Behind Jimmy Graham's future rowing excursion in the Arctic
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Katherine Terrell, ESPN Staff Writer
JIMMY GRAHAM DOESN’T know yet if he’ll ever participate in another NFL practice.
But Graham, currently a free agent who hasn’t officially retired from football, knows his plans are set for 2025.
While players across the league are sweating during the heat of summer training camps next July, Graham will be shivering somewhere in the middle of the Arctic Ocean as part of a four-person team embarking on the Arctic Challenge — a rowing expedition expected to take anywhere from 10 to 21 days. Sleep deprivation, blisters and outside temperatures that will hover around 37 to 45 degrees will be among the hurdles they may face in an attempt to break the current speed record of 15 days, 5 hours and 32 minutes.
Graham, 37, is used to the unusual after an NFL career that has spanned 13 seasons and four teams. He sat out the 2022 season before returning to the place where it all started with the New Orleans Saints. Graham caught 89 touchdowns from 2010 to 2023, a number that ranks fourth all time among tight ends. He plans to retire as a Saint one day, but he said recently that he’ll leave that timetable up to the team.
As his football career winds down, he and his friend Andrew Tropp, a retired Navy SEAL, will join New Orleans rowers Hannah Huppi and her husband, John, on the expedition spanning approximately 621 miles. The group will row nonstop from Tromsø, Norway, to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, an archipelago about halfway between their starting point and the North Pole.
“We’re chasing world records and we’re chasing them with a purpose,” Graham said. “So there’s a lot that is on the line. When you’re doing something like this, you’ve just got to embrace it and just fight through it.”
They hope to raise money for two charities in New Orleans: Covenant House, which provides shelter and service to homeless youth, and Laureus Sport For Good USA, which provides grants to create sports opportunities for disadvantaged youth.
But how did Graham go from catching passes to sculling the ocean?
It all started with a few beers.
GRAHAM AND TROPP were celebrating some milestones in May 2023 when Tropp pitched an idea.
What if they rowed across the ocean together?
“We’re sitting in a pub in Cambridge, getting a little banged up,” Graham said. “He kind of just broke it all down and said, ‘Listen brother, you’re the only human being I could do this with in the world, the only one I could be on a boat alone with that long. It’s a life goal of mine, to row across the ocean.'”
Tropp had just gotten his executive MBA at the University of Cambridge in England after retiring after two decades in the Navy. Graham was considering his future after a year away from the NFL.
The timing felt right for an adventure they had talked about since they met in 2010.
“I felt like the stars were aligning,” Tropp said. “I retired in October 2023 after 22½ years in the Navy. [He] didn’t know what his future held for the immediate.”
Graham and Tropp had wanted to do something spectacular for years. Make the Olympics as a two-man bobsled team? Enter the Race Across America — a bike race that spanned almost 3,000 miles coast to coast?
The idea of rowing across an ocean came up often. Tropp, a former college rower, was keen to do it but Graham wasn’t enthused.
“I was like, ‘Dude, I’m not doing that. I’ve never rowed, and I’m not going in a little boat across the ocean,'” he said.
But neither man knew just how long their careers would keep those ideas on the back burner.
“He’d been asking me to do this rowing thing or some type of extreme sport whenever we retired,” Graham said. “What’s funny is a decade ago, we didn’t know we’d be in our jobs for so long.”
Graham certainly didn’t anticipate the breadth of his NFL career when the Saints took him in the third round of the 2010 draft after just one year of college football experience.
He quickly proved that didn’t matter. When he was 25, he briefly set the tight end record for most receiving yards in a season until Rob Gronkowski broke it again just minutes later. When he was 27, his 16 receiving touchdowns led the league.
His signature celebration was a dunk, a nod to his basketball days. He’d launch his 6-foot-6 frame into the air and slam the ball over the crossbars while the crowds howled in appreciation. The NFL permanently banned the move in 2013 after Graham accidentally tilted the crossbars and caused a 20-minute delay in the game.
But by 2023, Graham was 36 and had been out of the game for more than a year, his longest stint away since he ruptured his right patellar tendon with the Seattle Seahawks in 2015.
At that point, rowing sounded intriguing, so Graham agreed to the idea of an ocean row in the distant future.
“I thought it was gonna be when we were 40, or at least when I was 40,” Graham said. ” … Just two meatheads trying to figure out some epic adventure to do together to celebrate retirement.”
Then the Saints called.
GRAHAM COMMITTED TO one more year of football when he re-signed a one-year deal with the Saints in July 2023, putting the trip on the back burner for several months.
But on the afternoon before a game against the New York Giants on Dec. 17, Graham opened Instagram to a message from Hannah.
Graham recalled that it said: “Hey, I heard you were sailing across the world, have you ever thought about rowing across the ocean?”
