Home Team: Coaching the Saints and New Orleans Back to Life

by Sean Payton;Ellis Henican

  I think Mickey was looking for a head coach who wouldn’t be overwhelmed by an extreme situation, someone who might even view it as a challenge to be excited by.

  Here’s something I noticed as we talked: When we got our salads, I was saying “you” about all the Saints’ issues. By dessert, I was mostly saying “we.” We could run this kind of offense. We could make a certain trade. We had to do it all amid the post-Katrina turmoil. No job had been offered. No deal had been made. I certainly hadn’t discussed any of this with Beth and the kids. I had a pretty good idea of what they might say. But as Mickey and I talked late into the night, with Green Bay now off the table and his frankness washing over me, the first-person plural was definitely creeping into my sentences. I was getting my head around that question I’d asked myself as I’d left the hotel. Without my even realizing it, an answer was gathering in my mind.

  “Maybe yes.”

  I brought up the idea of my family staying in Dallas and me coming here to work. Mickey wasn’t keen on that at all. Whoever came would have to be all in, he said. It was essential that the New Orleans Saints’ head coach be as much a part of the team and the community as any player, any team official or any fan. This was not a job a head coach could just phone in.

  Before I left New Orleans, Mickey drove me all over the area, everywhere. He showed me the French Quarter, which hadn’t flooded and looked relatively normal. We rode through Uptown, with its stately historic homes. But we also drove through Lakeview, Mid-City, the Ninth Ward, New Orleans East—neighborhoods that all had flooded badly, places that four months later still looked like ghost towns. He skirted nothing. As Mickey talked and I was taking it all in, I was already thinking about the next conversation I would have: explaining all this to Beth.

  On the flight back to Dallas/Fort Worth, leaving the blue tarps behind, I finally had a few minutes to myself. I’ll admit I felt a little excitement about the whole idea of New Orleans. This city and this team needing so much now. What it was I might bring to both of them. If Mickey offered and I said yes, success was certainly not guaranteed. Hell, it might not even be possible. But I knew this much already: It would be the challenge of a lifetime.

  I got back to Dallas and sat down with Beth. It was strange. I really hadn’t convinced myself yet that New Orleans was a smart idea for us or even doable. And yet I could hear myself trying to sell the idea to my wife. I told her, “This is what I think. Green Bay is going to hire Mike McCarthy. And we’re not interested in going to Buffalo. The one thing about New Orleans is it’s a fifty-five-minute plane ride from Dallas.”

  Beth raised an eyebrow. I was waiting to hear her say, “And . . . ?”

  We had a great life in Dallas. We had friends and a nice place in the community. We were building a beautiful home. Meghan was almost nine. Connor was almost six. Connor is not big on change, but Meghan also didn’t want to leave. She had close friends and loved the school she was in.

  Whenever you take a new coaching job and you have a young family, you really spend a year away from them, at least to some degree. You’re starting the new job. You have to sell your old house. So you lose a good part of a year. You go ahead and leave. Your wife is left cleaning up the crumbs. And the strongest argument I was making was, “Well, you can fly out of there quickly.”

  We’d be moving into an area that hundreds of thousands of people had just left. Maybe they left for a reason? Everything was a concern. The crime. Housing. Schools. The medical situation. The basic details of everyday life. We couldn’t get rid of those thoughts. And let’s be honest: A lot of those things were problems even before Katrina.

  We’d always said we were up for an adventure. What an opportunity! What a challenge! What need!

  A week passed as we thought through all these issues. There were plenty of them. But Beth and I both gradually began to see that New Orleans actually might be something like a calling for us—a challenge we were meant to take on. I don’t believe in destiny. But both of us really did feel that something was pulling us here. Maybe suburban Dallas wasn’t the only place we could thrive.

