James had obviously been busy. He didn’t stop with Coors Light. He also rounded up some Heinekens and some Amstel Lights, and he had all of it icing in buckets when we boarded the plane. There was only one problem: The flight from Dallas to New Orleans was only fifty-five minutes. Was that really enough to properly enjoy all this beer, especially after you subtracted time for takeoff and landing? I didn’t think so.
As we prepared to leave DFW, I went up to the cockpit to see the pilots. “Hey,” I asked, “is there any way we can make this flight a little longer?”
The pilots looked a little puzzled. “I guess,” one of them said.
“See if we can get that done,” I said. “If you can stretch it out to maybe an hour twenty, that would be awesome.”
“We gotcha,” the captain said.
Route adjustments were made. We swung down around El Paso, then swooped slowly around and back east. In an hour and fifteen minutes, we were landing at Louis Armstrong.
We finished the season 10-6, which was good enough to put us in the divisional round of the play-offs. It was only the second time that had happened in New Orleans Saints history. And this was coming the year after Katrina, when people really worried the Saints wouldn’t show up at all. As the second-seeded team, we would face the Philadelphia Eagles, who’d beaten the New York Giants in the wild-card round of the play-offs.
The Saints and the Eagles were well matched, and I’m not just saying that. Together, we had the two best offenses in the league that year. And the game stayed close most of the way. We matched Philadelphia’s seventy-five-yard touchdown pass—Jeff Garcia to former Saint Donté Stallworth—with a four-yard Reggie Bush score. And when their running back Brian Westbrook ran for two touchdowns, one a sixty-two-yarder, Deuce McAllister responded with a five-yard touchdown run that kept us in contention. His eleven-yard touchdown reception from Brees won the game, with the defense holding back a couple of fourth-quarter Philadelphia scares. The Saints recorded a franchise play-off record 435 total yards. Deuce alone rang up 143 of them, also a record. He was magnificent that night.
That bought us a ticket to Soldier Field in Chicago for the team’s first-ever NFC championship game.
Not only had we had a winning season. Not only had we made it to the play-offs as the second seed. We’d also won there—and now we were one step away from the Super Bowl. A team that was coming off a 3-13 record, a team that wasn’t expected to be a factor at all.
After the Philly game, the feeling in New Orleans bordered on shock. It wasn’t just happiness or even delirium. It was more like, “Can this really be true?”
And: “How much farther can this possibly go?”
But we had a daunting task ahead.
For dome teams playing in the postseason, the record in cold-weather outdoor stadiums is not very good. Games like the one we played that January against the number-one-seed Chicago Bears in open-air Soldier Field illustrated this vividly.
It was snowing at game time. The temperature was 28 degrees. We committed five turnovers, which killed us. Chicago kicker Robbie Gould made three field goals in the first half. With a two-yard touchdown run by Thomas Jones, the Bears pulled out to a comfortable lead.
Our guys were miserable. The cold, the wind, the snow. The players were either shivering on the sidelines or sweating on the field in their long johns.
We came within striking distance in the third quarter. Brees connected for a thirteen-yard touchdown pass to Marques Colston and an eighty-eight-yarder to Reggie Bush. But we couldn’t overcome the field conditions or the turnovers. We lost 39-14, to the environment as much as to the Bears.
Our Cinderella season was over.
We did learn a lesson from that game—an important one that eventually would serve us well: If we were ever going to bring this city to the Super Bowl, we had to find a way to play this NFC championship game at home.
Win more in the regular season. That was the answer. Ten was just a minimum. Get the home-field advantage of a number-one seed.
We needed to be the home team right up to the Super Bowl.
When we got on the plane at O’Hare International Airport, the weather was still miserable. Our flight was delayed. We sat on the tarmac for more than two hours. We got de-iced. We got delayed. We got de-iced again. Finally we took off for New Orleans.
And when we landed at one thirty a.m., fifteen thousand Saints fans were waiting outside the airport to welcome us home. Fifteen thousand people! At one thirty in the morning! To greet a team after a loss!
“Thank you,” people called out as we walked bleary-eyed through the airport to applause from this huge, unexpected crowd.
“Thank you for such a great season,” they yelled.
18
FAN BASE
AS I WAS GETTING to know New Orleans, something occurred to me about playing here: What the fans wanted most of all was effort and presence.
Wins were nice. Same as in other cities. Winning made everyone feel better, the team and the fans. But the fact that these players and I had chosen to come here when so much was in doubt—that meant an enormous amount to the people in this region—maybe even more than the final score of some game.
