The Prayer Before The Catch

Everybody who watches football remembers the catch. Super Bowl XLII, fourth quarter, the Giants trailing the Patriots with a perfect season on the line. David Tyree goes up for a ball he has no business getting to, pins it against his own helmet with one hand, and comes down with it. It's still called one of the greatest plays in Super Bowl history. We'd bet most people who've seen the highlight have no idea what came before it.

Years earlier, during his rookie season with the Giants, Tyree was pulled over on a New Jersey highway with marijuana under the seat. He spent the night in a holding cell — a kid on a good team, a contract worth protecting, already fined once by the Giants for drinking and drug use, now facing a charge that could end the whole thing before it really started. He'd been drinking since middle school. By college at Syracuse he called himself "an all-star partier." In the league, by his own account, life had become "a never-ending bender." That night in the cell, with nothing left to perform for and nobody left to impress, he prayed the plainest prayer there is: "Lord, I need you right now. If you could spare my job, I'd really appreciate it."

We don't skip past that detail, because it's the whole hinge of the story. Grit hadn't gotten him there — grit had gotten him a scholarship, a draft pick, a roster spot. It was running out of road the night he sat in that cell. What turned him wasn't willpower. The weekend after he got out, he visited his girlfriend Leilah, saw a Bible on her bed, and opened it to Genesis. "God was real," he said later. "And he was in control. Not me. That was the answer." Within a week, he says the pull toward drugs and alcohol was simply gone. He proposed to Leilah not long after. He didn't make a speech to his teammates about the change — he let his actions speak for him, and over time they noticed anyway.

That's the order we build this shop around. Tyree had plenty of grit before that night — the kind that gets a sixth-round pick onto an NFL roster and keeps him there. What he didn't have was a direction for it, and grit without direction just burns in place. Faith gave his grit somewhere to go.

Four years after that cell, he made the catch everyone remembers, in the game he now calls, without a hint of irony, "the Supernatural Bowl." Asked if the play changed his life, his answer cuts right through the highlight reel: "Not exactly. God did." He'd buried his mother that same year, welcomed twin daughters into a family that already had two sons, and built a marriage out of a relationship he nearly lost to the version of himself that existed before the cell. None of that makes the sports pages. All of it is the real story.

We think about Tyree every time somebody tells us they're ashamed of the season that came before their turnaround — the DUI, the year they don't talk about, the rock bottom nobody saw. His answer to that shame wasn't to hide it or outrun it. It was to let it be the exact place where he finally stopped trying to save himself.

As reported by the Boston Globe and Guideposts.

Been through a season like this yourself — the kind that could've left you bitter but didn't? We'd love to hear it. Tell us your story.