THE YEAR 2010 was marked by a series of injuries that plagued the Packers from beginning to end. Fifteen of our players were placed on injured reserve. Our star running back Ryan Grant went down in the first game of the season against Philadelphia and missed almost the entire season, and we wondered who was going to fill his shoes. Rookie James Starks, who started the year on the physically unable to perform list, filled in very nicely, it turned out.
Tight end Jermichael Finley went down, and he was replaced by Andrew Quarless and Tom Crabtree. Andrew and Tom filled in admirably.
Among our starters, linebacker Nick Barnett, tackle Mark Tauscher, safety Morgan Burnett, linebacker Brady Poppinga, linebacker Brad Jones, and linebacker Brandon Chillar all were lost for the entire year.
I wasn’t immune. In week eight against the New York Jets I tore my quadriceps muscle.
My quad had been hurting for the last couple of weeks. Our trainers knew one of the New York Yankee trainers, and he came over and gave me treatment. He did a great job of getting the knot out right before the Jets game.
I felt good, and we were playing well, and the next thing I knew, I was running down the middle of the field and I popped it. My quad and leg became so stiff I couldn’t run, and I was so upset, because I knew I had the opportunity to help the team to a sensational year.
I was on the sidelines, and coach came over and asked me, “Donald, why did you switch the play with Greg?”
“I wanted to see whether they were going to double-team me or double Greg,” I said.
After our conversation I could feel my quad get tight. It was completely locked up, and I couldn’t move, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I finally had to admit to the trainers, “I may have to have something done.”
The doc came over.
“You’re done,” he said.
I was in great pain just getting onto the plane at LaGuardia Airport to fly back to Green Bay. During the flight it hurt so much I had to keep getting out of my seat to stretch it and try to get it to loosen up.
The next week we were getting ready to play Dallas, and I did all I could to get better so I could play. Meanwhile, the trainer was telling me I would most likely be out six weeks, that there was no way I could come back sooner.
“I’ll take off the Dallas game,” I told him, “and we have a bye the following week, and I will be back after that.”
The team doctor said there was no way.
I missed the next game against Dallas, a game we won 45–7. Aaron threw two touchdown passes to Brandon Jackson, one to Greg Jennings, and one to James Jones. I stood on the sidelines resolved that I would be playing in two weeks.
During our bye week I was injected with a substance called PRP. The doctor takes blood from some other part of your body, separates the red blood cells from the white blood cells, and puts the while blood cells back inside your body. It’s something everyone in college and the pros does now. It’s amazing. It was something new, and I didn’t think it was going to work, but I was willing to try it. Doc thought it would work, but he didn’t think I’d recover as fast as I did. I had two injections, and after the bye week, I was ready to play. I came back to play the rest of the season.
Aaron even missed a game after he suffered a concussion against the Detroit Lions. Our next game was against the New England Patriots, away, and without Aaron we figured that his backup, Matt Flynn, had to be about perfect if we were going to beat the Patriots.
Flynn, who led LSU to a national championship in 2008, was amazing. He was 24 for 37 for 251 yards and three touchdowns in a 31–27 loss. One spectacular TD was a sixty-six-yarder from Flynn to James Jones. At the end of the game Matt threw an interception to give the Pats possession, and Tom Brady made a gutsy call and threw for a touchdown to beat us as time ran out.
Despite Flynn’s great play, there was a lot of grousing in the locker room after the game. A couple of our receivers were complaining about not getting the ball thrown to them enough.
I was sick of it. I got up and said, “Stop worrying about how many balls you catch. Just focus on winning.”
The frustration, especially after all the injuries, was getting to us. With two games to go, our record was only 8–6, and with another loss, we faced elimination from the playoffs.
To reach the wild card we needed to defeat two excellent teams, the New York Giants and the Chicago Bears. After that Patriots loss, every game to the end would be do-or-die.
I did what I could to keep everyone upbeat.
“We spend so much time looking at the door that’s about to close that we forget the door that’s about to open,” I said, quoting Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. It was trite, but it was true. The players filling in for our injured guys were doing a very good job.
Against the Giants Aaron completed 25 for 37 passes for 404 yards and four touchdowns. Eli Manning threw four interceptions. We cruised to a 45–17 win. The star for us was fullback John Kuhn, a Pittsburgh Steelers reject who caught a touchdown pass and ran for three more.
We next had to face the Chicago Bears, not an easy team to beat. With an 11-4 record, they had run away with the NFL North division title.
Before the game I was talking with Bears safety Chris Harris. I suggested that he be nice to us.
“You know,” he said, “we’re not going to let you guys into the playoffs.”
