WHEN MIKE MCCARTHY became the Packers’ head coach in 2006, he wasn’t a total stranger. Mike had been the quarterback coach for the Packers in 1999, and I can remember him standing with Brett and Doug Pederson joking and laughing. He wasn’t the martinet that Mike Sherman was. He was more like an older brother who came to you with advice. He was always coaching, working with guys, though Brett was a veteran who didn’t need much help.
Mike McCarthy had left the Packers the year Ray Rhodes was fired, and he went to New Orleans as their offensive coordinator. A friend of mine, Aaron Brooks, was very upset when he was traded to New Orleans just after Mike signed to be their coach, and I told Aaron, “Mike is a great guy. He’s going to take care of you over there.”
I would watch the Saints on TV, and I could see Mike on the sidelines talking with and listening to his players. That was the thing about Mike. He would ask what you were thinking, and he would listen to his players, whether you were a rookie or a veteran. I will always be grateful to Mike for coming in and allowing me to continue as a primary receiver. I was thirty years old, and he could have buried me for a younger man. It was Mike McCarthy who allowed me to forge my legacy.
After coaching in New Orleans Mike was hired for the same offensive coordinator job with the San Francisco 49ers. His specialty was developing quarterbacks and offenses. He brought with him to Green Bay the famed West Coast offense, one that emphasized passing over the running game. Under McCarthy, Brett Favre developed into the finest quarterback in the NFL.
Brett was a wonderful teammate. He was the funniest guy I ever played with. He kept things lively. He loved putting a whoopee cushion under the cushion of your chair. He put live rats in teammates’ lockers. He kept guys laughing all the time.
One year, on his birthday in October, Brett was running around the locker room chasing teammates and throwing handfuls of cake. I was sitting on the training table minding my own business, laughing at what they were doing, when Brett came running over and jammed a piece of gooey cake into my face.
I was mad. It was good cake he was wasting.
“What are you thinking?” I yelled at him. “We have to go to practice.”
Not wanting to be late, I ran out with cake and frosting all over my face.
The coaches sent me back to clean up.
I got even. Before practice soon afterward, I swiped Brett’s helmet from his locker, and I coated it with Zostrix, an arthritis pain medication. When you put it on your skin and you get sweaty, it burns like fire ants. I put his helmet back in his locker.
I warned the trainers not to say anything.
“Not one word,” I told them.
After we ran some drills, Brett started to heat up.
“What’s wrong, Brett?” I asked him.
“I feel like I have a fever,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s hot out here today,” I said.
The trainers, afraid he’d burn up, spilled the beans. His forehead was smoking red. After that Brett never messed with me again. He said he’d get even, but he never did.
Brett and I became veterans together. Before 2006 Brett had sat on the plane rides next to backup quarterback Doug Pederson. After Doug retired after the 2005 season, Brett sat in his usual seat. Pointing to the seat next to his, he said to me, “Drive, sit here.” I did as I was told.
I had been sitting with Rob Davis, our long snapper.
“Oh sure, you’re going to leave me,” Rob said to me.
Brett and I sat together until he left the Packers. Brett wasn’t a card player. He liked to do crossword puzzles. I read books. Sometimes he’d take out his laptop and watch game video. Often we’d talk football. He’d discuss our plays and what he expected when he called a particular play.
“If this defender jumps,” he would say, “I’m throwing to you.”
Working with Brett, one of the greatest ever to play the game, was a career highlight. Being close to him as a friend made playing with him more special.
My wife, Tina, is from Mississippi, and Brett and his wife, Deanna, are, too. We would visit them in Hattiesburg.
The first time we visited him, he asked me to go hunting with him.
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “You don’t see black people hunting.”
He tried to convince me to go by telling me how much fun it was to walk around the hundreds of acres he lives on, climb a tree, and wait for a deer to come by.
“The thing is, Brett,” I told him, “I don’t like being up in trees, sitting there all day, trying to shoot something that probably won’t come by anyway.”
Brett thought that perhaps I’d enjoy a run through his woods.
“You go out there walking through the trees,” he said, “and you’ll send the deer toward me.”
I thought he was out of his mind.
“Look at me,” I said. “Do you see what color I am? I’m blacker than the deer. If I run through these woods, someone will take a shot at me because they think I’m a deer. I’m going to be dead, and it’s going to be your fault.”
Brett spent the afternoon driving me around his property.