John Huppi, a Saints fan, had read a profile about Graham’s new love of cycling in the New Orleans Times-Picayune the day before. The story mentioned Graham’s interest in circumnavigating the globe with his sailboat and his bike one day.
“He had a quote at the end of it that was almost like a joke. It said he was really excited about the sailing adventure but was concerned about how he was going to fit his bike on the sailboat to stay in shape,” John recalled.
Thinking they had a chance to make him a member of their team, John looked at Hannah and said Graham might be the missing piece to a team Hannah had been trying to put together for years.
Hannah had planned to compete in “The World’s Toughest Row,” a 2,800-mile rowing race from California to Hawaii in June. When the two-month row didn’t pan out, Hannah continued to pursue possibilities, including sending a Hail Mary message to Graham.
Little did they know, Graham and Tropp had already talked about rowing across an ocean. Naturally, he sent the message to his friend to ask his thoughts.
“I just said we’re a package deal,” Tropp said. “You better tell her to take it or leave it.”
To Hannah’s surprise, Graham committed to the idea almost immediately. Then he suited up and caught a touchdown pass in a win against the Giants a few hours later.
“He’s probably not even going to message me back. Why would he even read this?” Hannah said. “But then he was like, ‘Actually, yeah, I am interested. I’ve got a game in an hour. Call me on Monday.'”
Within a week, the group had a plan and John became the fourth and final member of the team.
Graham, who got a pilot’s license in 2012, would become their navigator because of his experience with handling weather patterns. Tropp’s Navy career translated well to the captain role. Hannah, the team’s project manager, has the most ocean rowing experience. John’s own rowing experience made him a good fit to be the team’s bosun in charge of equipment.
“It’s crazy how well it worked out, just like how the timing was so perfect,” Hannah said.
The team zeroed in on the Arctic Ocean as the location thanks to Tropp’s cold weather experience from his time spent stationed in Norway. Next came the boat — a $160,000 custom carbon fiber ocean rowing vessel.
Next year will be largely dedicated to the unique challenges of the row.
There will be sponsorships to obtain to pay for the equipment and funds to raise for the two charities the team is supporting. They’ll hold training camps and maximize their time spent on the boat.
Then there are the challenges of rowing a mostly unnavigated ocean. The act of staying dry will be a constant battle against the spray of salt water and the frigid temperatures.
In order to qualify for a world record, the team won’t have a support ship trailing the boat. That means space is at a premium with all of the supplies, navigation equipment and food.
Three people will row in two-hour shifts, while the remaining person will dry off, prep and eat dehydrated meals and try to get 90 minutes of sleep in one of the two sleeping cabins.
“It’s about the length of Jimmy,” Tropp said of the sleep cabin sizes.
“Which is generous,” Hannah said in response to that description.
LOVED ONES MET Graham, Tropp, Hannah and John with some resistance and skepticism upon hearing the idea.
“Holy s—. That was my first reaction,” said Saints coach Dennis Allen, who was the defensive backs coach when Graham was drafted in 2010.
But the team’s reasoning behind the journey outweighed the danger. The chance to break world records was just a small part of the appeal.
“The challenge, the mental challenge,” Hannah said. “The physical challenge. I want to see what it feels like. … I want to see how I am in the rawest form when I’m at my worst. Who am I?”
Hannah and John said they hope to inspire their 4-year-old daughter, and the New Orleans rowing community, to dream big.
“If you do decide to do something, and you want to do something, even if it’s crazy, if you put in the work, then you can achieve it,” Hannah said. “That lesson is what we’re trying to push beyond rowing or even rowing the ocean.”
Graham felt inspired by the thought of raising money for Covenant House, a place that resonated with him. He found a kinship with some of the children at Covenant House, having experienced a difficult childhood.
He spent part of his youth without a stable support system after being dropped off by his mother at a group home when he was 11. He was eventually taken in by a youth counselor from a local church and earned a basketball scholarship at the University of Miami.
Graham said that upbringing has given him a true appreciation for the things he’s able to do now.
“I’ve spent the last … basically 20 years, chasing every dream I’ve ever had,” Graham said. “I’m going to continue to do that until the last breath that I take because our time on this Earth is very finite and I just want to maximize every day that I have here.”
He said he would like kids with backgrounds like his to know that their circumstances don’t define them. Rowing across the ocean might seem preposterous, but it’s just one example of what can be achieved with the right mindset, he said.
“I think I can be a sounding board for the next generation on what is possible,” Graham said.” … You can be a gutter kid like me, a kid that grew up, that nobody wanted, that everybody threw away at every opportunity, but man, you get the opportunity, like I got at 18, to change your life. And you can. It’s not going to be easy. No one’s going to give you anything for free. You’ve got to go get everything you get. But when you do, it’s so much more satisfying.”
