Home Team

by Sean Payton

  The second time, he said it like a question: “Bring the wood?”

  Then he turned to the team and said: “You guys are the wood.” He recalled his visit with the team back in August. He spoke about winning a championship and what that entails—and how he smelled greatness in the room.

  When you look back at that game, Minnesota did a number of things well. Defensively, they played us tough. Offensively, they moved the football. The one thing we were able to do was protect the football and force them to turn it over. We came up with four big turnovers. It was really the main reason we won that night.

  Late in the game, they had the ball. Tie score. Brett threw an interception, and now, all of a sudden, we had a chance to go into overtime. And when we won the coin toss, we all felt, “We’ve got to take advantage of this momentum. We’ve got the ball here.”

  The way the game was unfolding, with such high scoring, this wasn’t going to be a long overtime. And then we were at midfield, fourth and one, and there was a time-out and a chance for us to discuss the play and make a decision.

  Players, coaches, all of us collectively—the question wasn’t whether we were going to go for it. It was, “What play are we going to run?”

  We ran a short-yardage lead play to Pierre Thomas to our left. If it was fourth and a yard, he got a yard and two inches. As he was going down, the ball kind of came out a little, but he was able to regain control. The officials reviewed the play, and Pierre had possession. He had made a first down.

  A huge amount was at stake. But soon enough, it was fourth again. But now we were in field goal range. It was time to put this game in the hands of our kicker, Garrett Hartley.

  That’s an awful lot of pressure for a twenty-three-year-old kid. To look at him, you might not immediately think: “I’m going to risk my entire season—I’m going to risk the grandest hopes of an entire region—on the power of this young man’s concentration and the power of his right foot.” He had long blond hair poking out the back of his helmet. He looked vaguely like a refugee from last year’s boy band. He could have been someone’s maddening younger brother.

  He’d had a flawless 2008, going thirteen for thirteen in field goal attempts. But 2009 had not started smoothly for Garrett. He had been suspended for four games after testing positive for a banned prescription. He’d taken borrowed Adderall to stay awake on a drive from Dallas to New Orleans for a preseason workout, not realizing it contained a substance prohibited by the NFL.

  We hired forty-five-year-old kicker John Carney to fill in. Carney was like the flip side of Hartley—bald, old enough to be the young kicker’s dad, the third-highest-scoring player in the history of the NFL with 2,044 points. Carney handled the placekicking for the first eleven games. Hartley returned in time for the Redskins game and kicked four field goals, including the game winner in overtime. Carney agreed to stay on as our kicking consultant, working closely with Garrett.

  But in the late-season game against Tampa Bay, Garrett had missed an important fourth-quarter thirty-seven yarder, sending that game into overtime. Tampa got the ball, marched down the field, scored and won.

  But for all that history and all his youth, Garrett seemed remarkably calm as I walked onto the field. I spoke to him for a moment, just the two of us. It’s amazing, in a tense and packed stadium like that, how quiet two people can be.

  I pointed up to the second tier, to the area where you might hang a retired player’s number. Together, Garrett and I looked out between the uprights. Centered directly between them was a fleur-de-lis. These fleur-de-lis were hanging around the stadium. But one of them was right there, centered perfectly between the uprights.

  I reminded him that we had good protection with the field goal unit. “How ’bout you hit that fleur-de-fuckin’-lis?” I told him. “Hit your best kick, son. You know why? Because you belong here.”

  When he did, everyone knew immediately what that meant. The Dome erupted in a positively euphoric roar. We were somewhere now this team had never been before. The Saints had won the NFC! The team and the city were in uncharted waters.

  The first person aside from Brad Childress I had the chance to greet was Brett Favre. There was just this minute with him, and this is one of the top two or three quarterbacks who have ever played the game. When I came into the league in ’97, my first project with the Philadelphia Eagles was to cut up Brett Favre tape—every one of his scrambled throws. His Green Bay Packers had just won the Super Bowl the season before, in ’96. That was my first project on Monday when I walked into the Eagles office with Jon Gruden. And here it was thirteen, fourteen years later—just having played in a championship game against this same player. That really speaks volumes about his career.

