Monday Night Memories: Arizona Cardinals vs. St. Louis Rams - December 7, 2008
December 7, 2008
It quickly became a threadbare cliché during Kurt Warner’s breakout season in 1999 to point out that his story was one too unbelievable for the movies. Warner went from stocking shelves in a HyVee grocery to the Arena League, to the Amsterdam Admirals of NFL Europe, to the bench of the St. Louis Rams. When presumptive starting quarterback Trent Green went down with a knee injury in the preseason, Warner was named the starter and shocked the world by having one of the greatest seasons in league history and leading the Rams, in order, to their first victory over the San Francisco 49ers since 1990, their first playoff trip since 1989, their first division title since 1985, their first Super Bowl appearance since 1979, and their first league title since 1951. It was the ultimate rags to riches story, a triumph of belief and determination and the human spirit. It’s actually quite easy to imagine a million movie scripts like this; it’s just hard to imagine enjoying any of them.
A movie adaptation based on Kurt Warner’s story named American Underdog: The Kurt Warner Story is being released this month. It very likely ends with the confetti falling at the end of Super Bowl XXXIV. It will not include the disappointing loss the next year to the New Orleans Saints in the wild card round. It will not include the loss to the New England Patriots that saw a new unheralded quarterback get everyone’s extremely conditional love. It won’t include the shocking start to the 2002 season, when a broken hand cut short a disastrous season for Warner. It won’t include the 2003 season opener to the New York Giants, where Warner fumbled an incredulous six times and looked as done as a quarterback can look. His backup, Marc Bulger, took over and led the Rams back to the playoffs. Warner was cut in the offseason, less than halfway into the seven-year contract he signed in March of 2000. Maybe those hypothetical movie producers were right to worry about the verisimilitude of those scripts.
Like many people contemplating retirement, Warner found himself in Arizona. The Cardinals are one of the oldest franchises in the league, one of two who can trace their lineage back to the first season of organized professional football in 1920. That seniority has never, in any era, translated into sustained on-field success. With only two titles, one heavily disputed and the other in 1947, they have the barest cupboard in the NFL. Despite two very talented young receivers in Anquan Boldin and Larry Fitzgerald, nobody anticipated Kurt Warner changing things in the desert. He was better than his broken 2002 form, and that was welcome, but he was there to keep the seat warm until a youth prospect could dethrone him. But the youth prospect drafted and anointed, Matt Leinart failed to develop. Part of this was due to season ending injuries, but in 2007, well before Leinart took the hit that broke his collarbone, coach Ken Whisenhunt was giving him the hook and using Warner as a relief pitcher. Behind Warner, the Cardinals won five of their last eight games in 2007, and the next year, after Leinart had a ghastly preseason, Warner was named the opening day starter.
This run in Warner’s career was as big a surprise as Warner’s 1999. We all allow for surprises, but once we have decided someone is washed up, we are less prepared for them to re-enter our consciousness. In 2007 Warner threw for as many touchdowns as he had in the last five years combined, and improved on that mark in 2008, and added an interception rate that was lower even than his MVP years. Boldin and Fitzgerald and third receiver Steve Breaston all hit the thousand yard plateau with Warner distributing the ball, and with a defense that had no real standout players, Warner was counted on to win a lot of high-pressure shootouts. There was no margin of error, and no romantic hook to entice people to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Marc Bulger, the man who replaced Warner in St. Louis, was walking a similar tightrope, but failing utterly. Bulger had had some pro bowl caliber years initially, keeping the Rams relevant even as the hopes for a dynasty Warner ignited faded, but in 2007 the bottom abruptly fell out for him personally and the Rams as a whole, with an 0-8 start and a 3-13 finish. They continued to burrow into the basement of the NFC West in 2008, and Bulger was benched for Trent Green in a delightful coincidence that managed to tie the Warner-Bulger era in a neat symmetrical bow. After Green lost horribly to the Bills, coach Scott Linehan was fired and Bulger restored, though the Rams continued to be listless bottom-feeders. Nobody was looking forward to or felt much dramatic tension when the Rams faced prodigal son Warner and the Cardinals, but if the Cardinals won, they would clinch the NFC West. What Rams fans remained were hoping to delay the inevitable by one week.
To have such modest hopes still be dashed must be discouraging. The Cardinals scored on their first two drives with little resistance, and when the Rams answered, they needed to be gifted the ball on the six-yard line courtesy of an interception, and even then they needed to use three plays before running back Stephen Jackson could punch it in. The Rams even allowed maligned parts of the Cardinals attack to shine; the run game gained thirty-nine yards on the first drive alone, and the defense took over in the second half. Stephen Jackson fumbled twice, the second scooped up by Darnell Dockett to make the score 27-7, and in the fourth quarter rookie cornerback Dominique Rogers-Cromartie returned a Bulger pass 99 yards to end scoring on the day at 34-10. The Cardinals were division champions for the first time in thirty-three years.
Friends and readers, I will level with you. I will probably see American Underdog just because I’m a mark, but I don’t enjoy sports movies. In this case, I can’t see the forest for the bug on the leaf on the third tree from the left. I’m so fascinated with the raw materials of sports itself, rich, unpredictable, kudzu-like, that imposing any kind of order in it, much less the rote structure of the inspirational screenplay, is like keeping a tiger in a living room, or putting music in a bottle. I am not asking anybody to make instead The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Kurt Warner. If a movie included everything in his career that I think is a turning point it would be longer than Battleship Potemkin. I’m only asking a disarmingly simple question: why do we have sports movies, when we already have sports?