We might not have had hunting in common, but we certainly had winning in common. We were on the field together for eighty-eight Packers victories. When I first arrived in Green Bay, Brett told me I was a great athlete and that I would be a fine pro player. Once I became a regular, he would continually work with me on our communication.
“Donald, if I peek at you,” he’d say in the huddle, “I’m coming to you. If I give you a wink or if I look at you and turn my head, I’m coming at you.”
After a while people would wonder, How in the heck did Donald know what Brett was going to do?
I read his energy. I also had to learn to keep a sharp eye out on him. My second year in the league in a game against Carolina, Brett was running to his right, and I was all the way to the left in the corner of the end zone, when I knew I could get open by running to the middle of the field. Brett drilled a throw straight down the field that hit me for a touchdown.
Look at this guy, I marveled. How does he do it?
I learned always to keep my eyes on him. He could be on the run, about to fall, and then he’d toss you a bullet for a completion. He would constantly advise, “Stay with me. Never take your eyes off me.”
Another piece of advice: “Don’t ever stop running.” And I wouldn’t. I knew if I kept running, eventually the man would find me.
THE YEAR 2006 could well have been a disaster, but it ended on a high note. We began the season 1-4. After a bye week, we traveled to Miami to play the Dolphins.
One play may have turned around our season. With the score tied 10–10 in the third quarter, Brett threw the ball to me in the end zone on a corner route between two defenders for a thirty-four-yard touchdown. I caught the ball with one hand, and after I was tackled the referees were saying the ball had hit the ground and the pass was incomplete.
I got up from the play screaming bloody murder.
I ran to Coach McCarthy.
“Did you catch it?” he wanted to know. If you made a challenge and weren’t upheld, it cost the team a valued time-out.
“Throw the flag!” I screamed. “I caught it. Look at my arm. It’s the same color as that ball. They saw my arm hit the ground—not the ball.”
The replay showed I did catch the ball, and when the referee signaled a touchdown Brett ran over to me, scooped me up, and started running around the field as I dangled upside down in his arms. I felt ridiculous.
“Put me down,” I told him.
The touchdown helped us beat the Dolphins 34–24 and stop our losing streak.
It was a special game for me. I had a game-high ten catches for 93 yards, and I became only the seventh player in Packers history to gain 5,000 receiving yards.
The next week we were home at Lambeau Field against the Arizona Cardinals when on a naked bootleg Brett ran into the end zone for a touchdown.
After he scored, I pointed to the stands and told him, “Go.”
He did as he was told. He jumped among the delirious Packers fans. It was Brett’s first and only time he did the Lambeau Leap during his long career. That’s when I realized he and I had built a special bond. No two teammates could be closer.
We won our last four games of the 2006 season to finish the year a respectable 8–8. With those four wins, we knew we were building toward something special in 2007.
When minicamp rolled around the critics predicted we’d continue being a .500 team, but when Brett looked around and saw our lineup, he commented to me that he thought this was the most talented team he’d ever been on.
Playing with Brett his final year in Green Bay was special and memorable. It was his seventeenth year in the league, and in week two, against the New York Giants, he got his 149th win, surpassing John Elway as the winningest quarterback in NFL history. In week four, against Minnesota in the Metrodome, Brett threw a touchdown to Greg Jennings, the 421st touchdown of his career, to break the all-time NFL record of 420, set by Dan Marino.
There was a three-week span in the middle of the season when he threw for 1,042 yards. At thirty-eight years of age he had a passer rating of 100 or more in ten games. Brett was superb all year long.
In 2007 we had one of the best—though youngest—receiving corps in the NFL. We had second-year wide-out Greg Jennings, myself, veteran Koren Robinson, and two rookies: James Jones and Ruvell Martin. We had a great bond.
I became the Packers’ slot receiver, whose job it is to find the spaces between defenders in the middle of the field. After you catch the ball you are subject to violent hits to the head, neck, and chest from linebackers and safeties who are flying at you from all directions.
When you play the slot, you have to concern yourself with a lot more detail than if you’re a flanker or a split end. You have to read what the linebackers, corners, and safeties are doing. The flanker and split ends are the speed guys, the ones who run down the field and clear everything out. The slot is Mr. Reliable, the guy who keeps a drive going. I had to know how to maneuver in the middle of the field, to run the right route and also sometimes to make a key block. I had to block linebackers, many of whom were fifty pounds heavier than I was.
