Driven: From Homeless to Hero, My Journeys On and Off Lambeau Field

Copyright © 2013 by Donald Driver

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,

an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

a division of Random House LLC, New York,

a Penguin Random House Company.

www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Driver, Donald

      Driven: from homeless to hero, my journeys on and off Lambeau Field/Donald Driver.

          pages cm.

  1. Driver, Donald, 1975. 2. Football players—United

  States—Biography. I. Title.

  GV939.D78A3  2013

  796.332092—dc23

  [B]                  2013022761

ISBN 978-0-385-34914-7

eISBN: 978-0-385-34915-4

Jacket design by Michael Nagin

Jacket photographs: © Scott McDermott

v3.1

To my beautiful wife, Betina,

my son, Cristian,

and my two daughters, Christina and Charity

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Chapter  1 CHILD OF THE HOOD

  2 HOMELESS

  3 I’LL PROVE YOU WRONG

  4 TINA AND THE NFL DRAFT

  5 MAKING IT

  6 ROOKIE BLUES

  7 A NEW REGIME

  8 PERSEVERANCE

     Photo Insert

  9 MY GLORY YEARS

10 BRETT RETIRES—THEN DOESN’T

11 AT LAST

12 THE RING

13 DANCING WITH THE STARS

14 TIME TO SAY GOODBYE

Acknowledgments

PREFACE

ADVERSITY CAN WRECK your life. Adversity can lay you so low that you never recover. But if you stand up to adversity, it can also make you stronger, wiser, and more compassionate. If you get nothing else out of reading my story, you will come to understand that no matter what your background, no matter what your family life is like, and no matter what obstacles are thrown your way, if you have someone who loves you and looks out for you and if you have a mind to succeed, then anything is possible.

I, Donald Driver, am living proof of that.

For fourteen wonderful years I was a member of the Green Bay Packers football team. I was the teammate of players such as Brett Favre, Desmond Howard, and Aaron Rodgers. After several heartbreaking near misses, painful for me in the retelling, I was blessed to be a member of the 2010 Super Bowl—winning team, and I have to say that earning that ring was one of the highlights of my life. Millions of people watch the Super Bowl on TV, but few truly understand how hard it is to get there and how special it feels to be playing in that game.

In addition to earning that ring, through hard work and a little luck I was able to become the leading receiver in Packers history in catches with 743 and yards gained with 10,137. The luck was staying away from serious injury, as I was able to play in 205 games, second-most in Packer history after Brett Favre.

I also had the privilege of participating in the reality show Dancing with the Stars. I became the third NFL football player to win the contest and the Mirror Bowl, which meant almost as much to me as winning the Super Bowl. The preparation was grueling, as you will see.

It’s been quite a ride.

Looking back I would constantly ask myself, How did this African American kid growing up on the mean streets of Houston do it?

The answer lies between the covers of this book.

As a teenager I had little stability as my family moved from place to place. When things got really bad we lived in a U-Haul under a bridge for several months, cooking meals on a hibachi. Father figures drifted in and out of my life, and I had a mom who worked at night, leaving my brother and me to our own devices.

The way I started out in life, dealing drugs and stealing cars, it’s quite possible that if events had occurred differently, I could have ended up in jail, or worse, six feet under. When I decided to write this book, I did it because I wanted people—especially young people—to know that we all make mistakes in life and, more important, we can overcome them.

I was fortunate. Unlike many of my relatives and friends who grew up with me in Houston’s ghetto, I had a talent I could use to escape my hardscrabble, street-kid youth. I had a mother who loved me and grandparents who supported me, and after I left Houston to go to college, I met a woman who helped me to find a more righteous path in life. Thanks to my wife, Tina, I became successful and right-minded.

You know of my toughness and my smile. Now you’ll know why I pick up after myself in hotel rooms, why my mother is a hero, and why my wife is my strength. You’ll know why I make my family wear seat belts, and why I am devoted to the Packers fans who always believed in me.

I am proud of the receptions and the touchdowns, but I am prouder of the family I am raising and the charity work I do. I am most proud of being a doting husband and a proud papa.

This is my real story. It isn’t a story invented to make me look good. I’ve decided to let you readers come with me every step of the way on my journey of life—smiling through it all.

CHAPTER 1

CHILD

OF THE

HOOD

MY DAD, MARVIN DRIVER JR., it has been said to me many times, was one of the best quarterbacks ever to come out of Texas high school football. He was the starting quarterback his freshman year at Drew High School in Crosby, Texas, a town about thirty-five miles northeast of Houston. My dad could throw the ball seventy-eight yards in the air. The legend is that he kicked a football from a tee from one end zone to the other barefoot in the winter. I suspect that was how he earned the nickname Steel-Toe.