  We left it there for the moment. This was all just hypothetical, wasn’t it? But that comfort didn’t last long. A few nights later, we were at a Bon Jovi concert, Beth and I, at the American Airlines Arena in Dallas. Somewhere between “Living on a Prayer” and “You Give Love a Bad Name,” Mickey called. I stepped out to the food court so I could hear. “How’d you like to be head coach of the New Orleans Saints?” Mickey said.

  I went back into the arena and looked at my wife. She knew what the call meant. We were going to New Orleans now. It wasn’t hypothetical anymore.

  The night before the press conference announcing my hiring as the Saints’ new coach, I got home and Beth said, “Did you hear what your new mayor said?”

  He was my mayor now.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t hear?” she said.

  “No.”

  “He said New Orleans has always been a chocolate city,” she said. “It’s all over the national news.”

  A what? “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said.

  Ray Nagin had given a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech at city hall. He was addressing the city’s black residents, who’d long been in the majority. “It’s time for us to rebuild a New Orleans—the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans,” he said. “And I don’t care what people are saying Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It’s the way God wants it to be. You can’t have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn’t be New Orleans.”

  This is the mayor’s idea of promoting harmony on Martin Luther King Jr. Day?

  Nagin tried to talk his way out of the uproar, saying he was actually encouraging integration. “How do you make chocolate?” he asked. “You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk and it becomes a delicious drink. That’s the chocolate I’m talking about.”

  But that was not exactly how the comment was received by most people, including the Paytons of Dallas, Texas.

  As we prepared for the move, clearly, some people in Dallas thought we were nuts. But Cowboys owner Jerry Jones really clarified things for me. This was the last meeting I had with him after I knew I was going to New Orleans. I went in to say good-bye.

  “With some of our greatest hurdles come our greatest accomplishments,” he said. “As I look back, Sean, some of my greatest achievements have come when I took the most risk.”

  He talked about going out there and going after something as big as this. “Your reward can be bigger than you ever dreamed,” he said.

  Big challenge. Big reward.

  I didn’t know it at the time. I had no idea. But he couldn’t have been more right.

  7

  LOSING TRADITION

  I’M NO SAINTS HISTORIAN, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  But I know this much: On the very first play of the very first game of the very first season of the New Orleans Saints, September 19, 1967, wide receiver John Gilliam returned the opening kickoff ninety-four yards for a touchdown. The sellout crowd at Tulane Stadium went wild.

  “Wow, this is easy,” local people thought.

  But not for long.

  The Saints lost that first game, 27-13, to the Los Angeles Rams. And the final score, more than Gilliam’s blazing run, set a standard for the expansion team’s future. It took another twenty years for the Saints to achieve their first winning season, thirty-three to win their first play-off game.

  In fact, New Orleans was lucky to have a National Football League team at all. If it weren’t for a Louisiana-style backroom deal in Washington, local football fans would still be making do with Saturday-afternoon keggers before Tulane and LSU games. In the early 1960s, a New Orleans sports promoter, Dave Dixon, launched a drive to bring professional football to the city. He got big turnouts for a couple of NFL exhibition games. The tourism industry thought the idea
was promising. Dixon had undeniable vision and energy. His later projects included the Superdome and the USFL. But the campaign for an NFL team was going nowhere.

  League officials thought New Orleans wasn’t big enough or modern enough or rich enough to properly support a team. Where were the corporate dollars that would make a franchise thrive? But in 1966, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle needed something important from Congress.

  Rozelle was eager to merge the struggling AFL into his league. But federal antitrust law stood in the way. Rozelle wanted a waiver. The constant bidding wars for college players were getting expensive. The cutthroat competition threatened to bankrupt some teams.

  To New Orleans congressman Hale Boggs, Rozelle’s obvious eagerness smelled like opportunity.

  Boggs was the Democratic majority whip. In a meeting with Rozelle, he made clear that the cost of his vote was a franchise for New Orleans. When the commissioner said, sure, he would definitely work on that, Boggs cut him off immediately—and not in a good way. “Then I guess we’re finished here,” the congressman said, standing up. Rozelle firmed up his promise on the spot.

