How Drew Brees Became "Cool Brees"

In the annals of professional sports, few athletes have ever been as loved, admired and respected by their hometown fans as Saints quarterback Drew Brees.

In New Orleans they call him "Cool Brees" or "Breejus," for resurrecting a devastated city, reviving a half dead franchise and leading them to the Super Bowl championship. And at a time when a few high profile NFL stars are serving jail time or suspensions for criminal or unacceptable conduct, Brees' activism and philanthropy have served to remind critics of big time sports that the news is not always bad.

In a nine-year NFL career, Brees has often been underappreciated and overlooked, but he is he is finally being recognized for what he is: an under-sized athletic freak, who in the past four years has completed more passes and thrown far more yardage than Peyton Manning, Tom Brady or Bret Farve.

Asked who the best quarterback in the NFL is, Brees joked with correspondent Steve Kroft, "Is this like if you're voting for student council president and you can't vote for yourself?"

"No, you can vote for yourself," Kroft replied.

Brees is much too smart to answer the question, but he is clearly pleased to finally be included in the conversation. In fact you can hear of talk around the league that he is not only the NFL's top passer, but maybe its best player.

And the person who seems to be the least surprised is Brees himself: "I'm a very modest person. But I am also extremely confident. And if you put me in the situation or in the moment, I'm gonna have some swagger, I'm gonna have some cockiness. And you know, there's not anything, I don't think, that I can do or accomplish."

In fact, he pretty much proved that everywhere he's been. But it took a long time to convince people and there were lots of obstacles to be overcome.

At six feet tall, football experts always considered him too short to be a big time quarterback, not big enough to see over the on-rushing linemen and to spot receivers downfield.

"I don't believe that you can be too short as a quarterback. It's not about height. It's about what you have here and right here," he told Kroft, pointing to his heart and head.

And in his case it's about more than just heart and brains: it's about agility, and accuracy. Last year the program "Sports Science" ran a segment showing him throwing ten passes at an archer's target, and hitting the bullseye dead center all ten times.

But most of all, it's about Brees' athleticism and a skill package that has allowed him to master every sport he has ever tried.

"You were a pretty good tennis player, right?" Kroft asked. "Against people that turned out to be pretty good professional players."

"I was going to let you bring that up. I know Andy Roddick's probably tired about me talking about how many times I beat him when we were kids. I beat him the first three times, and he beat me the last time in pretty convincing fashion," Brees replied.

"So you retired," Kroft remarked.

"I knew that my direction in life was going elsewhere," Brees replied.

When he grew up in Texas, the only sport that mattered was football. And Brees somehow managed to lead Austin's Westlake High School to the state championship. Not one of the big Texas universities ever offered a scholarship.

So he went to Purdue, where he was a two-time all-American and Heisman Trophy finalist and shattered virtually every Big Ten passing record on the books.

Asked if he gets some personal satisfaction out of that, Brees told Kroft, laughing, "There's always a little bit of personal satisfaction when you prove somebody wrong."

In the NFL there were more doubters, even after he was drafted by San Diego in 2001 and led the Chargers to the playoffs three years later. The team snubbed him by signing 6'5" rookie Philip Rivers as their quarterback of the future. The next year, in the final game of his San Diego contract, his career nearly ended.

His throwing shoulder had been dislocated and his rotator cuff and labrum torn but it was the beginning of a wonderful story.

"There were people that said it was inoperable. That it couldn't be fixed in surgery. There was a chance you would never play again," Kroft remarked.

"Oh, it was career threatening," Brees agreed. "A career-threatening right shoulder dislocation. Which for a quarterback is the worst injury, besides a broken neck that you can have."

After an extremely complicated surgery, only two teams came calling: the Miami Dolphins, whose doctors placed Brees' chance of a full recovery at 25 percent. And the hapless New Orleans Saints, who had more faith.

"If someone was gonna be able to come back off of that injury, it was gonna be someone like Drew Brees," the Saints' brand new head coach Sean Payton told Kroft.

Payton had done his homework on Brees and liked what he saw. But convincing him to come to New Orleans six months after Hurricane Katrina was not going to be easy.

"The Super Dome at that time had, you know, half a roof. There was uncertainty whether this team was gonna be here for the long haul. There was a lot of uncertainty," Payton said.

"Do you think they were more desperate than anybody else?" Kroft asked Brees.

"Well, I think that they were," he replied, laughing.

Brees, who could barely lift his throwing arm at that point, decided to visit the city that was barely keeping its head above water. Coach Payton was assigned to show Brees and his wife Brittany that the city was livable. Instead, Payton got hopelessly lost amidst the rubble.

"So here we are driving down roads seeing homes literally moved off of their foundations, cars that are flipped upside down in people's living rooms, boats on top of roofs. I mean, it was the worst of the worst," Brees recalled.

"And I thought to myself, I might as well just drive them right to Miami, we have no shot at signing him," Payton added.

In fact, it had exactly the opposite effect. "To see those areas and see people's lives being affected like that, really, I think, helped us make the decision," Brittany Brees told Kroft.

In what way?

"What most people might see as devastation and 'Hey, I want no part of this,' I think we saw as an opportunity and a challenge," Drew Brees said.

"You sound like missionaries, almost," Kroft remarked, laughing.

"I wouldn't go that far," Brittany Brees replied.

"Like you felt some calling here," Kroft added.

