The Player Who Found Himself

IT WAS JUST A STORM CLOUD THE FIRST TIME HE SAW IT, A SIMPLE SPLOTCH OF WHITE ON A television weather map. Danny Wuerffel's life had seemingly been so charmed up until then that it was as if his life story had been lifted from the pages of a Frank Merriwell tale in Tip Top Weekly. The son of an Air Force chaplain, he was a devoutly Christian supplicant whose greatest vice was a tendency to chew his fingernails (a habit he later broke, of course). As the quarterback at Florida from 1993 through '96, he had led the Gators to four SEC titles, as well as their first national title, and won the Heisman Trophy. Selected by the Saints in the fourth round of the 1997 NFL draft, his pro career had petered out—mostly due to a lack of both height and arm strength—after seven journeyman seasons with four teams. But that didn't disappoint him so much. It merely gave him the chance to answer a higher calling, to work full time with Desire Street Ministries, a Christian inner-city outreach and education center based in New Orleans with which he had been involved since his rookie year.

And now there was this white splotch.

On Aug. 26, 2005, Hurricane Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico after smashing her way through South Florida. Picking up steam as she moved over the water, she then turned to the northwest, growing in intensity to Category 5 status and bearing down on New Orleans. Though Wuerffel didn't know it at the time, it was the first day of the longest year of his life.

Katrina wasn't his first hurricane scare in the Big Easy. A resident since his rookie year with the Saints, he had been on hand for Georges in 1998, Isidore in 2002 and Ivan in 2004. He knew the drill. In advance of Ivan he and his wife, Jessica, had taken the precaution of evacuating, seeking shelter at the home of a friend in Natchez, Miss.

But as each storm bypassed New Orleans, shifting course or losing strength before hitting the city, a sense of complacency set in. By the late summer of 2005 the warnings of public-safety officials had begun to ring hollow to Danny and Jessica. Here we go again. Nevertheless, on Aug. 27, along with their 21-month-old son, Jonah, and their dog, Chester, the couple dutifully struck out for Natchez in their small SUV. For Ivan they had left town with both of their cars loaded with household possessions. This time, certain that they would be returning in two or three days, the Wuerffels brought just a few essentials with them, including four changes of clothes, two pillows, some vital documents, two Bibles and a few family pictures. "We were highly underpacked," he says. "It was all just a nuisance."

He had no idea how profoundly that "nuisance" would change his life and the lives of so many others. Right now Wuerffel is as far away from football as he has ever been in his 32 years. Just as Katrina ravaged the Crescent City, submerging much of it beneath the Mississippi River Delta and depleting it of more than half its population, so, too, did the storm smash Wuerffel's world to pieces. The floodwaters claimed his home and almost everything in it, and they very nearly destroyed the ministry to which he had recently devoted his life. The heartbeat of the Desire Street operation was its boys' academy, an oasis of structure and sanity in the middle of the city's poorest neighborhood. After Katrina, with the school's 36,000-square-foot facility completely flooded and its 190 students scattered all over the southeastern United States, Wuerffel wasn't even sure if Desire was going to continue. But he would spend the next year of his life making sure that it would, an endeavor that has been both rich with reward and tinged with pain.

Wuerffel had first come to Desire Street in 1997, after one of the ministry's board members had contacted him by letter. Started in 1990 by the Reverend Mo Leverett, a onetime punter at Division I-AA Tennessee- Chattanooga, and his wife, Ellen, Desire Street Ministries had grown from a small community church into a sprawling community center. In addition to the academy (which encompassed grades seven through 12), the ministry offered tutoring services, helping more than 100 kids get into college, a full health clinic staffed by doctors from Children's Hospital and summer sleepaway camps for kids. The whole operation was funded entirely with charitable donations. Wuerffel admits to being "shocked" on his first visit by the condition of the neighborhood, but he was also blown away by Leverett and his ministry. He began showing up regularly to hang out with the kids, and no matter where the NFL took him, he kept coming back. "His level of commitment impressed everybody," says Leverett. "He ceased to be a celebrity pretty quickly and became just Danny."

Katrina washed away everything Leverett had built. Wuerffel, who had taken the job as the ministry's chief fund-raiser in 2004, suddenly found himself working one branch of a phone tree from his parents' house in Destin, Fla. Along with Leverett and Desire principal Al Jones, he tried to find volunteers in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas who could search relief centers for academy students. The tactic was surprisingly effective: Within a month Desire had made contact with more than 100 of its boys. "We had people walking through these places holding up signs that said IF YOU'RE FROM DESIRE STREET, CALL THIS NUMBER," says Jones. "I think we even found somebody up in Kansas City."

Wuerffel also made a few other strategic calls. The flood had wreaked havoc with the banks in New Orleans, so there was no access to any of the accounts Desire maintained with them, leaving the ministry unable to come up with the roughly $300,000 it would need to sustain itself in the short run. "In this job every need you have is a capital need," says Wuerffel. Steve Spurrier, his coach with the Gators, promptly made a donation, as did former teammates from college and the pros. Mike Ditka, the man who drafted Wuerffel, made an offering. A former Florida State quarterback donated $100,000. And Florida chipped in $50,000 in proceeds from the pay-per-view broadcast of its Sept. 10 home game against Louisiana Tech. Wuerffel's alma mater also agreed to lease one of its 4-H camps to Desire, a 35-acre facility located in Niceville—just a deep out from Destin—named Camp Timpoochee. On Oct. 3, about a month after it had ceased to exist, Desire Street Academy reopened, with 81 of its former students ready to go back to school. "So many of our kids didn't have any place to go," says Wuerffel. "We had to provide for all their needs."

Wuerffel's work impressed everybody at Desire Street. "We're so blessed to have him," says Jones. A public relations major in Gainesville, Wuerffel says he had thought about coaching when his career was over, but in the end he knew he wanted to be part of something bigger, "something that was bigger than my life. There's no question that this is where I'm supposed to be."