  That evening was pretty special. When the team was coming back in, we had that Aerosmith song “Dream On” being pumped into the locker room. It was a crazy scene. You had all sorts of people in that locker room. Kenny Chesney. Jimmy Buffett. Jon Gruden. We gave Ronnie Lott the game ball. Avery Johnson. All these people who had been a part of our four-year journey were once again in the Superdome, in the locker room. And they knew the full significance of what all this night meant.

  The Saints were going to the Super Bowl to play the Indianapolis Colts.

  29

  SPECIAL OPS

  THE SUPER BOWL CAN be an overwhelming experience for a football team, especially for a team that hasn’t been there lately—or at all. There’s tremendous pressure to perform on the field, of course. The whole world is watching as you succeed or fail. But there’s another battle most fans are never aware of: the equally important struggle for psychological dominance off the field. Like New Orleans and the Saints, the two are intimately intertwined. I focused my attention on preparing our players for the on-field competition. I could afford to. I had Mike Ornstein running Miami special ops.

  Mike had no official title with the Saints. His name appeared nowhere on the team payroll or organizational chart. But he played an absolutely crucial role in the Saints’ Super Bowl victory, and hardly anybody knows what he did.

  Mike is gruff and hyperactive. He paces, and he talks fast. He comes from New York City, although now he lives in Los Angeles, where he’s a top marketing agent connecting sports figures with endorsement deals. He spent thirteen years working for Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders, a time that included three trips to the Super Bowl. Over the years, he’s helped several teams handle the complex logistics of America’s biggest sporting event. More than anyone else I know, he understands how to get things done in the pro-sports world. He also has a taste for mischief.

  It’s ironic. Mike was the agent who four years earlier had told me, “Reggie doesn’t want to come to New Orleans,” and I had replied, “Fuck you.” Now he was a close friend of mine and a great asset to the team, flying into Miami and softening up the off-field for us.

  I didn’t know it until years later, but I’d actually been on the wrong side of an Ornstein pre-Super Bowl campaign. This was after the 2000 season, when I was an assistant with the New York Giants. We played the Baltimore Ravens in Tampa that year. Ornstein was helping our old friend, Ravens president David Modell. All I knew was that in the week before our 34-7 defeat, our players kept grumbling that the Ravens were getting better hotel room freebies. And the Giants’ wives weren’t happy at all.

  That’s no mind-set to take into the Super Bowl.

  At the time, I chalked up the grumbling to pregame jitters. I had no idea Mike Ornstein was involved. But after the Ravens went home in victory, I heard that David Modell had told Mike: “We beat their ass on the field. Thanks to you, we beat their ass off the field too.”

  So I’d learned this lesson the hard way.

  During the 2006 season, Ornstein had come around with Reggie, and I’d gotten to know the agent a bit. As the Saints kept winning, I told him: “If we end up in the play-offs, you gotta find the guy who did all that stuff for the Ravens.”

  “I was the guy,” Mike told me.
<
br />   “You were the guy?”

  “I was the guy.”

  Our Super Bowl talk was premature that year, stalled in the slush of Chicago. So we didn’t have a chance to test any of this. But three years later, as the 2009 season rolled along, Ornstein and I picked up that intriguing conversation.

  We agreed: If we were going to Miami, Ornstein would oversee the nongame logistics. Room assignments. Travel plans. How many tickets Reggie’s family might need. If you think issues like those can’t erupt into major catastrophes, you’ve never been involved in planning a Super Bowl. At any moment, a thousand things can go wrong. Much as I admired the skill and dedication of the in-house Saints staff, no one on Airline Drive had ever been through something of this magnitude.

  “I’m telling you right now, you’re in charge,” I said to Mike even before the play-offs began. “Work with our people. But if there’s something you want to do that they don’t want to do, you tell me.”

  I don’t know all the details of what Mike Ornstein did. But I do know the players and their families were extremely well taken care of. I know the stupid distractions were kept to an absolute minimum. I know we dreamed up a bunch of little irritations to get under the skin of the Colts.