Time brought change to Texas. After Brown v. Board of Education, integration became mandatory, and race relations in the South turned really ugly. Drew High School, where my mom as well as dad went to school, was all black, and Crosby High School was all white. When the courts ordered the integration of Crosby High, the whites rioted.

At that point all the black players decided they didn’t want to play with the white boys, and they quit the team—all except my dad, whose father told him, We’re not quitters. We’re going to fight this, and you’re going to play football.

Dad said he was stunned by what happened next: Most of the hatred toward him came not from the whites but from people of his own race. He was called whitey lover, and one day he opened up his locker and was horrified to see a stuffed monkey hanging with a rope around its neck with a sign that said, Quit nigger or you’ll wish you had.

My dad, scared, went home and told his father what happened.

Stay strong, his father advised him.

My dad stayed on the football team, even though the white coaches made him backup behind a less talented white quarterback.

Sports often is an antidote to prejudice and racism. Coaches and fans want to win, and, even in the 1960s, if the white guy couldn’t do the job, to save his own job a white coach would put in the more talented black player. Once a player can help a coach win, the color of the player’s skin no longer matters.

The Crosby Cougars football team wasn’t doing very well under their white quarterback, and so as a last resort the coach put my dad in, and my dad brought the team victories.

As my father tells the story, the crowd would yell, We want Driver! We want Driver!

He told me, It gave everyone, including me, goose bumps.

(To show how times have changed, I never once—not in high school or in college—felt the sting of racism.)

My dad became the captain of the Crosby Cougars, and he was recruited and given a scholarship to Texas A&M, but he never went because life threw him for a big loss when his father died unexpectedly his senior year.

My father was the eldest of ten children, and he felt the pressure of suddenly having to be the breadwinner of the family. With his father’s income gone, his mother, Betty, had to raise ten children by herself. Money was very hard to come by.

Before his dad died, my father had had big dreams. He saw himself as an NFL quarterback. He loved Perry Mason, his favorite TV show, and he fancied himself becoming a lawyer. But with the death of his father, his dreams died with him. When he graduated from Crosby High School in June 1971, he married his girlfriend, Faye—my mother—and went to work. He drove a truck during the day, and he had a second job working in a canning factory in Highlands, Texas, as a machine operator.

People who saw him play still talk about him, bragging about how he was such a great quarterback and how he could have made it to the pros. And it’s tough, because it’s forty years later and he still thinks about that. When I got older, my dad would pull out the old 8 mm films and show us how he could throw and run, how he would jump off a blocker’s back and run down the sideline. There he was captured on film, the captain of the football team and the school homecoming king standing alongside my mother, the homecoming queen and the head cheerleader.

He met Faye in high school. She was a little country girl who lived on a farm. She was beautiful, smart, and had a great sense of humor. Mom was hardworking, independent, and very loving. She was twenty-one years old when she had my sister Tamela; was twenty-two when she had Marvin; and twenty-three when she had me, so she was pretty young. What I remember most about her when I was a child was that she was very affectionate. We were always hugging, always kissing. My mom would greet me with Hey baby, and she’d wrap her arms around me and plant a big kiss on me. Today mom is sixty, but she never changed. She’s still that same loving, passionate person.

My given name was Donald, but no one ever called me that. My nickname was Quickie. Everyone called me Quickie Driver, never Donald. As an infant my mom had called me Quickie because I was so fast she had a lot of trouble catching me when she went to put a diaper on me. My dad said that every time I got in trouble and he wanted to spank me, I’d take off running. He said he rarely could catch me.

In the end my father couldn’t get over his not fulfilling his dreams in football. Time went on, and the fame and the stardom became more and more distant. After high school, the way my father tells it, he met new friends. Jobs were scarce for African Americans, and he and his new friends were desperate to provide for their families. You don’t have a lot of choices when finding a job isn’t possible. He and his new friends sold drugs. They robbed and stole. When my mom was pregnant with me in May 1974, my dad went to prison for robbing a convenience store.

Dad was locked up for six months—he insisted he was innocent, but as with many defendants, he worried about what a jury would do and pleaded guilty in exchange for a shorter prison sentence. He figured it was better than having the case go to trial, losing, and serving a much longer sentence.

When I got out, my dad told me, I did didn’t take my eight-year probation sentence seriously.

He got in trouble again, this time for drug possession, and with that came a new arrest warrant. He was sent back to jail, this time for two years, although it was reduced to eight months and twenty-four days. After he got out of jail, he was caught with a pistol and had to return once again.