This outlook is a rare act of generosity from fans to a team—all but unknown in the world of professional sports. In Boston or Philly or New York—in almost any other major sports market—the fans can love you passionately, exorbitantly, unreservedly. And they will love you as long as you deliver the victories that make them feel good about themselves and their team. But string together a few losses? Blow a few important plays? Employ a strategy that flops? Even the most enthusiastic boosters will turn on you in a flash. That is just the nature of this business.
My job as a coach—and the players’ job as players—is to perform and to achieve victory. We are professionals. We are supposed to have talent. We are paid for our time. And whether it’s football, baseball, basketball or NASCAR, all these sports have concrete ways of measuring how we’ve done. What’s your win-loss record? What’s your batting average, your free-throw percentage, your pass-completion rate? Do you keep crashing your car into the wall? Fans sometimes will briefly tolerate poor personal performances on teams that are winning. “Sometimes” and “briefly” are the key words here. But if a team isn’t winning, do not expect to get very far with pleas of “Honestly, we tried hard.”
But in New Orleans, when we lost, it was nothing like the usual fan-on-coach experience. All we got was support and encouragement. Just the fact that we were open for business meant so much at this time.
We were the home team—their team—and we were home now. These people were so generous and warm and understanding—I’d never experienced anything like that before. I didn’t quite know how to respond.
And when we won, it was off the charts. After home games, I wanted to shake hands with every spectator who’d been cheering us on. And it wasn’t only me. Lots of the players hung around every game accepting congratulations, signing autographs, posing for photos, trading high fives with the fans. The atmosphere in the Dome wasn’t like that of a pro team at all. It was more like college players coming over to the student section after a win—and joining the glee club in a rousing rendition of the school’s fight song.
We were building a fan base, retail.
Slowly, this direct player-fan contact became a Saints ritual. Players would toss their wrist pads into the crowd. I got into the habit of tossing my visor. People just love to collect this stuff, although I’d suggest giving that visor a thorough scrubbing before it goes on anyone else’s head. It sounds almost trivial, but truly it was the least we could do after the many ways local people were supporting us.
Naturally, there was more of this with the people in the low-row seats. They were closer. They were easier to reach. But I noticed myself scanning the second-row balcony, which seemed like a mile away. A smile, an acknowledgment, even a nod—I knew how much the personal contact meant.
Peo
ple got a kick out of Mr. Benson’s second-line dance with a jazz-band parasol whenever there was something to celebrate. And now that we were back in the business of winning, we were all seeing more of that. After the home games, when our players and coaches were showered and dressed, they would go to a tented area to unwind for an hour with family and friends. Then they would head off to their cars, where they would inevitably be met in the garage by happy fans. That would never happen in security-conscious New York or Washington. In most NFL cities after 9/11, you’d be lucky to catch a glimpse of a player’s Mercedes zooming out of the team garage. But it was just taken for granted and enjoyed here.
I’m not saying the fans didn’t like the winning. Of course they did. I’m saying there was something as important as success on the field: We cared and we were there.
And then there was the matter of crowd noise.
When you play or coach in the NFL, whether you’re at home or on the road, there’s a white noise from the stands that you just become used to. Walking out of the tunnel and hearing the sound of the crowd—you get used to that. Not right away, but eventually. And that white noise, the cheering or the booing—it’s like it’s all being filtered through big sheets of cotton. It’s there, but it gets dulled out. You become accustomed to it, and it’s not as moving as it was your first year in the league. You’re a professional. It’s just the noise.
But it was different in New Orleans. It wasn’t a white noise. It was . . . clear. And it started with the region itself, and it wasn’t just the sound inside the Dome. The clarity was all-pervasive, on and off the field. It was the lack of artifice in this place, the actual human touch, going all the way down to where the players and coaches lived. In this city, there was far less insulation between the city and the team. The logistics simply didn’t allow any insulation. Insulation is not what New Orleans is about.
There are only so many neighborhoods. Uptown, Mid-City, Marigny, the Garden District, Metairie, the West Bank, the Northshore. All of them are areas where people in the organization live, the coaches and the players. New Orleans is not a place where everyone is on a freeway to the suburbs at rush hour. And so the fan base is more hands-on here. You see each other in the Quarter on weekends, or coming and going from restaurants or the mall. There’s just more daily interaction, in-season and off-, with the fans of the New Orleans Saints. Not a day goes by as I drive across the causeway that some other driver doesn’t give me a thumbs-up, a horn toot or a nod. This is not a city where a player or a coach can easily hide.
And on a personal level, the people here have been extremely welcoming to us. Despite the early misgivings, I am pleased to say, the Payton family has built a very happy life here. We have terrific neighbors. We’ve made real friends. We’ve certainly been enjoying restaurants, the ones with the white linen table-cloths and the little neighborhood joints. Like many people here, we talk a lot about food.