You have to be tough to play the slot. You have to be willing to work the middle of the field knowing you’re going to get your head knocked off. It’s a position not every receiver is willing to play—Javon Walker and Corey Bradford didn’t want any part of it—because you’re likely to be clobbered by a hulking linebacker or even a monstrous defensive lineman like Warren Sapp, who once tackled me and tried to crush me. Fortunately I saw him coming. I tried to make a move, but Sapp grabbed me, brought me down, and put all of his three hundred pounds on top of me.
“Man, get your sweaty butt off of me!” I yelled at him.
Sapp just laughed and growled, “Driiivvve.”
WE HAD BEGUN the season with a 7–1 record in 2007 when we played the Minnesota Vikings at home on November 11. In that game Coach McCarthy unveiled his “Big Five” package, with five offensive linemen, all five of us receivers, and Brett.
Coach McCarthy came to us with the reputation of being an expert in the West Coast offense. The high-powered, passing-oriented philosophy has a long and glorious history. It was invented by Sid Gilman, coach of the San Diego Chargers, in the 1960s; his assistant, Al Davis, continued to use it to terrorize the league after he took over the Oakland Raiders. Davis was the one who invented the slot formation, with two fast receivers on one side flooding an area.
Don Coryell employed the offense when he was at San Diego State University, and one of his assistants there, John Madden, went to the Oakland Raiders and made it famous. Another Al Davis assistant, Bill Walsh of Stanford, improved it even more. Walsh had a handful of disciples including coach Paul Hackett, and when Hackett and McCarthy were together as coaches of the Kansas City Chiefs, McCarthy learned it from Hackett.
Coach McCarthy knew everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. He would put you in the right position to make plays to win games. McCarthy was amazing.
OUR RECORD IN 2007 was 13–3, and yet for some reason the game I remember most vividly was a terrible loss we suffered at the hands of the Chicago Bears in late December. The game was played at Soldier Field and it was sixteen degrees out. With the windchill, it felt like minus thirteen. It was brutally cold.
We were already in the playoffs, knew we had a first-round bye, and figured the game didn’t mean anything to us. I decided I would have as much fun as possible playing the game, but the freezing weather made that almost impossible.
The wind of Lake Michigan was blowing hard, and my toes were numb. I put my foot in the heater on the sidelines, and my shoestrings caught on fire. I was so numb I didn’t feel the flames.
Going back into the game, all I could think was, What am I doing out here? They should cancel this game.
During halftime I was happy to be in the locker room out of the cold. When it was time to start the second half, some of us stayed inside until the very last moment. For the kickoff I ran straight from the locker room onto the field. Mike McCarthy was furious.
What the crap is going on? he was wondering.
Brett threw two interceptions, we had two punts blocked, and we lost the game 35–7. Afterward in the locker room, Coach McCarthy screamed himself hoarse for our coming out of the locker room late and for losing so badly.
We were thinking, Hey, Mike, we’re already in the playoffs. It doesn’t matter, but our attitude was very wrong. It mattered because it was a game against our rival, Chicago, and because no matter who we were playing, we should always play hard for the fans.
The next week we returned home to Lambeau Field and beat the Detroit Lions 34–14. Brett threw two touchdown passes and left the game at the start of the second quarter. It was our seventeenth consecutive home win against Detroit. We were ready for the playoffs.
ON JANUARY 12, 2008, we hosted our former coach, Mike Holmgren, and the Seattle Seahawks in an afternoon game that was played in a near blizzard. Fat snowflakes fell steadily. It wasn’t all that cold, about thirty-one degrees, which in Green Bay is like a spring day, and there was no wind. Lambeau Field looked like one of those snow globes. You couldn’t see the lines on the field. Everything in front of you was—white.
Our star rookie running back, Ryan Grant, fumbled twice, helping to give the Seahawks a 14–0 lead. But Ryan redeemed himself and then some, rushing for 201 yards and three touchdowns. Greg Jennings also had a great game, catching balls for 71 yards and two touchdowns.
We needed just one more win against the New York Giants at home, and we’d be in the Super Bowl playing the 18-0 New England Patriots, with quarterback Tom Brady and his star receiver, Randy Moss.
The game against the Giants was played at 6:30 P.M. Darkness was falling, and so were the temperatures. It was even colder than it had been in Chicago on that horrible day. It was minus one degree at kickoff, with temperatures dropping even further as the game went on. It was the second-coldest game in NFL history, after the legendary Ice Bowl game between the Cowboys and the Packers in 1967.
The game should have been canceled. It was inhumane to make us play under such conditions. At the same time we were all very aware of the advantage we had playing in such cold weather. We knew most of the visiting teams weren’t used to it.