  “It was definitely a quid pro quo,” said Tommy Boggs, the late congressman’s son, now a powerful Washington lobbyist.

  The House Judiciary chairman, Emanuel Celler, a feisty seventy-eight-year-old from Brooklyn, was a staunch defender of the antitrust law. Boggs needed to neutralize him. So the New Orleans congressman attached the football waiver to a larger bill that was outside the chairman’s jurisdiction. Boggs and Louisiana senator Russell Long both got themselves on the House-Senate conference committee. Final approval came October 21.

  Rozelle got his waiver. New Orleans got its team. Celler was left shaking his head. “They caught me bathing and sold my clothes,” he said.

  On November 1, 1966, All Saints’ Day, Commissioner Rozelle flew to New Orleans to announce the new franchise. The first owner was a young Houston oilman named John Mecom Jr. The team’s colors reflected Louisiana’s deep ties to the oil industry—and Mecom’s. “Black gold,” he explained. The name of the team was meant as a trumpet blast to the city’s Catholic tradition and the most famous Dixieland song of all, “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

  All the team had to do now was play some football. That turned out to be the hard part.

  Over the years, Saints fans had a few things to cheer about besides John Gilliam’s first-day return. A few. Tom Dempsey, with half a foot, kicked a sixty-three-yard field goal in the final seconds of a 1970 game to beat the Detroit Lions, 19-17. That record was matched but never beaten.

  After the 1992 season, the Saints sent four linebackers—Rickey Jackson, Vaughn Johnson, Sam Mills and Pat Swilling, “the Dome Patrol”—to the Pro Bowl. That was impressive. The Saints won their first play-off game in 2000, when St. Louis Rams receiver Az-Zahir Hakim dropped a punt with less than two minutes remaining to seal the 31-28 win.

  “Hakim drops the ball! Hakim drops the ball,” a hyper-ventilating Jim Henderson shouted on WWL Radio, a call Saints fans still love to imitate.

  Archie Manning had a great passing arm and nimble dancing feet. Too bad he played on such lousy 1970s teams. Coach Jim Mora, hired after Tom Benson bought the team in 1985, got some real traction in the late 1980s and early 1990s with quarterback Bobby Hebert. Unfortunately, Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and the San Francisco 49ers were also in the NFC West.

  A New Orleans Saints All-Time Highlights Reel can be maddeningly short.

  Early draft picks disappointed. First-round kicker Russell Erxleben. Running back Vaughn Dunbar and his incurable fumble-itis. And there was Ricky Williams, who made some contributions but cost the team eight draft picks, including two first-rounders. He and Coach Mike Ditka posed for Sports Illustrated in a wedding dress and a tuxedo. Ricky wore the dress.

  Coaches came and went. Hank Stram. Bum Phillips. Bum’s son, Wade. Ditka. Jim Haslett. Some had successful careers other places. Mora was the only one who won more Saints games than he lost.

  There are a hundred ways to count all this. None of them is good. The Saints didn’t climb as high as second in their division until 1979. They had only two .500 finishes in their first twenty years.

  Every season started with promise. Most ended in sorrow, one more link in the chain of Saints disappointment.

  The real low point came in 1980, when the Saints lost fourteen games in a row. Sportscaster Buddy Diliberto urged fans to wear paper bags on their heads. Many took a certain perverse pleasure at each new embarrassment committed by “the ’Aints.”

  By 1985, Mecom had grown weary of football ownership and was ready to sell the Saints. The likely new owner? An investor group prepared to move the team to Jacksonville, Florida. This would have meant the end of the New Orleans Saints. As that deal got closer, there was talk around New Orleans that Governor Edwin Edwards was putting together a group of local businesspeople who would buy the team and keep it here. When Tom Benson, who had built a successful chain of auto dealerships in the New Orleans area, was invited to a sit-down at the governor’s office, he assumed he’d be meeting with the other members of the local investor group. Only after he arrived did he discover that there were no other investors. He was the group.

