Originally Posted by
Jon Evans
I've long held that it's important to follow sports because we spend so much of our lives absorbing scripted entertainment that it's easy to start expecting life to follow the script - the meet-cute, the darkness just before the dawn, the happy ending, automatic success because you followed your dream. Real life isn't like that, and sports hammers that home. In sports, bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad people. People spend their lives working as hard as they can, chasing their dream, and they fail to ever make it to the big time, much less win a championships. Your side loses, maybe because of a freak incident or a bad call, but too bad, that's it, game over, no redemption here.
Every so often, though -
In the early 1990s, a guy named Kurt Warner was the third-string quarterback for the University of Northern Iowa. It wasn't until his senior year that he got the chance to actually play, and you know what? The kid was good. In fact he was named that conference's Offensive Player of the Year. But that meant nothing in terms of getting to the big time. NFL scouts watch football players from junior high school on, they know exactly what they're looking for, and they weren't looking for Kurt Warner.
Every year the NFL "drafts" players, ie its teams claim the college players who they think might make the big league. First- and second- round players often do; third- and fourth- round picks might, maybe; fifth- and sixth-rounders hardly ever. In the 1994 draft, the various NFL teams called out 222 names of college players they thought had a shot at the big time. Kurt Warner's name was not among them. He eventually did manage to get a tryout with the Green Bay Packers - and was promptly cut.
So there he was, 24 years old, stacking shelves in a Hy-Vee supermarket in Cedar Falls, Iowa, to pay his bills. His football career was behind him, anyone could see that. He'd sort of had a shot with the Packers, but he didn't make it. Well, no shame in that. The ratio of excellent college football players to those who play so much as a single NFL game is huge. At least football had gotten him a college degree, right? He was young, he could do anything. I'm sure all kinds of people were advising him that it was time to accept his lot in life, do the grown-up thing, turn his back on his childhood fantasies, and build a real future.
Instead he joined the Iowa Barnstomers of the Arena Football League, an obscure, threadbare, penny-pinching rough-and-tumble league of castoffs and wannabes. You might see a game or two every week on tape delay on ESPN well after midnight. Nobody took it seriously - until Kurt Warner came along, and did so well over the next three years that an NFL team, the St. Louis Rams, actually took notice and signed him, which was unheard of. They promptly assigned him to NFL Europe, only marginally more credible than the AFL; after all, it was clear to everyone that he wasn't good enough to be an NFL starter. But the Rams, and only the Rams, thought that maybe this undrafted AFL player, by now 27, might have some potential as a backup, and he did well enough for the Amsterdam Admirals that they finally brought him to the big time in 1998 - as a backup.
You have to understand: quarterback is the most important position in sports, more important than pitcher in baseball or goalie in hockey. The quarterback has the ball in his hands on every single play when your team's on offence, and has to judge a complex, high-speed, ultra-chaotic situation, make the correct decision in the span of maybe 2.5 seconds, and throw or hand off the ball with mechanical perfection, without God forbid giving it away to the other team - and all the while, on the other side of the line, several of the world's fastest, strongest, meanest and most dedicated athletes are devoting themselves wholeheartedly to running him down and hitting him hard enough to knock him out of the game.
A good quarterback, all by his lonesome, gives a team hope. A bad one makes them hopeless. It's the highest-paid position in the NFL. Second-highest is left tackle, because they protect the quarterback's blind side. Teams simply can't afford to have two first-rate quarterbacks, so their backups are either a) rookies being groomed for the big time, or b) second-rate guys with enough experience that they hopefully won't screw up too badly. If you're a backup suddenly handed the ball and told to go play, as Kurt Warner was in 1999 when the Rams' starter Trent Green was injured and he found that his long and winding road had, incredibly, somehow made him a starting NFL quarterback after all, the hopes and expectations of the team's coach and fans are basically "please don't singlehandedly cost us the game."
So what happened?
Guy went all storybook on us.
