a football school.

I was part of a recruiting class that was able to sign only fifteen players. We were considered the last-place recruiting class in the Big Ten. The dregs. The bottom of the barrel. Whatever was picked over by everyone else. But instead of getting upset about the disrespect, we used that label to bring us together as a group. We said to each other, “Nobody’s giving us a chance. But by the time we leave here, we’re going to be Big Ten champions, and we’re taking Purdue to the Rose Bowl.”

The nation was going to be surprised at what could come out of West Lafayette, Indiana.

Moving from high school football to the Big Ten was a big jump, although playing 5A football in Texas did help. They say adversity will either make you stronger or break you. If that’s true, the Big Ten will make you tough as nails . . . or it will tear you apart.

Purdue is a proud school with strong athletics and a respected academic tradition. Nearly every building on campus is red brick, and according to legend, benefactor John Purdue insisted that since he owned the local brickyard, all future university buildings must be built with red brick. Whatever the reason, it makes for a majestic atmosphere. Some of my greatest memories from my time there are walking across campus to the athletic facility after my last class on Fridays during football season. The week of homework and tests was over, and it was almost game time. There is no better time of year than autumn in the Midwest. As I strolled through campus, I could feel the cool, crisp air and the sunshine on my face as I admired the leaves changing to beautiful shades of red, orange, and yellow. The bell tower would chime a tune just as I crossed the engineering mall and hit the homestretch to the locker room.

All the teams I played with during my four years at Purdue had great leadership and tremendous team dynamics. We knew how to work hard, but we also knew how to have fun doing it. This was due in large part to Joe Tiller and the culture and attitude he created when he came to Purdue. He ran about twenty guys off the team in the spring of 1997, a lot like the military weeds out the weak links during boot camp. Coach Tiller had a couple of very simple rules that you were expected to follow: Do what you are supposed to do, when you are supposed to do it. And do it that way every time. He also emphasized that if you do things the right way, good things will happen to you. They might not happen today or tomorrow, but eventually they will.

Oh, and then there was the “golden rule,” at least Coach Tiller’s version: he who has all the gold makes all the rules. As long as you acknowledged this, you would be just fine. We all knew who the boss was. If you missed class, were late to a meeting or a workout, or disrespected authority, you would pay for it with a 6 a.m. workout or a “throw-up session,” as the players liked to call it. You ran so much or did so many up-downs and barrel rolls that throwing up was almost guaranteed. It was this leadership and discipline and fear of failure that allowed us to be as successful as we were those four years.

I vividly remember many exciting games from my time at Purdue, but there are a few that have left permanent marks on me. One of those was a game against Notre Dame, which I see as one of the defining moments of my college career.

I didn’t start for Purdue until my sophomore year, in 1998. The first game of the year was against USC in the Pigskin Classic. We lost that game after taking a halftime lead, then won against Rice and Central Florida. The fourth game of the season had us playing at Notre Dame. In a game against the Fighting Irish, you have all the storied tradition of Notre Dame football—“Touchdown Jesus,” the Golden Dome, the Gipper—and it was nationally televised on NBC. Purdue hadn’t beaten Notre Dame in South Bend in almost twenty-five years. It was the biggest game of my life.

My play in the first three games had been okay, but I still hadn’t convinced anyone that I was the quarterback of the future. There were questions about whether I could lead the Boilermakers to a Big Ten championship and a Rose Bowl.

Notre Dame was a highly ranked team at the time, not to mention the fact that they ended up in a Bowl Championship Series game at the end of that season. They also had an unbelievable defense. When I was a kid, I would watch games like this on TV and dream about being in that moment. Now that moment was here.

For the first fifty-eight minutes of the game, I played some of the best football I ever had. Unfortunately, a game is sixty minutes long. At halftime we were winning 24–14. I had completed seventeen of twenty-one passes for more than 200 yards and two touchdowns. We were rolling.

In the second half Notre Dame came back. We were up 30–28, and we had the ball in our territory. We basically needed only one first down to run out the clock. The Fighting Irish defense stuffed the first two run plays for no gain, and then we moved back five yards on a penalty. It was third and fifteen with about 1:50 on the clock. Jim Chaney, our offensive coordinator, called a pass play where I would roll out to the left and throw the ball to a receiver running a deep in route right into my vision. It’s not an easy pass—you have to time it well and stay balanced in order to deliver the ball accurately. But it was a play we’d run many times with success. If the pass was completed, we’d have a first down and the game would be over.