  And there was Ornstein with a tiny smile on his face.

  The psych-out began with a huge Saints billboard just outside the airport, a solid black background with a giant gold fleur-de-lis. The unwritten message: “Miami is Saints Country.”

  Actually, it wasn’t just one Saints billboard. There were twenty of them in high-visibility spots around South Florida. Mike had mapped out the route the Colts would take from their hotel, the Marriott Harbor Beach Resort in Fort Lauderdale, to the Miami Dolphins’ practice facility in Davie. Several billboards sprang up there. Several more appeared along the Saints’ route from the Intercontinental to the University of Miami practice field.

  Very simple, but very effective. It would be impossible for either team not to notice these signs. The Saints were going to look like South Florida’s home team.

  When the players arrived in Miami on Monday, I wanted to start off the week with a smile. I thought it might be fun if, as the team buses pulled up to the Intercontinental, I greeted the players in a bellman’s uniform.

  This wasn’t an original idea. I stole it from Bill Walsh, the legendary San Francisco 49ers coach. In 1982, when his team played the Cincinnati Bengals at the Super Bowl in Detroit, Walsh dressed up as a hotel bellman. Some of our players hadn’t even been born then. But I liked the Super Bowl association with Walsh, whose team had won the game that day.

  The Pro Bowl was also being played in Miami this year. Seven Saints players had made the team: Drew Brees, Darren Sharper, Jahri Evans, Jonathan Vilma, Jonathan Goodwin, Roman Harper, and Jon Stinchcomb. They got down to Miami before the other players did. I asked if they wanted to join my little welcome-to-Florida stunt.

  “Sure,” all seven of them said.

  The only hard part? Finding bellman uniforms big enough to fit the three linemen, Evans, Goodwin and Stinchcomb. A hotel employee named Ana Maria raced in a police cruiser to the home of a heavyset bellman named Bob, who happened to have three spare uniforms he was willing to lend.

  As the buses pulled up in front of the hotel, the eight of us were waiting right there. I have to say we looked pretty sharp in our regulation hotel uniforms. We waved as the buses stopped. When the players got out, we asked them crisply: “May I help with your bags, sir?”

  It didn’t take long for some of the guys to catch on. This was one beefy crew of bellhops. But it did break the tension when they realized what we’d done. Everyone got a smile.

  And from what I hear, some of the guys made pretty good tips!

  Every detail from that moment forward was designed to make a point.

  When each player got up to his room, there was more in there than free stationery and little bottles of shampoo. There was a Sony video camera. There were gift cards from Morton’s steakhouse, Subway sandwich shops and Cold Stone Creamery. There was a giant basket filled with candy, popcorn and a week’s supply of Title Sports Drinks.

  This might all sound minor in the hugeness of the Super Bowl. It was not. I remembered how those Giants players had reacted when they thought the Ravens were getting better swag. I remembered how their wives took every slight so personally—and didn’t keep their disappointment to themselves. With Ornstein handling the execution and Mr. Benson paying the bills, I wanted to make sure there was none of that on our team.

  We put on extra hotel security. We didn’t want the players being hassled in the lobby. We paid extra so the team buses would get presidential-motorcade escorts. Traffic didn’t exist for us that week.

  And every day, extravagant freebies kept showing up in the rooms.

  On Tuesday, it was monster bags of Reebok gear—eight hats, eight T-shirts, two jackets and two sweatshirts. The bags were so big, the hotel bellmen—the real ones—could deliver only four at a time.

  On Wednesday every player got a fancy Saints-logoed bathrobe with his name on the back and his number on the sleeve. Thursday it was high-end sweat suits. On Friday, a friend of Ornstein’s from Motorola came up with sixty cutting-edge cell phones that weren’t even on the market yet. Those were a huge hit.

  I made sure the wives were taken care of too. Bathrobes, slippers and extra supplies of designer bath products were left in every family’s room.

  You knew that, as the week wore on, the players would be out shopping with their families. Or they’d be in some club at night. They’d meet up with Colts players and start swapping stories. Word would get around.

