TAMPA, Fla. — The lights went out, the flood waters were rising, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers running back Leonard Fournette, then 10 years old, and his family had to get to the Claiborne Avenue overpass of I-10 in his hometown of New Orleans quickly during Hurricane Katrina.
The Grand Palace Hotel on Canal Street, where they chose to ride out Katrina, one of the most catastrophic hurricanes to hit the continental United States, had caught on fire.
Fournette was with his parents, Lory and Leonard Sr.; his grandmother, Lorraine Tyler; his sisters LaNata and LaTae and younger brother, Lanard.
“The water was so high, we couldn’t really carry our grandparents through the water, because the water was up to our necks,” Fournette told ESPN.
“One of my father’s good friends, they stole a boat, and we put our parents and grandparents on the boat and carried them to the bridge from there. … I don’t know where the hell he got that boat from, to be honest.”
There are things that Fournette, now 26, witnessed that still haunt him to this day — things in the water that he cannot unsee — the weight of it all in which he still holds onto, with every step and every carry, even now as one of the NFL’s top running backs trying to help lead his team to a second consecutive Super Bowl.
Only this year, he’s doing it wearing the No. 7, a nod to the New Orleans’ Seventh Ward and the city he cherishes so deeply, whose namesake, the New Orleans Saints, he faces Sunday (8:20 p.m. ET, NBC) at Raymond James Stadium with the NFC South title on the line.
“It shaped him,” Lory told ESPN.
“I’m just a testament to where I come from,” Fournette said. “So of course I’m gonna carry that.”
For four nights he and his family slept under a rain-soaked sheet on that bridge and recited scripture. The one Lory remembers most? Ecclesiastes 11:1. It reads, “Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it…
Source : espn
