What Jimmy Graham knows and understands, after decades as an elite athlete and now in retirement after 13 NFL seasons, is the concept of team.

And after crafting a career that will land him in the Saints Hall of Fame and Ring of Honor and, possibly, the Pro Football Hall of Fame having totaled 719 catches for 8,545 yards and 89 touchdowns in stops with the New Orleans Saints (2010-14, '23), Seattle Seahawks (2015-17), Green Bay Packers (2018-19) and Chicago Bears (2020-21), he knows a good teammate when he sees one.

Or three.

He's counting on that as he and his team prepare to test the boundaries of their endurance and mental toughness in theArctic Challenge.

Graham will be joined by Andrew Tropp and Hannah and John Huppi in an effort to row 1,000 kilometers across the Arctic Ocean in a 9.6-meter, human-powered boat, as they attempt to set several world records in the event, including the speed record of 15 days, five hours.

The Arctic Challenge will begin in July and will journey from Tromso, Norway to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, and last between 10 to 20 days. The team will depart for the site on July 1, spend two or three days preparing the boat, then wait for the best window of weather to begin.

Graham, Tropp and the Huppis will be raising funds for two New Orleans charities Covenant House and Laureus Sport for Good with the goal being $1 per meter for each charity. It will be sleep-deprived, around-the-clock work, each person rowing 13 hours per day with rotations of two hours on, two hours off and one hour donated per day.

"Basically, we're looking to inspire young people by demonstrating the power of persistence," Graham said. "I've been given a lot in my life and I just want to make sure I'm relaying that to other people and trying to inspire.

"I understand that my life circumstances when I was born and when I was raised wasn't the greatest, and I think it's a tragedy sometimes.

"I was blessed enough to have a lot of realization very young and to realize that what I was in and where I was growing up was not normal. And basically, at the age of 12, I decided to change my life and chase my dreams and chase something bigger and greater, which led me down a wild path and led me to the NFL."

And now, to a row team?

THE HAIL-MARY DREAM TEAM

Tropp is Graham's best friend, a 44-year-old who retired after nearly 23 years as a Navy SEAL. He dreamed of a challenge along this scope for a long time.

"I always wanted to row across the ocean, for the adventure piece of it," he said. "(He and Graham) had some other ideas and two years ago, in May 2023, I graduated with my MBA (from Cambridge in Cambridgeshire, England), he came out for my graduation in the U.K. I had a plan put together to row an ocean, I pitched to Jimmy and he finally given where he was in his career, (and) I knew I was retiring from the SEAL teams so we said in about a year, we'll do it."

Tropp rowed at in college at Boston University, but left to enlist.

"It always kind of weighed on me that I quit the rowing team," he said. "I joined the Navy with the express purpose to be a SEAL, but it still kind of weighed on me the stuff I was missing out on with my team. I loved that camaraderie and environment."

"I decided that I'm not at Olympic-level, but I can still do other things to compete and be competitive. Most things that I'm good at, they're not big-name sports or anything that makes money. So for me, a lot of it is the exploration aspect, and being out there testing yourself."

Tropp and Graham planned to go forward; they had no idea Hannah Huppi, too, had been dreaming of rowing across an ocean.

Huppi has been rowing since she was 18, and did so in college at Tulane. She and John, whom she met at Tulane and who currently is Tulane's rowing coach, have rowed in New Orleans and in Washington, D.C., helped rebuild the New Orleans Rowing Club, started a New Orleans youth rowing team and explored coastal rowing. Hannah was on the first U.S. national team for coastal rowing, competed at the world championship in that event and helped win the first medal for the United States.

She was planning to row across the Pacific Ocean but her team fell apart. One member had a baby, another changed jobs and, poof, no team.

John saw an article about Graham's desire to sail around the world, which also mentioned Graham's interests in cycling and flying, and jokingly suggested that Hannah recruit Graham for her new team.

"I don't follow football that much, so I was like, 'That (name) sounds familiar. Who is that again?'" she said.

So, she decided to shoot her shot, and sent Graham a direct message. "I just sent him a DM on Instagram and was like, 'I'm making a team to row across the ocean,'" she said.

"I heard you like sailing. Would you be interested?'" Graham, who isn't a social media frequenter, said he was told by a Saints teammate to check his DMs after the teammate told Graham he'd sent him a DM.

Amid the other messages, Graham saw the one from Hannah. He screenshotted it, sent it to Tropp and Tropp quickly approved, with the caveat being that he and Graham were a package deal.

"I was like, Dude, if you do this without me I'm never talking to you again," Tropp said.

Hannah didn't have an issue, at all, with the package.

"I didn't have anybody else on my team yet at that point," she said, laughing. "I was like, 'Oh, your friend is a Navy SEAL? Yes! He can come.' A Navy SEAL is basically the ideal ocean rower. To me, it was like, perfect, I'm set, here we go.

"I was shocked when (Graham) actually responded. It was a total Hail Mary, but it worked out. Then it was full steam ahead from there."

The fourth member of the team, John Huppi, is a full-time professor in real estate at Tulane, in addition to the rowing coach. He and Hannah have a 5-year-old daughter, so the timing for him to participate had to be perfect and since the timing syncs with summer, he, too, was in.