The truth is, I had no father figure when I was young. My dad wasn’t around when I was born, and with him in and out of jail, my mom decided to part ways with him when I was two years old. She had three children and didn’t want us growing up with a part-time father. She set out for a new life. My mother took us to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and didn’t tell my father where we moved. I didn’t know that at the time.

For years dad had no way of tracking us down, until he hired a private detective, who determined where we were living. Once he found her, he pleaded with her to come back to Houston.

Because of these trials, I didn’t meet my father until I was six years old. I remember it like it was yesterday. My mom drove to my paternal grandparents’ house in the Hattiesburg section of Houston in her green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. My dad had just gotten out of prison, and he was inside my grandparents’ home waiting for us.

Inside I met a tall, smiling stranger who had this whole goatee thing going on.

Quickie, my mom said to me, this is your dad.

He looked like a tough guy.

I was caught by surprise. I looked at him like, Who is that? I don’t know that guy. Who are you?

After my mom and siblings moved to Houston, the relationship between my parents cooled, and we saw little of my father.

• • •

MY MOTHER THEN fell in love with a man named Sam Gray, and after they got married, Sam became my father. Officially he was my stepdad, of course, but I was young, and to me he wasn’t anything but my dad.

The years I lived with mom and Sam were among the better ones of my childhood. Sam was everything you would want in a father. While living in Baton Rouge, my mother had had a boyfriend, and she gave birth to a fourth child, a beautiful baby girl named Patrice. Sam took us all in and raised us as if we were his own. Sam’s no longer with us, and I get teary-eyed and choked up just talking about him. Sam, who didn’t have any kids of his own, raised us during my formative years. He didn’t have to do it, but he did. Sam fell in love with my mother, and he fell in love with us. He was great, and I loved him to death.

From Sam, I learned that anyone can father a child, but not everyone can be a father to a child. By the time I was in the second grade, Sam and I were connected. He’d always do things for us. He never hesitated. Sam was always there for us.

It’s hard to find a good man like that.

When my mom was married to Sam, they had a baby, Sam Jr. I had a little sister, Patrice, but I didn’t have a little brother, so when Sam Jr. came along I thought that was great. My older brother Marvin wasn’t so sure.

I have one little brother. That’s enough, he said. But once Sam Jr. was old enough to walk and talk, he was thrilled to have a little brother he could pick on. We loved to tease him, but we were also his bodyguards. We protected him. We were always there for him.

Sam’s job was driving a bus for handicapped people to and from MD Anderson Hospital in Houston. Short and chubby, he had hair on the sides and was bald in the middle. He reminded me of George Jefferson.

Every Tuesday night Sam went out bowling and brought home all these bowling trophies. Usually we would go with him because that’s what the family did. And I can still bowl pretty well because of him.

When it was homework time, Sam would walk through the door and yell, Hey, it’s time, let’s get your homework done!

Sam was always supportive, and when we did wrong, mom gave him the right to spank us. Sam was our dad; that’s how we looked at him.

When we were with Sam, we had stability. We lived in a nice middle-class home. Sam had a job and my mother worked cleaning hotel rooms.

For years she had worked as a housekeeper from morning until evening. When we were very young she would take us with her to work. She wasn’t supposed to have us there. She’d say to me, Don’t move from this spot. Stay here. And I would stay and wait until she came back.

As I got older, I would go into the rooms with her, and I’d watch her work. I saw the way people would abuse hotel rooms—it was terrible.

I saw how hard my mom worked to get those rooms cleaned. Maybe that’s why, to this day, when I leave a hotel room, I always try to clean up. For me I find it tough to leave a hotel room with wet towels thrown all over the place. I just can’t do it. I take them up and put them in a pile. I always pick up the trash and throw it in the wastebasket.

Around the time I was in fifth grade, my mom went back to school to get a license to be a security guard.

I don’t want to just clean hotel rooms for a living for the rest of my life, she said. I need to do something better.

My mother’s determination to improve her lot sparked something in me. I can never forget seeing this woman determined to make a better life for herself.

ONE QUIRKY THING about my mom: She had the traveler’s blues. For some reason she didn’t like to stay in one spot. She felt like she needed to keep moving—as a child you don’t really question these things, but it was unsettling.

She wasn’t running from bill collectors. She always paid her bills on time.

We moved rather frequently, and we would change schools each time we moved. Maybe she thought she was improving herself with each move. I don’t know. I do know it wasn’t good for her kids.

Why are we moving again? we would constantly ask ourselves.

Sam liked to be settled, and moving drove him crazy. We were never in one place long enough to enjoy it. I would be at one elementary school, we’d up and move, and I’d go