Delhomme was invisible - now he's The Man
Every Super Bowl needs its Cinderella story, and this year's glass slipper belongs to the Carolina Panthers' Cajun quarterback Jake Delhomme. Comparisons are inevitable with Kurt Warner, who propelled the St Louis Rams to the title in 2000. But Delhomme's rags-to-riches story is even more dramatic: when Warner was toiling in the obscurity of NFL Europe in 1998, Delhomme was in Amsterdam too - warming the bench as Warner's back-up.
"If you can't make it in NFL Europe," the 29-year-old Delhomme conceded this week, "you have to figure you aren't going to have much of a chance in the National Football League . . . "
Delhomme was proved right in six subsequent seasons with the New Orleans Saints, during which he threw only three touchdown passes and was released five times. Had he been one of the thoroughbreds he trains in the off-season, he would have been glue long before the Panthers had a chance to rescue him from the NFL scrap heap.
It is reasonable to assume, then, that when Delhomme's name cropped up yet again on the list of unrestricted free agents last winter, Carolina's coach John Fox did not jab his finger at the board and shout, " Here is the guy who's going to take us to the Super Bowl!"
"No," agrees the Carolina coach, "but he had a lot of intangible things that I think are important for the position. I'd had an opportunity to see him first hand: he was a back-up quarterback in our division. We did a lot of research and concluded that the only thing Jake was missing was an opportunity."
"Sometimes if you're not the tallest guy or the guy with the strongest arm, you get pushed off to the side," Delhomme says. "But one thing you can't measure with all those tests is somebody's heart. I thought I had a lot of heart, and that given an opportunity I could, maybe, do well."
Delhomme signed with the Panthers last March, but when he reported to their training camp in July he was only the No3 quarterback behind the veteran Rodney Peete, last year's starter, and Chris Weinke, who had started 15 games for the Panthers when they finished the 2001 season with the league's worst record.
Then in the season opener against Jacksonville Delhomme was summoned from the bench in the third quarter with his team trailing 17-0 and threw three touchdown passes in a 24-23 victory that ranks as the biggest comeback in Carolina's history. He has been "The Man" ever since, leading the Panthers to a remarkable eight come-from-behind wins in what Fox describes as Carolina's "outhouse-to-penthouse" season.
To all outward appearances Delhomme has been a model of composure under fire, but evidently it was not always that way. Though he never lapsed into Cajun French, his first language, in the midst of a snap-count, one Panthers team-mate recalls that "sometimes he would get so excited he'd start garbling the plays - we'd have to make him calm down and start all over".
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George Kimball in Houston
The Guardian
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