"Great sports figures leave legacies that come in a variety of shades and textures.

Gritty work ethics. Shining athletic feats. Dark off-the-field moments.

Kurt Warner gives us something better. Kurt Warner gives us his story.

Every step of his career was a lesson in resilience, a tutorial in perseverance. His experience can serve us all. As much as we'll remember the pinpoint passes and postseason brilliance, we should embrace, too, how he responded in his darkest moments.

"I want people to remember anything is possible," he said.

We will.

His story can be told by the faces at Friday's retirement news conference.

There sat his two oldest children: Zachary, 20, and Jesse, 18. Warner first met them when he was a senior quarterback at Northern Iowa, starting for the first time in his college career. They were the children of Brenda Carney Meoni, whom Kurt had met at a country-music dance bar in 1993. She was divorced, her oldest child had special needs and "I was definitely the last person he should come near," Brenda said.

He bonded with the unconventional family, anyway, but they struggled. They drove a car that stalled on left turns. They lived on food stamps. When Warner's pro football career didn't take off, they relied on his salary stocking shelves at a local Hy-Vee grocery store.

That's OK, Warner told himself. I love these people. We can make it work.

They did. Brenda and Kurt married, Kurt adopted the two children and the couple had five more. Kurt introduced each of them Friday and became emotional as he did it.

"There's nothing better than to be able to walk into your home and know that at least eight people there still love you every day no matter what you've done," he said.

There stood Rob Lefko and Julie Magrane, representatives from Priority Sports, the sports agency Warner turned to in 1998 when the St. Louis Rams gave the quarterback, then 27, his first NFL opportunity.

Warner, in need of a representation, called three agents. One wasn't interested, and another seemed indifferent. Only Priority Sports decided he was worth a gamble."