"We did. We absolutely did," Drew Brees agreed.

It was, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful relationship. New Orleans and the Saints needed a hero, and Brees needed to be needed.

"This was the only team that really looked at me and said 'We trust you. We have confidence in you. We believe in you.' And sometimes all you need is just for somebody to believe in you in order to be able to accomplish maybe what you never thought you could," he explained.

Just six months later, he took the field and led the Saints to their best season ever all the way to the NFC championship game, one victory short of the Super Bowl.

That season not only marked the rebirth of Brees' career - for many in New Orleans it marked the rebirth of the city.

"It was so needed, I mean the cars were going the other direction. They weren't coming in, they were leaving. And so here came hope," Payton remembered. "And so that will never go away, with that he did."

According to the coach, it was more than just winning football games.

Off the field, Brees and his wife helped galvanize the relief effort with more than just photo-ops. He committed and raised $6 million through their foundation to help rebuild homes and refurbish parks, and schools.

Even New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landreau, who "60 Minutes" met at a luncheon for the Saints, knows who the most popular man in town is.

"You wouldn't want to run against him?" Kroft asked.

"Never. I'd give it to him if he wanted it. He'd be a great mayor, by the way," the mayor replied, laughing.

You could feel it as we took a speed walk through the French Quarter on a quiet August night.

The reception he received was the acknowledgement of two dreams that came together last February in Miami. In an epic game against the Indianapolis Colts and Peyton Manning, Brees conjured up one the greatest individual performances in the history of the Super Bowl.

"It's all just kind of a blur. It just all sort of runs together. At the time it was all very much one play at a time. This next play was the most important play of the game. I mean that was the mind set. You know we completed almost every pass, and every play we ran we just operated," he recalled.

Brees would complete an incredible 32 of 39 passes and walked away with the game's Most Valuable Player award.

The sight of him alongside the Lombardi Trophy and holding his son Baylin became the enduring sports image of the year. It also effectively put an end to all the questions about his stature as a quarterback

Asked what makes him so good, Coach Payton said, "Let's forget for a second the intangibles, the work ethic. Let's forget the mental toughness, the intelligence, this unbelievable competitive spirit. It's the first time for me to be around someone so driven and it motivates you as a coach."

Before a game lots of NFL quarterbacks wander off to be by themselves and collect their thoughts. Not Brees. He is the one stoking the fire, a job usually performed by someone much bigger and more intimidating.

"It's not that often though you see a quarterback in the middle doing that stuff," Kroft remarked.

"No. It's the first time ever in my football career. I first got here, he was the guy leading the chants, and I was like, all right, it's a little different. But you know what, he's all into it," Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma replied.

Kroft spoke to Vilma and tight end Jeremy Shockey hoping they would give us some inside information on Brees, some chink in his armor, a piece of dirt, even as spec of lint.

"He's a bad drunk," Shockey joked.

"He's a bad drunk," Kroft remarked.

"Naw," Shockey replied.

"They are going to keep that one," Vilma joked.

"Just as good of a player he is on the field he's as good off the field. He's a better person off the field," Shockey said.

"I will say he's not the best loser. I'll give you that much," Vilma added.

We saw it ourselves after a long practice session. We asked Brees if he would give us a demonstration of his passing accuracy for our cameras. And he accepted the offer.

The challenge was to see how many times he could hit the eight-inch goal post crossbar which is ten feet off the ground from a distance of 30 yards

On this day, Brees wasn't perfect - he hit the crossbar a number of times and his misses weren't very far off. But he failed to live up to his own expectations and he wasn't happy about it.

"Low. Not my day," Brees said. "Nah. That was terrible. You got me on a bad day."

"I wouldn't lose any sleep over it," Kroft said.

"Yeah, Brees said. After a long pause, he added, "I will."

"He's his own worst critic. It's just non-stop. I mean even after the Super Bowl, 'Oh, you know it's great.' You know the celebration and you know, that one ball that got away. Or that, you know, 'the on me that sailed on me. If he'd just gotten it out a little faster, those kind of things," Brittany Brees explained.

"You can always be a little bit better," Drew Brees said.

That attitude has gotten him through some tough times. Just before the start of the Super Bowl season, his mother Mina, in throes of legal and emotional problems, committed suicide. Their relationship had long been a difficult and contentious one with periods of estrangement and Brees blames himself for not recognizing the signs of distress.

"There was feelings of guilt, sadness, just thinking about, you know, what I could have done differently. Could I have prevented this?" he told Kroft.

That pain has been eased somewhat by his devotion to own son and by the news, received just after the Super Bowl, that another boy is on the way.

His wife is due on Oct. 18th. "And Drew has an away game on the 17th. So we'll see," she told Kroft.

"So what happens if you get a call on the morning of an away game?" Kroft asked.

"He's not gonna get a call," Brittany Brees told Kroft. "He's not gonna know. If I go into labor I'm gonna get the drugs and just pretend like everything's fine."

"So I go play the football game and I come home and there might be a new baby boy there waiting for me," Brees added.

Whatever happens this season on the field or off , whether he meets his own expectations or not, Brees has already achieved sainthood in New Orleans and has delivered the miracles to prove it.

"This must feel pretty good," Kroft remarked.

"Yeah, it does," Brees acknowledged. "Everybody says, if you love New Orleans it will love you back. If you hate New Orleans it will hate you back. And I love New Orleans."

Produced by Pete Radovich