MIAMI — Drew Brees knew he could not save New Orleans by tilting scoreboards and leading some manic pregame chant. He needed to be a citizen, not a quarterback, if he wanted to be part of something bigger than a revival in the NFC South.
So Brees called Kathy Riedlinger, head of the Lusher Charter School in his uptown neighborhood, yet another school with facilities and ballfields ravaged by Katrina’s floods.
“People need to feel a sense of normalcy,” Brees told her, “and there’s nothing like kids playing in the schoolyard to bring back life to a neighborhood.”
Riedlinger thought it would take as many as 10 years for New Orleans to recover from a near-apocalyptic storm.
“These kids don’t have 10 years,” Brees said.
So yes, the $60 million star of the Saints wrote some pretty heavy checks to benefit an arts-based student body with so many colors and creeds among its kindergartners through 12th graders that the Southern Poverty Law Center called Lusher the most diverse school in the South.
Brees’ charitable foundation gave $750,000 for the restoration of Lusher’s football, soccer and track fields. When Riedlinger interrupted one of the quarterback’s many visits to solicit advice on how to equip a proposed weight room, Brees gave her another $38,000 out of his pocket.
Only donating the money was the easy part. Professional athletes are pretty good at handing out the kind of supersized checks you see awarded at golf tournaments.
Brees’ time, presence and generosity of spirit were the more valuable gifts. He became a campus regular with his wife, Brittany. He showed the high school-age athletes how to use the weights he bought for them. He accepted Lusher’s invitation to speak to its first post-Katrina graduating class.
“Drew established a real bond with our students,” Riedlinger said Wednesday by phone. “His mission is to make sure the children of this city don’t feel any long-lasting effects of the hurricane.”
Mission? Brees prefers to describe it as a calling.
In the days leading up to a most improbable Super Bowl XLIV showdown with the Colts’ Peyton Manning, son of New Orleans, Brees has made it clear he’s playing this game for millions of Gulf Coast residents still trying to rebuild their lives.
It’s the opposite approach to the one embraced by the late, great American hockey coach, Herb Brooks, who kept insisting his epic Lake Placid game with the Soviets’ Big Red Machine merely was about sport until Brooks saw how a demoralized nation responded to the upset.
“We feel like we are playing for so much more than to win a game for our organization or team,” Brees said. “We are playing for an entire city and region. And you could say for an entire country, because there are still so many New Orleans natives who had to evacuate after Katrina who have not been able to move back yet.”
Some six months after Katrina hit in 2005, Brees had free-agent offers from the Dolphins and Saints. He saw the devastation in the Ninth Ward. He saw the boats that had crashed into people’s living rooms, and the trucks that had flipped upside down and onto people’s roofs.
“It looks like a nuclear bomb went off,” Brees said to himself.
He signed with the 3-13 Saints, anyway, a franchise with a rich history of losing, with an owner itching to move, and with a battered stadium the Superdome — that had become a symbol of desperation and death.
“A defining moment in my life,” Brees said, “and one that brought me to New Orleans with a sense that this is a calling for me, an opportunity that I have to not only come to a city, but to be a part of the rebuilding of the organization, city, community and region.
“This was an opportunity that really doesn’t come along for most people in their lifetime, and yet here it is staring me in the face. … I felt it was destiny, that God put me here for a reason.”
Barely 6 feet, Brees took the hard road to the hardest job. He quarterbacked his 16-0 Austin, Texas, high school team to a state title in his senior year and secured all of two major-college scholarship offers from Purdue and Kentucky.
He was San Diego’s second-round pick out of Purdue, then a Pro Bowl quarterback for the Chargers about to lose his position to Philip Rivers. He wrecked his throwing shoulder in his final game before hitting free agency.
Some doctors figured Brees had a 25 percent chance of playing another NFL down, better odds than many observers gave New Orleans of keeping the Saints.
The quarterback fought his way back and helped his adopted city do the same.
“Now Drew can be the mayor, governor, whatever he wants,” said Bobby Hebert, former Saints quarterback and current New Orleans radio host. “He’s given so much back to the community that people think he walks on water.”
Brees also has emerged as a union leader bold enough to write a guest Washington Post column assailing the NFL’s attempt to expand its antitrust protections.
Only Sunday, Brees will fight for something bigger than the union, bigger than the one true national holiday in sports. He said he will play for the millions impacted by Katrina in the hope the Saints can “lift their spirits and give them something they deserve.”
Brees’ foundation has committed $3 million to New Orleans causes, but the kids at Lusher the ones who play at Brees Family Field — will confirm the man has delivered much more than money.
“His time and the way he respects people have meant so much to our students,” Riedlinger said. “There’s a core goodness about Drew that has endeared him to everyone.”
The Super Bowl quarterback gets it. To save a city, Brees understands that a stadium full of fans has nothing on a playground full of kids.
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