WHEN I WAS drafted I didn’t even know where Green Bay was. I knew it was north. I knew it was cold. I was thinking it was in Illinois, somewhere north of Chicago.
It didn’t take me long, however, to learn that Green Bay was in fact in the state of Wisconsin and that the Packers had won more league championships than any other NFL team, with thirteen at the time I joined the team in the summer of 1999. The Packers had won Super Bowls in 1967 and 1968 under Vince Lombardi, one of the most famous and successful coaches in the history of the game, and had won a Super Bowl in 1997 under coach Mike Holmgren.
The Packers were founded in 1919 by George Calhoun, whom most people have never heard of, and coach Earl “Curly” Lambeau, after whom our home field is named. The team is called the Packers because Lambeau was able to get the Indian Packing Company to agree to pay five hundred dollars for the team’s uniforms—but only if Lambeau named the team after its sponsor.
Today the Packers are a publicly owned corporation, with more than a hundred thousand stockholders.
The Packers have featured some of the most famous players in NFL history, starting with Don Hutson, who led the league in receptions eight years in a row in the 1930s and 1940s. Then, after ten years of poor play, Lombardi took over the team in 1959, and with outstanding performers like Paul Hornung, Bart Starr, Jim Taylor, and Ray Nitschke, the Packers became America’s Team, even though the Cowboys were so brazen as to call themselves that.
The Packers didn’t win all that much in the 1970s and 1980s, but then in the 1990s quarterback Brett Favre and defensive lineman Reggie White came along to bring Green Bay renewed glory. In 1996 the Packers finished the season 13-3. After beating San Francisco in the mud and Carolina in freezing cold weather in the opening rounds of the playoffs, the Packers went to the Super Bowl for the first time in almost thirty years.
We defeated the New England Patriots 35–21. Desmond Howard returned a kickoff for a touchdown and was named MVP of the game.
When I joined the team in 1999 we had a new head coach, Ray Rhodes, a defensive specialist who had been coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. After losing to the San Francisco 49ers in a controversial playoff game in 1998, Mike Holmgren had quit and taken the job of head coach in Seattle. He took most of his staff with him.
When I arrived in Green Bay for the first time, I knew none of this. I knew only that Ron Wolf was the general manager, and I knew his name because he was the one who had called me to say the Packers had drafted me.
When I got off the plane, I was met by Packers football administrative coordinator Matt Klein. I should have been happy and grateful. I have to admit I came in feeling disrespected and pissed-off because I had been drafted so low.
In my first press conference, Sherman Lewis, the offensive coordinator, talked about me with faint praise.
“He’ll go up in the crowd and come down with the ball,” said Lewis. “But he’s kind of a raw kid. If we take our time and bring him along slowly, a lot of times these guys develop.”
It’s not exactly what I wanted to hear. I wanted him to say I was going to start and be a star.
I was coming to a team with a ton of talent at quarterback. Besides Brett Favre we had three other excellent passers: Doug Pederson, Matt Hasselbeck, and Aaron Brooks.
How are all these guys going to play here? I wondered.
If I had had an adviser talk to me about the reality of my situation, I would have been asking the same question about myself.
When I reported, my locker wasn’t even in the big room with the veterans. It was off to the side, and I even had to share it with another rookie, Zola Davis. When they assigned me uniform number 13, I asked whether I could have 3, my college number.
“No,” I was told, “receivers in the NFL can’t wear single digits.”
I counted the wide receivers on the team. There was Jahine Arnold, Corey Bradford, Robert Brooks, Zola, Antonio Freeman, Tyrone Goodson, Desmond Howard, Derrick Mayes, Dee Miller, Bill Schroeder, Michael Vaughn, and Pat Palmer. I counted twelve competitors for the position.
And one more—me—number 13.
Are they telling me I’m not going to make the team? I wondered.
I WENT TO minicamp, a team practice in shorts and helmets before the real training camp, with everyone—rookies, free agents, tryout guys, and veterans—in attendance. Rookies had to dress early and be on the field first.
For a guy as self-confident as I was, this time I was nervous. Rookie camp wasn’t a big deal. These were a bunch of guys coming in the same time I was, and all I had to do was look better than them. But when the veterans and free agents came in, the nerves started to get the best of me. Brett Favre was walking out onto that field, along with other guys whom I had watched when I was a kid.
