Payton and Brees, стр. 14
Drew and his younger brother, Reid, would spend their summers attending two-a-day preseason practices at Gregory-Portland. But Drew didn’t start playing football until high school, primarily because Mina was leery of the sport. She had seen how a knee injury derailed her brother, Marty’s, career and didn’t want something similar to happen to her boys.
“I had witnessed my brother’s career come to a screeching halt,” Mina Brees told the Austin American-Statesman in 2002. “I was a little leery of…kids playing tackle football too early.”
Chip and Mina divorced in 1987, when Drew was eight and his brother Reid was six. Both parents remarried. Mina was married for 10 years to Harley Clark, a state district court judge and former Texas yell-leader who is credited with inventing the famous Hook ’em Horns salute. Chip married Amy Hightower, whose father, Jack, was a congressman from north Texas and later a state Supreme Court judge. The couple received joint custody of the children, and the boys split their time between both homes.
“There’s absolutely no way that a divorce cannot affect children or any of the people who are intimately involved,” Mina said in a 2000 Lafayette Journal and Courier story. “I do think they became more adaptable and more mature earlier because of that. They had to become more responsible.”
In 1993, Brees enrolled at Westlake High School, located in West Lake Hills, an exclusive suburb west of Austin. Westlake was an academic and athletic powerhouse. The Chaparrals won state titles in seven different sports before Brees arrived, and the school regularly was listed among the top high schools in the nation in rankings by Newsweek and the Washington Post.
Brees played football, basketball, and baseball, where he was a power-hitting infielder and a right-handed pitcher with an 88-mph fastball.
Brees was not an immediate football prodigy. As a freshman he played on the B team, and as a sophomore he found himself stuck behind Jonny Rodgers on the junior varsity. Rodgers was the younger brother of Jay Rodgers, a star who went on to play at the University of Indiana, and the son of Randy Rodgers, then in charge of recruiting for John Mackovic’s staff at the University of Texas. That August, Brees grew so discouraged he threatened to quit the team so he could concentrate on basketball and baseball. Brees was dissuaded by a pep talk from his mother, and a few days later Rodgers injured his knee during a scrimmage.
“If Jonny hadn’t got hurt, I don’t know if Drew would have ever had a chance,” Westlake varsity coach Ron Schroeder told the Austin American-Statesman. “I never heard anyone talk about him as a starting quarterback, then all the sudden he had to be the starter when Jonny got hurt.”
In Brees’ first JV game he completed 9 of 10 passes for 315 yards and four touchdowns. The Westlake JV didn’t lose a game that season. The next season he led the Chaparrals varsity to a 12–0–1 record before suffering the first major injury of his career. In a regional playoff game at Alice, Texas, Brees tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee while running a bootleg. His season was over and so was Westlake’s a week later.
“That was a big, defining moment,” Brees said. “I had seen other athletes tear their ACLs and not come back the same. It really scared me at the time. At the time, it was the hardest thing I ever had to do, both mentally and physically. It was more so mentally getting over the hurdle of coming back from something that I thought at the time was pretty devastating and coming back and having my best year.”
Brees had surgery in January 1996 and attacked the rehab process. He was fully recovered when his senior year started but still wore a large brace on his surgically repaired knee as a precaution. Brees led the Chaps to a 16–0 record and the Class 5A Division II state title, the first in school history.
The night of Westlake’s 55–15 state championship romp over Abilene Cooper at Texas Stadium in Dallas, the team returned to Westlake High and there were throngs of people waiting outside the locker room, including autograph-seeking youngsters. One by one, his teammates came out to sign the championship T-shirts, but Brees was nowhere to be found.
“Drew was so sentimental about his last time in that locker room as a player, he did not want to come out,” Amy told the Journal and Courier.
As a senior, Brees passed for 3,528 yards and 31 touchdowns with a 63 percent completion rate. He was named the Class 5A offensive MVP award and finished his career with 5,416 passing yards and 50 touchdowns.
“My biggest memory is that there was never a down or distance so foreboding that we didn’t think we could get it,” Westlake team doctor and longtime family friend Newt Hasson told the Waco Tribune-Herald in 2011. “We always knew Drew could come through. If it were third-and-30, he’d get 31 yards. If it were fourth-and-14, he’d get 15 yards. There was never any doubt that he would get whatever yardage we needed to keep the chains moving.”
College scouts and recruiting analysts were less impressed. Despite his gaudy numbers at the highest level of Texas prep football, Brees was not listed in SuperPrep’s Texas 102 as a senior, nor did he make the 100-player All-Southwest Team in Tom Lemming’s Prep Football Report.
Hometown Texas didn’t recruit Brees at all. The Longhorns sent him just one form letter and never called him once. Texas A&M, his dream school because of his parents’ ties, flirted with him for a couple of months but showed more interest in his Westlake teammate Seth McKinney. Texas A&M coaches told him he was their backup plan in case their top target, Major Applewhite, a highly ranked prospect from Baton Rouge, chose elsewhere. Mina Brees even took