I rolled out, and wide receiver Randall Lane broke across the field in front of me as expected. The coverage was good, but I saw a window to complete the pass. As the ball left my hand, I could feel it come out a little high as I was attempting to elevate it over the head of a defender. Randall jumped for it, but the ball glanced off his fingertips and landed right in free safety Tony Driver’s hands. He ran the interception back to the five yard line. Our defense held, but the Irish kicked a field goal and took the lead, 31–30.

I was in shock. Because of my mistake, we had gone from being one play away from victory to being behind. Even if I hadn’t completed the pass, we would have punted, and our defense would have had a chance for a stop. Now we were losing. And it was my fault.

The game wasn’t over yet, though. We had less than a minute to get into field goal range, and our offense had been clicking the whole game. We still had a chance. We threw a pass on first down, but it fell incomplete. Then lightning struck again. On second down, I threw the ball a little high, and it bounced off my receiver’s fingertips. Another interception. Game over.

I knelt down on the field, unable to believe what had just happened. I had thrown two interceptions in the last two minutes, erasing the good play of the whole game. I headed into the locker room, still stunned, and sat at my locker. I looked around at the seniors and watched as tears ran from their eyes. We had worked so hard, and now here I was, the sophomore quarterback in his fourth start who had just lost the game for everybody. The first win on Notre Dame territory in twenty-five years had been in our grasp, and I had let everyone down. I felt awful.

I started wondering whether I was fit to play at Purdue. Do I belong here? Can I compete at this level? Fortunately I had friends who knew what I needed. That night I went out to eat with my two roommates, Ben Smith and Jason Loerzel. Jason was from Park Ridge, Illinois, and played linebacker. Ben was a quarterback from Nebraska who switched to free safety when he came to Purdue. We all came in during the same year and formed a bond, a brotherhood. We were from very different backgrounds and different parts of the country, but we were like glue.

Jason and Ben insisted we go to C Ray’s, a local restaurant with the best chicken wings in town. “You’re pretty miserable to be around right now,” they said. “Let’s order up some C Ray’s wings, and we’ll relax and let you vent.”

That’s what we did. Even though I was down, the wings were good. Still, I had trouble letting go of those last two minutes. I knew I was the reason we had lost. It’s one thing to start well, but you have to finish—you have to follow through. You have to be able to win the big one and deliver when the game is on the line. But as we talked through the feelings, I realized that for fifty-eight minutes in the biggest game of my life, I’d played some of my best football. There was so much pressure to perform in that game. I hadn’t finished well, but for fifty-eight minutes I’d showed I belonged on that field. That gave me confidence. The glass was half full. Find the positive out of every negative. That is what I always tried to do.

Jason and Ben helped get me out of my funk and focus on the next game, which was Minnesota at home. It was a misty day—foggy to the point where you almost couldn’t see the field from the press box. For home games the team stayed at the hotel in the Union. We’d get up in the morning and walk about a half mile to the stadium as a team. To everybody else that day may have seemed dreary, but for me it felt like there was energy in the air. It felt like a fresh start, and the mist was bringing in a brand-new opportunity. I was going to show people what I had inside. I wasn’t going to let the last two minutes of the Notre Dame game wreck my future.

That dinner at C Ray’s was a proverbial fork in the road for me. I realized I could focus on my mistakes and feel sorry for myself, or I could learn from those mistakes and use them as motivation to come back stronger. Under pressure, would I fold and disappear, or would I show everyone that when bad things happen, you fight? I wanted to prove to my team that they could count on me and that I was the guy who could lead them.

In the game against Minnesota, I went thirty-one for thirty-six, with 522 yards and six touchdowns, until Coach Tiller pulled me after the third quarter. We were winning the game 56–14 at the time, and he wanted to get the young guys some action. All those stats were school records, and we could have gone for the NCAA record books if we’d wanted to, but running up the score is not how you play the game. In reality, the outcome of the Notre Dame game wasn’t those two interceptions and the loss. It was the way it motivated me to play the next week—and helped me to turn a corner in my college career.

We went 9–4 that season and beat fourth-ranked Kansas State 37–34 in the Alamo Bowl. But we still hadn’t made it to the Rose Bowl. That had been my ultimate goal as an incoming freshman. I knew the road to get there would not be easy, but anything worth fighting for never is.