Wow! I thought. Now I can see these guys in person.
When I walked on that field for the first time the first thing I did was get down on my knees and pray.
Okay, I told myself, just have fun and try your hardest not to make any mistakes—and catch every ball that comes to you.
And that’s what I did. I was confident and nervous all at the same time, telling myself that all I had to do was do what I’d been doing since I was a little kid, and that was to have fun.
I worked and worked. I fought for every ball that was thrown, even if it was thrown out of bounds. I dove for everything and even ran into a fence a couple of times. I kept my frustration at being drafted so low to myself, and I came to work happy with a big smile on my face.
It was at the minicamp that I met Brett Favre for the first time.
We had a warm-up drill called “pad and go.” The quarterback drops back, and the receivers take off and run. The purpose is merely to warm up your legs. Brett threw me a ball and I caught it. I was supposed to run to a different line for one of the other quarterbacks, but I wanted to make myself known to Brett, and so I ran the ball straight back to him and handed it to him.
“Hey, Donald, how ya doing?” he said.
I was elated.
“Don’t worry,” Brett said, “there are going to be plenty of those.”
I was in awe. I was like a little kid. I had no idea how to act, and I probably made something of a fool of myself.
“You’re awesome, awesome,” I said to Brett. “I just caught a ball from you. Yeah!”
Brett looked at me like I was a little wacky. He didn’t respond. I was hoping he believed in me, but I wasn’t at all sure.
In the minicamp I found out there were two kinds of teammates: the ones who were focusing on saving their jobs and those who were there to help you. Among the helpers were Favre, and receivers Antonio Freeman, Bill Schroeder, and Robert Brooks, who became a close friend.
A couple of the other receivers went out of their way to try to make me look bad.
“Run this route,” they’d tell me, and I’d run it, and it would be the wrong route. Early on I saw these guys weren’t out to be a teammate, partner, or friend. They were doing what they could to get me tossed from the roster.
In the huddle one of these guys said to me, “Run a post.” I ran it when in fact I was supposed to run a hook. I came back to the huddle, and he was laughing.
“You should know you had a hook,” he said.
I wanted to mash his face into a bloody pulp, but I was a rookie.
I can’t trust these guys, I realized. I vowed I would study the playbook harder so I’d know exactly what I needed to do. All through training camp I studied like it was for a final exam.
CUT-DOWN DAY WAS traumatic. I was staying at the Midway Hotel along with the other rookies and first-year players. The Midway, an old hotel, is next to Lambeau Field. Training camp was over, and we were just waiting around to find out if we had made the team.
Most of us were waiting in the hallway. In my head I was trying to figure out who would stay and who would go, when I heard the phone ringing in my hotel room.
I ran to answer it. Reggie McKenzie, the Packers’ director of personnel, was on the line.
My heart sank. I figured he was calling me with bad news.
“How are you doing, Drive?” he asked.
“I was doing good until you called,” I said.
Reggie laughed.
“You had a good camp, Drive. The team likes you. You’ll be a great fit.”
“So what are you saying?”
“Congratulations,” he said. “You made the roster. Now let me talk to your roommate.”
I yelled for Zola Davis and told him he had a phone call. “Who is it?” he asked.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I handed him the phone and left the room.
When he hung up, I could see by his face that he had been cut. And he could see by mine that I had made it.
“How did you make the team?” he asked me.
I could only shrug.
“That sucks,” he said.
Zola walked across the street to the stadium and handed in his playbook, and when he returned to our room I watched as he packed up all his belongings. I packed up mine, too, but I did it because I was moving into a new room with Tyrone Goodson, a receiver from Auburn who was hurt. Tyrone ended up on the practice squad.
A week before the first regular season game I was able to change my jersey from number 13 to number 80. Its previous owner, Derrick Mayes, went to Seattle, so it was available. Number 80, I felt, was perfect. My cousin Lawrence Driver and I both played high school ball and both of us loved Jerry Rice, who wore number 80 with San Francisco. We promised each other that if either of us made it to the NFL, he’d wear number 80. I would wear number 80 proudly for the next fourteen years.