Payton and Brees, стр. 49
Brees has felt the slight since he began playing sports as a kid in Austin.
“I guess I’d just say this: As a 6-foot quarterback in this league you had better have some athletic ability, because that’s really all you have going for you in a lot of ways, right?” Brees said.
Former Saints tight end Billy Miller learned the hard way about Brees’ all-around athletic skills. During USO Tours overseas in 2008 and 2009, the pair would often train together. To mix things up, they would square off in basketball or racquetball. Miller, at 6’3”, 252 pounds, figured he had an advantage over Brees. Each time, Brees soundly defeated the tight end, who was a good enough athlete at Westlake Village (California) High School to play running back and start for three seasons in basketball.
“Don’t let him fool ya,” Miller said. “He’s a very good athlete, and he’s not shy in telling you about it, either. He’s extremely competitive.”
Brees owes his precocious athletic skills to superior genetics. His mother was an all-state track, volleyball, and basketball player in high school. His father played freshman basketball at Texas A&M. His uncle was an All-American wishbone quarterback at Texas in the early 1970s. His grandfather, Ray Atkins, was one of the winningest high school football coaches in Texas history.
With a heritage like that, athletics were a part of Brees’ life from the outset. He played every sport introduced to him and dreamed of becoming an Olympic athlete.
“I loved the decathlon,” Brees said. “I wasn’t that fast, but I could do a little bit of everything.”
There was hardly a sport Brees couldn’t master. As a youth and into his early teens, Brees starred in football, basketball, soccer, baseball, and tennis. At the age of 12, he was the top-ranked tennis player in Texas and defeated a younger Andy Roddick three times as a junior. That same year, Brees set an Austin city record with 14 home runs in Little League and was chosen to play on a youth soccer select team. A few years later, he starred at Westlake High School in football, basketball, and baseball, where he was a power-hitting infielder and a right-handed pitcher with an 88-mph fastball.
“Baseball was really the sport I thought I had the best opportunity of playing at the next level,” said Brees, who wears No. 9 to honor his boyhood idol, Ted Williams. “I wanted to be a three-sport athlete in college: baseball, basketball, and football.”
Football eventually became his meal ticket. But to this day, Brees continues to awe his friends and peers with flashes of his all-around athletic brilliance.
Before he became a father, when he had more time to golf, he was a scratch golfer, a sport he didn’t start playing regularly until his junior year of college. At one time, he carried a 3 handicap. He has shot a couple of 71s, including one at New Orleans Country Club. In 2009, he hit his first hole-in-one while playing with General Manager Mickey Loomis and Greg Bensel, the team’s vice president of communications. Brian Schottenheimer, the Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator, who coached Brees in San Diego, said Brees owned an “uncanny, unbelievable” short game made possible by his delicate touch around the greens.
Over the years, Brees has wowed fans at the Saints’ annual charity softball game by hammering home runs over the fences at Tulane’s Turchin Stadium and Zephyr Field. Back in the Super Bowl years, Brees and former Saints backup quarterback Mark Brunell pounded several home runs off then Zephyrs manager-turned-batting-practice-pitcher Ken Oberkfell before a Triple-A baseball game at Zephyr Field. One of Brees’ home run balls landed in the swimming pool over the fence in right field.
When the Saints used to play pickup basketball games on their off days, Brees was a force on the court. When the Saints went bowling on a team function, he was the team’s best bowler. When they played paintball at a team function, Brees was the best paintball player.
“Everybody thinks he’s just smart,” former Saints center Jonathan Goodwin said. “I definitely think he’s underrated as an athlete. He just doesn’t get credit for it.”
The Saints coaches understand this better than anyone. They incorporate Brees’ athletic skills into their offense and take advantage of his mobility as often as possible. They’ve designed their protection schemes around his footwork and innate ability to feel the pass rush and “climb” the pocket. Bootlegs and rollouts, which take advantage of his mobility and uncanny accuracy as a passer on the run, are a staple of the system.
New Orleans offensive linemen said they routinely marvel at Brees’ athletic skills during weekly video study. His extraordinary footwork and pocket presence are big reasons why the Saints annually rank among the least-sacked teams in the league. He said he employs skill sets from each sport while directing the Saints—the footwork of soccer, the hand-eye coordination of hitting a baseball, and the motion of a tennis serve in his passing mechanics.
“He really is a tremendous athlete,” Lombardi says. “He’s not fast, per se. He’s just so coordinated and balanced. And when it’s time to go, he’s better. There’s a lot of things to playing quarterback that are not necessarily about being fast or strong. He has a mental skill of awareness and it comes from studying and his mental energy, but there are a lot of guys that could still do everything he does in preparation and still not have that. He has a sixth sense.”
Brees is not Lamar Jackson or Patrick Mahomes. He’s not even Taysom Hill, who recorded a time of 4.44 in the 40-yard dash and a vertical jump of 38.5 inches at his Pro Day workout at BYU. But at