Kurt Warner - All Things Possible: My Story of Faith, Football, and the First Miracle Season

To Brenda, Zachary, Jesse, Kade, and to the little one I don't know yetyou have made me want to be the best Christian father and husband I can be. You are my life. I love you all.

Kurt Warner

To my parents, Stephen and Susan Silver, for giving me unlimited love, teaching what's right and wrong, and letting me fall on my face a few times.

Michael Silver

CONTENTS

O n the morning of May 23, 2000, when I was in a clouded state of consciousness, my world turned wacky, and I had what some might regard as an out-of-body experience.

While recovering from surgery at Missouri Baptist Hospital in St. Louis, I began to break out of my Demerol-triggered delirium and started focusing on a small television set in the corner of a post-op room. A voice was talking breathlessly about a matter of great importance, and as I squinted my eyes to make out the figure on the screena man in a white, blue, and yellow jersey throwing a football while being clobberedI realized that the cause for the commotion was me.

Rams quarterback Kurt Warner was rushed to emergency surgery, where his appendix is being removed as we speak, the newscaster reported. There's still no word on his condition or what impact this appendectomy may have on his football future...

If I hadn't been so groggy, I'd have burst out laughing. A little more than nine months earlier, I could have bungee jumped from atop the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and it's questionable whether anyone would have even noticed. Back then, I was as anonymous as any player in the National Football League, a guy whose career path included a Division I-AA college, the University of Northern Iowa, and a pair of low-prestige pro leagues, Arena Football and NFL Europe. Even the previous summer, after having ascended to the number two quarterback job while heading into my second year with the Rams, I could roam the aisles of my local supermarket and be recognized by exactly no one.

Heck, only five years earlier, I worked at a supermarket, stocking shelves on the graveyard shift for minimum wage at the Hy-Vee in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Now, here I was, interrupting soap operas, Jerry Springer, and other daytime programming because of a relatively innocuous surgery. After all, I had driven myself to the hospital before the procedure, and the doctors later told me my appendix had never been in danger of bursting. I'd been nauseous on and off for the previous sixty hours, but I didn't even have any lower abdominal pain at the time I was examined.

Still, after our miracle season of 1999, when I emerged from obscurity to throw forty-one touchdown passes, win the league's Most Valuable Player award, and lead us to our first Super Bowl victory, the Rams weren't taking any chances. Following my Tuesday morning workout at our facility, I was examined by our team physician, and he sent me to Barnes-Jewish Hospital for a precautionary CAT-scan. I was supposed to fly to New York later that day to tape some promotional spots for Monday Night Football, so I figured I'd get the test and jump on a later flight.

My wife, Brenda, got a babysitter for our youngest child, Kade, and met me at the hospital. Brenda used to work as a nurse, so she knows a little something about normal hospital protocoland she was amazed by what happened next. We went into a tiny room for the CAT-scan, and five hospital employees followed us inside. The last guy had to press his shoulder against the door to squeeze his way into the room. I've been in pileups after fumbles with more breathing room.

Your appendix is inflamed, one of the technicians told me shortly after the test. Brenda and I looked at each other and shrugged, because we didn't know what that meant. A doctor then entered the room and said, cheerfully, Hey, we've got you set up for surgery in an hour or two. My jaw dropped, and we drove to Missouri Baptist for the operation. Shortly thereafter, television watchers all over St. Louis shared my surprise.

Our two other children, Zachary and Jesse, were in school at the time, and one of their teachers told them I was having an operation, because I guess she had heard about it on the radio. Obviously, they were a little concerned, and the massive news coverage that followed the surgery didn't help. When I looked out the window of my room in the maternity ward, where I was being stashed to keep away fans and media members, I saw a bunch of news trucks clustered in the parking lotlike someone really important was there. Even though I was loopy from the morphine in my IV, I knew this was too weird not to be true.

This is ridiculous, I said. I asked Brenda to go outside and calm everyone down. She did, and the reporters were yelling questions in frantic tones until Brenda finally said, You guys need to relax and stop freaking our kids out.

Eventually, the storm died down, and I resumed my offseason routine. My family and I have been on quite a whirlwind since I became the Rams' starting quarterback, and our definition of normal changes by the day. We've tried to stay as rooted as possible, which is tough when useless body parts are treated as regional treasures. Yet as silly as it seemed to me that people cared so much about my appendix, I'm flattered that I've touched them in a way that provokes their concern. Further, I hope that my improbable success story gives me a forum from which to share the values, lessons, and faith that made it all possible.

J ust before I threw the biggest pass of my life, the sideline bomb that won the Super Bowl and completed one of the wildest slingshot rides you'll ever see in sports or anywhere else, I closed my eyes, savored the moment, and felt nothing but sincere, honest-to-goodness joy.

It was a strange feeling to experience at the time, because my St. Louis Rams teammates and coaches were nervously pacing the sidelines, and there wasn't a whole lot of exhaling going on around me. By all rights, I should've been a stressed-out mess. The dream I've had since I first got out of diapers was slipping away like a football caked in Vaseline, but for some crazy reason, I couldn't stop smiling.

I had helped give my team a 16-0 advantage in Super Bowl XXXIV, but now the Tennessee Titans had made up the deficit, and 72,625 fans at the Georgia Domeand about 800 million watching TV across the worldwere wondering whether we'd fold. The Titans had a bounce in their step, and for good reason: they had stopped our offense cold on the previous two drives, and for the third consecutive possession their offense had ripped through our extremely tired defense. As my teammates and I watched Al Del Greco's forty-three-yard field goal sail through the uprights to tie the game at 16-16 with two minutes and twelve seconds remaining, the oxygen on our sidelines grew dense, and the mood grew extremely tense.

Everyone looked at me to see how I would react, but I was eleven years and thousands of miles away, daydreaming about Joe Montana and the greatest Super Bowl finish of all time. As the world waited for a worthy encore, I stood there smiling, alone in my thoughts, a gleam in my eyes, head held high to the heavens.

One mistake, and our incredible, worst-to-first season would be obliterated. It was a daunting situation, but I wasn't worried about the possibility of pulling the biggest choke job in Super Bowl history. For one thing, I'd been confronted with far more intimidating circumstances in the past. When you've helped your soul mate throw her parents' ashes to the wind after they were killed in a freak tornado, when you've walked alone through the snow, digging your freezing hands into your pants pockets and trying to dredge up quarters for gas money while the woman and young children you love sit stranded and shivering alongside a freeway on-ramp, losing a football gameeven that football gamedoesn't qualify as a disaster.