The game was a defensive struggle. There was no score the first quarter, the Bears kicked a field goal in the second period, and we kicked one in the third to tie the game at 3 apiece. In the fourth quarter, after Aaron hit me for a twenty-one-yard gain, he threw a deep post to Greg Jennings for forty-six yards. Greg was pushed out of bounds at the one. Aaron then threw a one-yard touchdown pass to our tight end Donald Lee to win it.
Needing a touchdown, Bears quarterback Jay Cutler threw deep to Devin Hester, but the pass was intercepted by our Nick Collins. The win put us in the playoffs. After all those injuries, it really was a minor miracle.
IN THE PLAYOFFS we were the sixth, and lowest, seed. All of our games would have to be played on the road. No team in Super Bowl history had ever overcome such odds to win it all.
I was a twelve-year veteran in 2010. Only three other players on the Packers team had ten years of experience—Charles Woodson, Chad Clifton, and Ryan Pickett. In the locker room before the playoffs, I told my team, “We’ve got to win it now. This is it for me. I want to win the Super Bowl now, because next year isn’t certain. There’s only one chance to get this thing. Don’t be thinking Oh, I got next year. I can tell you from being in this league a long time, next year isn’t promised to you.”
Our journey to the Super Bowl came down to three road games. The first was in Philadelphia, a team we had defeated in the first week of the season. Aaron was terrific, throwing three touchdown passes to Tom Crabtree, James Jones, and Brandon Jackson. I had five catches for fifty-six yards, including one play when I ran a deep cross down the sideline on third down, splitting two defenders just as Aaron threw the ball. It was an important first down on the way to a touchdown.
Michael Vick, the Eagles quarterback, threw for almost three hundred yards but only one touchdown. He was moving the Eagles down the field at the end of the fourth quarter when our cornerback, Tramon Williams, made an incredible interception in the end zone with thirty-six seconds left in the game. David Akers, who beat us in overtime to crush our chances of going to the Super Bowl in 2003, missed two field goals. Karma, baby, karma.
FOOTBALL HAS BEEN an important part of my life, but in November 2010 I was reminded that there are times when football has to take a backseat. Bryant Pretlow had been a dear friend of mine since college. He had played basketball for Alcorn State, and we were close like brothers. We would share clothing—even though he was a lot bigger than I was. He was six foot six and would wear size XL, but back then I liked to wear my clothes big and baggy, and he’d always lend me his shirts.
He majored in criminal justice, which was Tina’s major as well. His girlfriend at the time was in the band with Tina, and it was through Bryant that Tina and I hooked up. Without him, Tina and I never would have been together.
The Saturday night before our game with the Dallas Cowboys, I had gotten a call from Bryant’s mom, urging me to come to Norfolk, Virginia, to see him.
“He’s not feeling too good,” she said. “He might not make it.”
He was working in special services in the army, and in our last conversation he had said he was working a lot and was tired. The truth was he had cancer, Hodgkin’s disease, and he didn’t want to tell me.
His mom was the one who finally told me about the cancer.
After the Dallas game, we had a bye week, and I told him I’d fly in to see him. I was scheduled to fly to Virginia on Wednesday. Another really good friend of mine, Timon Durrett, an actor we called Tree, went to see Bryant on Tuesday afternoon.
Tree arrived first. As he walked into the room to see Bryant, he was talking to me on the phone. Tree screamed at me, “He’s gone, Quickie! He’s gone!”
I lost it. I burst into tears.
About a half hour later Tree called back. Bryant was breathing again. Bryant’s aunt got on the phone.
“Quickie,” she said, “Bryant’s waiting on you. I told him you were on your way, and he took another breath.”
There was a flight leaving Dallas in half an hour for Norfolk. I called the airline and asked them to hold it for me.
“My best friend is passing away, and I need to get there,” I said.
I made the flight.
Tree picked me up at the airport.
“He’s waiting on you, man,” Tree said.
I walked into Bryant’s room. His mom, aunts, brother, and girlfriend all were there. He was lying in bed, barely breathing, taking noisy, strained breaths.
“Hey, P,” I said. “I’m here, man. If you’re ready to go, you can go now.”
He was unable to speak.
I moved close to him. He opened his eyes, and as I walked toward him I could see he was following my movements. I grabbed his hand, and he moved a finger.
“Hey, man, you can’t go,” I started babbling. “We have all these plans. When I retire, we’re going to do all these things together for kids in Virginia, give these kids an opportunity. You can’t go on me now.”
He couldn’t talk.
He was having trouble breathing and he wanted to roll over. I picked him up in my arms, and he let out a heavy sigh.
“Hold on, Bryant, just a little longer,” I pleaded with him. I told him Tina and the kids would be out the next day to see him.
He took one more breath—and that was it.
Bryant was thirty-five years old. How can you explain that? If that doesn’t shake your believe in God, nothing will.
I couldn’t accept he was gone. I wouldn’t let him go. I lay in the bed with him, holding him, until his mom said, “Quickie, you have to let him go.”