  And we began hearing reports: “Really?” the wife of one of the Colts asked. “A Sony camcorder? All we got were caps and T-shirts and a pendant.”

  I don’t know exactly where all this stuff came from. Some I know we bought at a discount. Other stuff was donated by companies that wanted to be friendly—or were eager for good PR. We might have traded some tickets with Reebok.

  “Listen,” Mike told me when I asked, “if Drew Brees stops in at the local Subway because he got a fifty-dollar gift card, it’s the best fifty dollars Subway ever spent.” He told me Jeremy Shockey said he really needed two of them. “I gave him mine,” Ornstein said. “Guess I’ll have to buy my own Subway sandwich.”

  It was amazing how much difference these little touches made. Ten-million-dollar professional athletes had their dispositions brightened by fifty-dollar gift cards. But all week long I heard from the players about what great stuff they were finding in their rooms and how cool their wives and family thought the whole experience was.

  It would never let up.

  The family lunches and dinners. The pregame tailgate party on Sunday afternoon. The thirty state troopers ready to drive anyone anywhere. The extravagant plans for a victory party, just in case.

  For most of these players and their families, this was going to be the most amazing week of their lives. These were not, by and large, young men from privileged backgrounds. Most of them came from tough city neighborhoods and out-of-the-way small towns, although some had attended top universities.

  I wanted the environment to be as confidence-building as possible for our players—and maybe just a little rattling to the Colts.

  I wanted our guys to keep their minds on football.

  30

  GAME PLAN

  THE BOLDEST PLAY IN Super Bowl history was supposed to be a fake punt, not an ambush onside kick. And here’s something else I’m not happy about. When we opened the second half of the Super Bowl with that game-changing surprise, we nearly ran it in the wrong direction. Had I known the kick would produce a never-ending mosh pit on the field, I probably wouldn’t have run it at all.

  But thank God I did.

  You could call this adjusting deftly to changing circumstances. You could also call it the coach nearly screwing up.

  Saturday night, we had our final special teams meeting. Everyone was
in that meeting except the quarterbacks and maybe another player or two. Pretty much everybody has something to do with kickoffs, field goals, punts and returns. The forty-five-minute meeting, just on special teams, started at eight o’clock.

  “Give me five minutes first,” I told Greg McMahon, our special teams coordinator. “I want to talk to everyone. I want them to hear this come out of my mouth.”

  I walked in and said to the players: “Hey, pay attention. This is important.

  “Tomorrow night, when we play this game—and I don’t know when it’s gonna happen. We might be up ten. We might be up seventeen.” No losing scenarios. We would be ahead.

  “We’re gonna run this onside kick. We’re gonna run ambush. And you guys gotta make me right here. You gotta make me right.”

  The way I said it was more a command than a request.

  “I just want to tell you that so you’re not surprised when it comes out of my mouth tomorrow.”

  Originally, ambush wasn’t going to be our big surprise in the Super Bowl. A week and a half earlier, I’d gone on a tangent about wanting to run a fake punt. I’d talked to Parcells. We talked about trying to steal a possession from Indianapolis. He had done that in the 1990 NFC championship game out in San Francisco when he was with the Giants. He’d run a fake punt, and it ended up being pivotal in their upset victory over the 49ers. The Giants went on to beat Buffalo in the Super Bowl. I spoke to Greg and Mike Mallory, our assistant special teams coach. They knew I’d been scheming with Parcells. “What’s our best fake-punt option?” I asked them.

  Nothing’s worse, when you’re an assistant coach, than hearing that the head coach has been talking with his old mentor and is saying, “This is what I want to do.”

  I knew what they were all saying to themselves: “Ugh! We have a thousand things going on here, and he’s talking to Parcells again.”

  But we spent some time studying tape and trying to figure out what would be the right opportunity, and it really didn’t present itself. There were too many variables. Some of the looks were good, but two-thirds of them weren’t. The players and the coaches knew I was interested in this. They knew I was pushing it. Yet they also knew enough to tell me what they really thought. At practice, Jason Kyle, our long snapper who’s been in the league fifteen years, came over to me at one point. I could just tell he’d been sent by the coaches.