  Mr. Benson had never owned a professional sports franchise. He’d never been a major Saints fan. He just wanted to see the team stay in New Orleans, and he agreed to go it alone. He paid $78 million. He hired Jim Finks as the team’s general manager. Finks became his mentor in the football business, and the fortunes of the team brightened noticeably.

  But still.

  It was one thing for the Saints to go 3-11 in their inaugural season. They were, after all, an expansion team. But a 3-13 record thirty-eight years later in the Katrina year of 2005 and only one play-off victory in between? There was still some work to be done.

  In my last visit with Bill Parcells before I came to New Orleans, he, like Jerry Jones, gave me some insightful advice. “You’ve got to figure out what’s kept that organization from winning,” Bill said to me. “Quickly. Figure it out quickly. Or three years from now, they’ll be having another press conference announcing the hiring of another new coach.”

  Parcells went on to talk about our league and new coaches. There were ten that year in 2006, ten out of thirty-two teams. That’s almost a third of the league.

  “Of those ten,” he said, “only one or two of you will have some success. The others will fail. Those are just the statistics if you research new hires.”

  That was not an encouraging number. But Parcells had it right. Penguins were what popped into my mind. Have you ever seen one of those documentaries about penguins jumping off an iceberg to get to another iceberg? Ten jump into the water. Only a couple make it across. The rest get eaten. And yet the penguins still jump, even knowing the odds.

  I understood Bill’s point. “These jobs were open for a reason,” he said. Despite all the optimism of the new hires, the original problems never got corrected. The problems just ate someone new.

  Whatever the dysfunction might be—and I really didn’t know yet—it had to be repaired top to bottom, across the organization. How we traveled. How we ate. How we sold tickets. And, yes, how we played football. We had to look at everything. We had to look at everything under a microscope. We had to find the right quarterback and the right guys working in the locker room. And we needed a whole organization to support what we were doing.

  It’s very easy to put all the prior failures on the old coaching staff and the old team. They are gone. But they are not the whole story.

  Mr. Benson seemed to understand this and asked if I would address the whole organization after he introduced me as the new head coach.

  “We’ll win as an organization,” I said that day in the building cafeteria, “not just a team.”

  8

  NEW HOME

  MONDAY MORNING, I FLEW in from Dallas on Mr. Benson’s plane. It was Gary Gibbs and me. Gary, who had been with me in Dallas, was a very talented
coach and a good friend, and he’d agreed to come to New Orleans as our defensive coordinator. Mickey had arranged for us to stay at an old Wyndham the team had used before Katrina. That hotel gave me an early hint of what we might be up against.

  There was a horrible, musty smell in the room. I’d brought three garment bags with me. I knew I wouldn’t be back in Dallas for another couple months. When I opened the closet and hung up the garment bags, the rod snapped immediately, dumping all three bags onto the nasty carpet that covered the floor.

  I opened the TV cabinet and the door fell off in my hand. The whole hotel was like a sitcom. I was beginning to realize that even the places that were open here were not quite ready for business.

  When I mentioned this to the people at the front desk, nobody seemed especially surprised. Truly, it was every little thing. Gary requested a wake-up call for six the next morning. The call didn’t come. “Ma’am,” he said later to the lady at the front desk, “I put in for a wake-up call this morning, and it never came.”

  The woman nodded. “Well,” she said with a shrug, “sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Been that way since the storm.”

  Gary and I looked at each other. Then Gary said, “Well, if sometimes it doesn’t work, then it’s not a wake-up call.”

  You couldn’t minimize the storm. It had a profound impact on the whole region. Its effects are still being felt. You couldn’t live in that time and place and not understand this. But still, I thought, if we’re going to make real progress—if the city and region are—we can’t start giving in to Katrina despair.