Going Deep
by Fr. Roger Landry - January 30, 2009
This Sunday we will all get a chance to focus on a true hero whose impressive athletic exploits are eclipsed by his personal accomplishments. Here in New England, we can sometimes think we have the market cornered on made-for-Hollywood rags-to-riches quarterback stories, with Tom Brady's rise from sixth-round-draft choice to Superbowl and league MVP and Matt Cassell's ascent from perpetual backup to standout starter. As impressive as these stories are, they're Pop Warner in comparison with the story of Kurt Warner, the man who will be under center for the Arizona Cardinals in this year's Superbowl.
While Brady was a starter at the University of Michigan and Cassell the understudy to two Heisman trophy winners at USC, Kurt Warner could not even crack the starting lineup at the University of Northern Iowa until his senior year. While he did well at this small school in his one season of playing time, unsurprisingly he was undrafted by any NFL team. He walked on as a free agent to the Green Bay Packers training camp in 1994, but was cut before the season began. He returned to Northern Iowa where he worked as an assistant coach during the day and, because money was so tight, stocked shelves for $5.50 at the Cedar Falls Hy-Vee grocery store at night. Not since Larry Bird worked a garbage truck in French Lick was there a more inauspicious starting point for future sports stardom.
With no other NFL teams willing to give him a chance, he signed with the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League in 1995. He excelled in indoor football for two years and earned a tryout with the Chicago Bears in 1997, but he was bitten by a venomous spider on his throwing elbow shortly before the audition and couldn't perform. The next year, however, he signed a contract with the St. Louis Rams, who promptly allocated him to the Amsterdam Admirals to see how he would do in the NFL's minor leagues. He did very well, leading NFL Europe in touchdowns and passing yards, and was hired as the Rams' backup in 1999. When starter Trent Green went down in pre-season, Warner took over and had one of the greatest seasons in football history, leading the Rams to a Super Bowl victory and capturing the league's MVP award. As he stood with the Lombardi trophy in his hands, it was hard to imagine that five years before he was a 22 year-old third-shift stock boy.
That is not the end of his football story, however. After another MVP award and Super Bowl appearance, he began to suffer various injuries. He was released by the Rams and, after short and moderately successful stints as a starter in New York and Arizona, he was in both places supplanted by much touted Heisman trophy winning rookies. Most thought his days of starting — not to mention greatness — were behind him. They were wrong. The man who had so many times overcome such long odds did it again. He won back his starting job and, thanks to a season of sterling statistics, led the long-shot Arizona Cardinals to Sunday's Super Bowl.
Kurt Warner's story is an inspiring tale of a man who never gave up on a dream and through grit, hardwork and good fortune, far exceeded anyone's expectations. But as Warner is the first to say, that's a small part of his story. To understand how he could have had the courage to overcome such challenges, he says, we first need to see that his bio is not principally about football. It's about faith.
"If you ever really want to do a story about who I am," he once told a reporter, "God's got to be at the center of it. Every time I hear a piece or read a story that doesn't have that, they're missing the whole lesson of who I am."
He explains the fundamental lesson of who he is as follows. "I believe that the Lord has a plan for each of us that's better than anything we can imagine — even if that plan isn't obvious to us at every stage. He prepared me for this over a long period of time — in lower-profile locker rooms and the grocery store and in Europe, through all the personal tragedies and in spite of the people who doubted me along the way. Whether I'm a Super Bowl Champion or a regular guy stocking groceries at the Hy-Vee, sharing my faith and glorifying Jesus is the central focus of my time on this earth. And the fact that I now have a podium, I believe, is no coincidence. I want to be a role model for Christ in everything that I do. Living my life for Him and showing people the beauty of that reality is my mission in life."
Warner's path to becoming a true apostle of the gridiron began in an unlikely way. As a 21 year-old, he met an older divorced veteran, Brenda Carney, the mother of two. She had recently been abandoned by her husband while she was eight months pregnant, because her husband was not able to cope with having dropped their first child on his head, causing brain damage and blindness. Kurt immediately bonded with the children and with their mother. He was still dating Brenda when, in 1996, both of her parents were killed by a tornado. Because she had nowhere to go and no help for the kids, Kurt moved in with them.
God always draws good out of evil. The death of Brenda's parents taught Kurt about the urgency of conversion. "That situation showed me that you don't know what is going to happen tomorrow," he said. "It was at that point that I realized the Lord needed to be at the center of my life. I couldn't wait until tomorrow or next year. It needed to be right now."
Brenda was a born again Christian and she encouraged Kurt, who had been raised a Catholic but had never really internalized his Christian faith, to start to read the Bible. He did, and he began to notice that Brenda was a cafeteria Christian, following only those teachings she found convenient. He called her, and them, to greater consistency. He told her that they needed to follow the Bible faithfully, which meant, among other things, no premarital sex and no excessive drinking. They began to exercise the same discipline in their moral life as Kurt did in his diet and in his workouts. "Our story shows," Brenda says, "that we are not perfect, but that we are sinners and have repented and we want to move on to be better people for God."
Since his conversion, Kurt has sought to live out his life not in anticipation of Canton, Ohio but the eternal hall of fame. He makes it a priority bring his family — he and Brenda now have seven kids — to Church each Sunday. He leads Bible studies with teammates. He began the First Things First Foundation — with its motto, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and everything else will be given to you besides" (Mt 6:33) — not merely to accompany sick kids to go to Disney World, but to assist them toward the New Jerusalem.
"I always fall back on my faith and I realize that the reason I came was not to win championships — that was only part of the process — but it set me up to have impact and to be put in a position to do great things, to represent Jesus in a lot of different ways. … I had a perspective that God wanted to do something with me in every one of those situations. I never want to come to a realization that maybe what I accomplished in the NFL is all I'm supposed to accomplish."
Kurt Warner not only throws deep, but puts out into the deep on a daily basis. He'll be worth cheering not just on Super Bowl Sunday, but beyond.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