"We're very well-rounded (as a team) I think in a lot of ways by design, and in some ways by accident," John said. "When we were looking at Jimmy, we felt like he checked a lot of boxes off that we didn't, especially when it comes to being a pilot and having experience in a sailboat and stuff like that. I kind of view that as a huge plus.

"And then, the plus-plus was when we learned that he wanted to get Andrew involved. Knowing that he was a Navy SEAL, had actually spent time in the Arctic region and just having some internal knowledge about how to deal with the cold and what kind of adjustments you need to make to gear and training, and even just the logistics of dealing with the Norwegian government. Andrew brought a lot to the table when it comes to that stuff.

"So, really, between the four of us it was kind of the dream team of skill sets."

THE FOUNDATIONS

Tropp was a rower at B.U. and then a Navy SEAL.

Hannah Huppi has been rowing since she was 18 and says she's an "endurance girl."

John Huppi rowed at Tulane, is the team's rowing coach and has been rowing for 15 years.

Graham's foundation is a bit different. Born to a black father and white mother, he was placed in a group home at 11 years old where he was physically assaulted by older children.

"A lot of people don't know this about me but when I was young, from basically the moment I could talk until high school and I even dealt with it a little bit in high school I had a really bad stuttering problem," Graham said. "I really didn't speak very much as a young boy, especially when I would have these issues with my speech. I would just go silent, basically.

"What that allowed me to do is, that allowed me to observe. I wasn't a kid that was asking a lot of questions or that was asked for something, I was just listening. I listened to those around me, listening to everybody I ever ran into. And really, the way that I escaped was through movies, that really helped me.

"At a very young age, I had the realization that when I turn 18, I become a man and every decision I make is going to have a ripple effect on the rest of my life. So I just made sure that when I became a man, I was going to be making the right decisions and I was going to be putting in the right effort to create the life that I wanted for myself. I basically chased that, really, the last 20 years.

"If I wasn't in school, training for or playing football, I was in flight school and if I wasn't doing that, I was studying business and I was investing and growing a portfolio, growing my business and making sure that I had a transition out of the NFL. I had that in my head really young, and just made sure that I was ready for that transition.

"From a very young age, I remember I was 13 when I got out of the home, I told my mother, 'Listen, what's sad is that I feel like I'm already smarter than you except you have control over my life.' And I told her, 'When I turn 18, I don't want to be nothin like you, I don't want to be nothin like any man you ever introduced me to.' Usually when I say something, I mean it and so, since the age of 18, I've been chasing that."

Here's what he caught, in addition to a lot of footballs: He's part of a venture capital firm, Mach 1 Properties, and intends to unveil Mach 1 Capital Fund, a debt fund endeavor, after this winter.

And, soon, a whole lot of ocean waves.

THE WORK FORCE

There are assigned duties for team members during the Arctic Challenge.

Among them, John is the bosun; he has to be knowledgeable about the equipment and if something breaks, he's the fix-it person.

Hannah is Team Mom.

"Because when we get out there they're all going to want a Team Mom," she said. "I've kind of been project manager, holding the administrative stuff together throughout the land-based component of the project.

"And then when we get out there, I'm kind of the welfare officer in that I'll be making sure everybody's fed, I'll be on Jetboil duty, boiling the water and getting all that stuff out to the team, which is a huge undertaking when you're trying to feed someone who's 6-foot-7."

Graham, the former college basketball player-turned-NFL tight end, is the pilot and he has trimmed down significantly to help fill the role. He weighed 280 pounds when he was at the height of his powers in the NFL, a Gulliver-sized gazelle having his way with Lilliputian linebackers and defensive backs. In his final seasons he trimmed down to 260; today he's 245, a neighborhood he hasn't occupied since high school.

"Jimmy needs to eat, like, 10,000 calories a day," Hannah said. "On my off shifts, I'll be spending quite a bit of time helping the nutrition component."

Graham has the lead on navigation, communication and weather. He flew to England to meet the team's weather modeler.

"I'll be looking at weather, immediately dispatching our weather person, getting any routing, making sure that we're on the right course and I'll correct our course to make sure that we're going to the right areas at the right time.

"One of the biggest things is just making sure that I keep the vibes good, that I'm making the right decisions when it comes and I'm communicating those decisions I'm letting everybody know what we're doing and why we're doing it.

"I'm not just demanding it; I'm going to be telling them why we're going to be on this course, what's coming, what I'm hearing from our land team based on the weather situation because that's one of the biggest catalysts to spoil this."

New Orleans Saints

ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT

Actually, nothing really can spoil this for Graham and his teammates. They already will enter the Challenge with several firsts; Graham is the first black athlete to compete in it, Hannah is the first woman, and Hannah and John are the first married couple.

In July, the Arctic Ocean is gifted with nearly 24 hours of daylight; the average temperature of about 40 degrees leads to an average water temperature of 28 degrees, and the average wind is 17 to 27 mph with an average gust of 35 to 42 mph and an average wave of 16 feet.

"So we're going to be in some treacherous waters and a treacherous environment," Graham said.

It won't be the first time, and he already has shown he knows how to come out stronger on the other side.

And he's convinced he has the right team for the occasion.

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