In the 1990s and 2000s the Packers had an advantage over any team coming from the South. Miami or Tampa Bay played most of their games in warmer weather, so when they came to Lambeau Field and had to face twelve degrees with a windchill of minus twenty-one, they weren’t used to it. Tampa Bay never won in Green Bay. Their players would wear long-sleeve shirts or tights. We didn’t need that. It was more of a mind game than anything. We felt we could play in it. The other team felt they couldn’t. And they just couldn’t beat us, even when they might have had a better team.
It was the same way with teams that played in domed stadiums, among them the Minnesota Vikings, Detroit Lions, and New Orleans Saints, who played their eight home games inside. During the season those teams might have two games where they have to play in cold weather, and that was in Green Bay and Chicago. We had an advantage over those guys as well. Detroit, for one, never beat us at home. One time when they were 0-15, they had a chance to beat us. They were ahead, and I caught a seven-yard touchdown pass to win the game and drop them to 0-16. I cherished that for a long time.
Whoever came to Green Bay in November and December, it was a guarantee we were going to win. They couldn’t stop us, because they weren’t used to the cold.
The only team in our division that wasn’t a dome team was the Chicago Bears, and we knew that whenever we played the Bears it would be a battle, in large part because the Bears also practiced in cold weather.
The Giants played outdoors, but it usually wasn’t as cold in New York as it was in Green Bay. Going into the game, we still felt we held the advantage because of the weather.
Red Batty, our equipment manager, cut seams in the sides of our jerseys and added a pouch of fur inside the fronts. For the pregame we kept our hands in there, and it felt very good. If you can feel your hands, the rest doesn’t matter. We all had our hands in that pouch in the huddle.
One of the highlights of the game was a ninety-yard touchdown pass Brett threw to me. Corey Webster, the Giants cornerback, tried to jam me at the line, but I was able to get past him, and after Brett found me with the pass twenty yards downfield, I outran the three Giants chasing me. I scored, and I performed the Lambeau Leap, but it was so cold I was gasping for breath as I landed in the stands.
It was the longest pass in Packers playoff history, and I had to take a couple of plays off during the next drive just to catch my breath.
We led at halftime 10–6, and after the Giants scored, Brett threw a touchdown to tight end Donald Lee to put us back in front. The Giants took the lead again with a touchdown run. Our kicker, Mason Crosby, tied the game with a thirty-seven-yard field goal. The game ended in regulation tied 20–20.
In overtime Brett threw an interception that everyone remembers to this day. It was the last pass of his long and illustrious Packers career. The ball he threw was directed toward me.
I ran a shake route to the post, turned, and headed to the corner. I beat Corey Webster, gave him a post move, and ran underneath him. I looked back at Brett, and he let fire, and I knew, If I catch this ball, I’ve got a touchdown, and we’re going to the Super Bowl.
Brett didn’t put his usual zing on the ball. He didn’t step into the throw. The ball floated. As it left Brett’s hand, I was saying to myself, Nooooooo, and as I stood there waiting for the ball to reach me, I was helpless to do anything when Webster, who was positioned on my right hip, caught the ball in front of me. I tried to strip the ball so he’d drop it, but he balled up around the football and fell to the ground.
On the sidelines Greg Jennings came over and tried to put a positive spin on what was happening.
“We’re going to the Super Bowl, Drive,” he said. “We’re going.”
I was less sure. The Giants had missed two field goals in regulation that would have won it for them.
“God gave us two chances,” I said to Greg. “I doubt if He’s going to give us a third.”
And He didn’t.
Giants field goal kicker Lawrence Tynes drilled a forty-seven-yarder through the uprights, a kick frozen in time. I can still see that ball flying through the air straight and true.
My head dropped. I sat on the Packers bench for a long time after the game had ended. Jennings had to come over and drag me inside. In the locker room I sat there stunned.
You’ve got to be kidding me, I kept saying to myself.
We had planned for our trip to Arizona for the Super Bowl. It was arranged that at the end of this game we were going to stand out in the middle of the field with the NFC Championship trophy and celebrate with our frozen, frostbitten fans.
Our planning was for nothing, I thought. I could not believe that we had lost. How did we lose this game? I sat in front of my locker and cried. After years and years this was my opportunity to go to the Super Bowl. I was counting on it. And we had let it slip away. The worst part: Brett and I once again didn’t get to go to the Super Bowl together, and now we never would.