Kurt Warner is the only NFL quarterback in history to throw three touchdown passes in each of his first three starts. In the next game he all but singlehandedly demolished the Rams' nemeses, the San Francisco 49ers. In October 1999 Sports Illustrated hit newsstands with Warner on the cover and a caption that summarized what everyone was thinking: "Who IS This Guy?" He went on to have one of the greatest NFL seasons ever, in his first year as a starter - I mean, people would have said that was impossible - was named NFL MVP, took his team to the Super Bowl, won it, and was named Super Bowl MVP. It was mind-boggling. This kind of stuff just doesn't happen, not in real life. Except maybe this once.
He didn't stop there. Two years later the Rams were back in the Super Bowl (which they lost, in the last few seconds, to the New England Patriots quarterbacked by Tom Brady, a fifth-round draft pick who similarly only became a starter because of injury) and Warner was the league MVP for the second time. But then, halfway through the first quarter of the first game of the 2002 season, Warner was hit hard by all 6-foot-5 and 275 pounds of the New York Giants' fearsome defensive end Michael Strahan, and badly concussed.
After that hit he wasn't the same. A little more tentative, maybe. A little slower to make decisions. The end result of the NFL's Darwinian decisionmaking was inevitable. The next season he was replaced by his backup Marc Bulger. At the end of that year he was released. The New York Giants hired him and made him their starter, but after several poor performances - he was holding the ball for more than 3 seconds, which was simply unacceptable at that level - he was replaced by his backup Eli Manning, and eventually released again. But proven quarterbacks are an extremely rare commodity, and in 2005 the sad-sack Arizona Cardinals, who had never won a playoff game, signed him to a one-year contract. He played three mediocre games for them, injured his groin, and was replaced by his backup Josh McCown.
At that point it was obvious to everyone that Warner's starting career was over. He might have another couple of years in him as a safe-hands backup, but that was all - and that was fine. No shame in that. He had had a long and proud career, festooned with accomplishments and successes people had never dreamed might be possible, and his stint stacking shelves in the Hy-Vee was well-established NFL myth. Everybody was ready to wave a fond farewell as he rode off into the sunset.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the closing credits. McCown played so badly that Warner was made a starter again, and you know what, this time he did pretty well - well enough that he was re-signed for the 2006 season. But after a few more subpar games as a starter, he was replaced by the Cardinals' much-touted draft pick, Matt Leinart, whose career could not have been more different from Warner's - groomed for ultimate success since high school, biggest-name college quarterback in the country, Heisman Trophy winner, a first-round NFL draft pick who signed a $51-million dollar contract before he played a single big-league down. You don't spend that much money on a quarterback without making him a starter. Warner's starting career was now clearly over. He was just there to groom the new guy.
But a funny thing happened just before the closing credits rolled. Leinart played so badly in this year's preseason that the team's new coach decided to play Warner instead, for the first few games of the regular season at least. Many people thought this was a terrible idea. Warner was 37 years old, and he'd had an OK 2007 season, but Leinart was obviously the future and Warner way past his prime, never fully recovered from his concussion, at the risk of going out as a once-heroic now-pitiable figure who had been great once but just hadn't known when to quit, like a deluded boxer.
So what happened?
Guy went all storybook on us again.
This year he threw for more yards than he ever had before in his career, was named a starting Pro Bowl quarterback, was touted for a third MVP, and all but singlehandedly marched the once-hapless Cardinals into the playoffs - even though they were widely considered to be a bad team. Indeed, many pundits were calling them "the worst team ever to make the NFL playoffs" ... until they beat the much superior Atlanta Falcons two weeks ago. And the far superior Carolina Panthers last week. And just yesterday, the guy threw four touchdowns and no interceptions against the clearly-superior-until-the-game-was-played Philadelphia Eagles, sending the Cardinals, whose futility had long been a running joke in the NFL, to their first ever Super Bowl.
Again, this kind of stuff just doesn't happen in sports, not in real life...except maybe this once. Or twice. But when it does happen, hell, it sure is fun to watch.
And some people don't even like sports. I just don't understand it.
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