“He’s tired,” I said. “He’s just sleeping. I’m going to hold him awhile.”
I couldn’t accept that he had died.
I stayed with him for two hours until the coroners came.
The coroners, Tree, and I picked him up. To the coroners he wasn’t anybody—to Tree and me he meant everything.
“He’s my best friend,” I told the coroners. “Don’t treat him like a nobody.”
After they made the arrangements the next day, I left for Green Bay. Coach McCarthy said I could leave practice to attend his funeral.
When Bryant passed away, I felt cancer. Cancer to me went from being a disease to something much more personal.
When you lose family members to drugs or to gangs, it’s terrible, but you have some control over those things. You had a choice. With cancer, there’s no choice. That’s tough. I had never experienced the feeling of being robbed because someone you love was taken too soon, taken against their will when they had no choice.
Cancer has been on my mind a lot since then. My foundation does so much for homeless families, feeding them and finding them housing, but I have to find a way to add cancer awareness to the list of causes just because of Bryant and the cruel way he died. I just have to.
I returned home with a heavy heart. The top-seeded Atlanta Falcons were next. Earlier in the year we had lost to them 20–17.
Normally before a game we stayed in downtown Atlanta. We would go to Peachtree Street and hit the restaurants and bars and enjoy ourselves. Before this game Coach McCarthy took us waaaaaay out to the woods. I don’t even know where we were, what town the hotel was in. It was the boonies.
“Our original designated hotel was already booked,” Coach McCarthy told us.
As a result, he said, we had to stay in a hotel in the middle of nowhere.
And I mean nowhere. I felt like I was back at Alcorn State. There was no mall. There was no McDonald’s. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, no one even thought of breaking curfew.
James Jones, myself, and a couple other guys were going stir crazy, so I paid one of the hotel employees to hijack one of the hotel vans and take us to McDonald’s. On the way I spied a Chick-fil-A.
“Pull over!” I yelled. “We have to eat at Chick-fil-A!”
It’s one of my favorite places to eat, but I only get to eat there when I’m in Dallas.
I ordered nuggets, a sandwich, and some fries. After that, there was nothing to do but head back to the hotel.
Mike had wanted to make sure we were focused, and against the Falcons we were just that. We scored forty-eight points, the most the Packers ever scored in a postseason game. We won the game 48–21.
Greg Jennings had 101 receiving yards. Jordy had 79 yards including a touchdown. James Jones had 75 yards and a touchdown catch. One highlight just before the half was an interception and 70-yard touchdown run by cornerback Tramon Williams. We were so far ahead Matt Flynn finished the game.
Our punter, Tim Masthay, never got off the bench.
THERE WAS ONE more game before the Super Bowl. Our opponents were President Barack Obama’s Chicago Bears. The last time the Green Bay Packers had faced the Bears in a postseason game was back in 1941, just after Pearl Harbor.
Winning big can sometimes be a trap. After winning big, you say to yourself, Piece of cake. We can do this every week. But as I’ve learned from bitter experience, it doesn’t work that way. The next week against a different defense, you can get shut out and then you begin to question your ability. Pro football is a very difficult game, and not just physically.
During the playoffs I worked hard to keep everyone focused on the next opponent.
“We’re going to take it one game at a time,” I said to the team several times in the locker room. “We’re going to beat the guy in front of us, one-on-one, all day long. If we can do that, we’ll continue.
“And we have to keep making the plays.”
As I sat in the locker room before the game, a couple of the younger players asked me, “Drive, have you ever been to an NFL Championship Game?”
“I’ve been to one,” I told them, “against the Giants in 2007. We lost that game, so I know what losing an NFL Championship Game feels like. The biggest thing is, we have to win and get to the Super Bowl. That’s my goal, to get to that game. I dream of this. I’ve been dreaming of this for a long time.” The game was a seesaw affair, more a war than a game. When the final whistle blew, we came away with a 21–14 win, a victory that started with a one-yard touchdown run by Aaron and then a four-yard touchdown run by James Starks, our rookie find, and after the Bears scored, B. J. Raji, our young nose tackle, intercepted a Caleb Hanie pass and ran it eighteen yards for a touchdown to make it 21–7. Hanie managed a touchdown pass late in the fourth quarter, but time ran out on the Bears as we became the first sixth-seeded playoff team to go to a Super Bowl. As I sat there after the game I thought about the tremendous job that general manager Ted Thompson had done to put the team together. I was one of the few players who were already on the team when he arrived. Most all of the Packers were his handpicked choices.
We were going to the Super Bowl.
I held the NFC Championship trophy in my hands, and I was kissing it. I thought, In the next couple of weeks I hope to hold the Vince Lombardi Trophy and kiss that, too.