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Bringing Back Belief

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By MARTIN FENNELLY | The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 5, 2008

TAMPA - Doug Williams works in the Bucs front office. He has also played a little quarterback for the team. Oh, and he blazed a trail at the Super Bowl 20 years ago.

He knows leadership.

He knows Jeff Garcia, front and back.

"Here's a guy 37 years old running around, taking that pounding," Williams said. "He's a gunslinger. He plays on the edge. Not everyone can do that. They don't all have Jeff's heart. You'd be blind not to see it."

Williams watched with admiration as Garcia went back into the Washington game this season with the stabbing back injury that would eventually sideline him.

"It was huge," Williams said.

"You know, leading ain't about who talks the loudest or who has the biggest shadow. It's the heart and soul of what you give on Sunday."

Garcia's Time Is Now

Now we come to the new season, the very one Jon Gruden had in mind when he picked Jeff Garcia off the heap, where Garcia always seems to be, in Canada, in the U.S., all across this great continent, before proving people wrong.

"I think as a player sometimes, I'll think, 'When is the appreciation or the respect going to finally arrive?'" Garcia recently said. "On the other hand, when people do question, or challenge, or wonder if I can do those sort of things, it really does drive me."

Now comes overdrive.

The playoffs.

The Giants, Sunday.

"This is when the great players step up," Garcia said. "I'm not necessarily putting myself in that position among the greats, but I understand what's put on our shoulders and what's put on my shoulders and I will do anything and everything to help this team reach the next level."

Garcia is the reason the Bucs can win Sunday, and not because the only two playoff wins in his career have come against the Giants.

He has revived the Bucs offense. He has revived the Bucs defense by keeping it off the field. He has revived Bucs dreaming.

"I don't want to put it on one guy, but he's the guy who makes us go," veteran Bucs receiver Ike Hilliard said.

"We wouldn't be here, I don't think, without him and we won't have a chance to advance without him," Gruden said. "Playing in Canada, he did it the hard way. If we win this game, it'll be done the hard way also. ... In the playoffs, it's my experience that you don't win in spite of your quarterback, you usually win because of the play of your quarterback."

To think, the last time Garcia was in the postseason at Raymond James Stadium, he was intercepted three times and hounded by eventual Super Bowl champions as his 49ers were inhaled by the growing legend of Bucs defense.

"Brian Kelly and I were talking about this today," Bucs cornerback Ronde Barber said. "The last time we saw Jeff in 2002 we thought completely different of him. ... We thought he wasn't that good. We really didn't see it. It was sort of confirmed as he bounced around teams."

Garcia smiled.

"When you are an outsider looking in, you just see kind of a smaller scale, scrawny kind of guy trying to make things happen on the field. It's not by any means how you teach it or coach it. It's me trying to make something happen. It's like organized chaos."

Then he arrives.

And all is calm.

"They start to see what I'm about, and they start to believe."

Amen to that, says Barber.

"He's got something about him. I don't know what it is about him. You just trust him to make a play. We have had great guys on defense who you trust are going to make a play. Jeff is that guy on offense. We've never really had that kind of guy on offense."

"I wish Jeff was 25," Hilliard said.

Seizing The Moment

Garcia knows these moments don't roll around very often, especially in the twilight.

"Yes, at 37, who knows how many opportunities like this are going to come about. So you don't want it to pass you by. You want to take advantage of it," he said.

His first playoff win over the Giants, five years ago, the week before the 49ers lost to the Bucs in Tampa, remains the high point of his career.

Garcia led the 49ers from 24 points down, the second greatest comeback in playoff history, to beat New York. He threw for two touchdowns in the comeback and ran for another and completed a pair of 2-point conversions.

In the 49ers locker room after the game, 49ers legend Bill Walsh, who had believed in Garcia when nearly no one else did, who had made him a 49er, grabbed Bobby Garcia, Jeff's dad, and hugged him

"Bobby, I told them this kid could play," Walsh said.

It's five years later.

The kid is 37.

He can still play.

He's on his fifth team in five seasons. But no team needed him like this one. No team treasures him like this one. He has made something happen. And no team fits him like this one.

"I see a never-say-die attitude," Garcia said.

They see heart and soul.

You'd be blind not to see it.

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