Beth stays busy like any mom with two kids and a charming but challenging husband. Meghan and Connor have thrived in the neighborhood parochial school. Meghan, who is heading off to high school, just made the cheerleading squad, even after she broke her arm performing a standing backspring. Connor may be getting tired of hearing, “You look like your dad.” But he loves playing soccer at Pelican Park, and he still enjoys our pickup football matches on the Superdome turf after home games. That postgame ritual now includes the children of other Saints players and coaches. Sorry if we’re delaying the confetti cleanup by the Dome maintenance crew.
In our time here, we’ve come to learn and to love many of the local traditions and quirks. We’ve picked up more than a few of them. You should see me peel a crawfish now. No one sneers, “Midwesterner!” anymore. Meghan and Connor love beignets. The first time they tried crawfish at one of our backyard barbecues, Beth peeled all the little mudbugs and neatly arranged them on a tray like shrimp cocktail. I believe that was a first for the Northshore. I’m now a major oyster fan. Every Friday during the season—home or away games—the Saints order a huge delivery of char-grilled oysters from Drago’s for the team. This works out fine since football and oysters are both at their peak in the R-months. It’s always fun seeing players and coaches from all over the country coming here and opening their eyes—and their mouths—to what’s so special about this part of the world. I’ve yet to meet the player who doesn’t like French bread dunked in Drago’s afterbutter. And I’m comfortable enough now that I don’t have to pretend I love the things I don’t. Those sticky hot sauce handshakes at the crawfish boil—ew! And king cake, which still reminds me of a cinnamon roll with a plastic baby inside!
As newcomers to New Orleans, we marvel at all the exotic accents and rules-be-damned language use. It won’t surprise me when Connor starts the R’s at the end of all his words. But I hope I never hear Meghan say, “I just made fourteen.” Maybe we’ll celebrate at Ruth’s Chris with a FEE-lay!
You gotta love it!
The only real sour note in our time here has been the Chinese drywall. We didn’t know it at the time, but our new house was constructed with that contaminated building material. We aren’t alone in this. Thousands of others have been affected. After Katrina, there was a shortage of American-made drywall. Much of the imported stuff went into homes that were being built or renovated in the Gulf Coast region.
We’ve learned since then that over time—and especially in a humid climate—this drywall emits certain gases that can have disturbing effects. In our case, it’s meant our air conditioners kept failing, our microwave kept going nuts, our house alarm didn’t function right, our computer hard drives kept crashing—and Beth’s silver jewelry turned black. Thank God, she didn’t keep that pricey necklace I tried to give her on Valentine’s Day!
Many inspections later, we had to move out of the house. After a top-to-bottom renovation, we’ve just recently moved back in, and we’ve joined a class-action suit with other families who’ve been forced from their homes.
It’s a post-Katrina irony, I guess. We arrived here after the storm—and we were still displaced. The experience has definitely made me more sympathetic.
Yes, good and bad, we’re all in it together. New Orleans is the most intimate city I know. That smaller scale affects everything. People know the players, these fifty-three ambassadors, and the coaches and team staff. I’ve been hearing this for four years now: “Gosh, Coach, I met Scott Shanle last week, and he was so nice to my dad and mom.” And “We had a chance to visit with Pierre Thomas.” Every one of these guys. Jahri Evans and Jon Stinchcomb, Will Smith and Hollis Thomas and Mark Simoneau and Roman Harper.
I guess you could say the Saints are a monopoly here. For much of the team’s history, the Saints have been the big-time game in town.
Baseball? There is no major-league baseball, although the AAA New Orleans Zephyrs do play on Airline Drive literally in the shadow of the Saints facility. For most of the time, there hasn’t been a strong, consistent basketball presence. The Jazz came and went. So did the old New Orleans Buccaneers in the ABA. The Hornets are here now. But that’s relatively new. There’s no ice hockey. LSU athletics are significant, but that’s in Baton Rouge. They have a good alumni network, but that’s not something everyone is into. Really, there’s one team that is the home team, and that’s the New Orleans Saints.
And there was Katrina, which created such horrific challenges for the team and for the city—but also created one surprising opportunity.
Support for the New Orleans Saints never evaporated with the local population. Something quite remarkable happened instead: It broadened. It spread. The circle grew wider. You could see the proof in the team’s marketing reports. People were buying tickets from farther-flung zip codes. People were making longer and longer drives to see the games. And the TV ratings reflected this too.
Part of this, I’m convinced, was a natural outgrowth of Katrina. All those Saints fans had been dispersed from New Orleans. The evacuees had to travel light. But they didn’t leave the
ir football loyalty behind. They took it with them and helped it spread—through Texas, North Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. And some of this was obviously infectious to the people there. It’s hard to watch a Saints game with a bunch of Saints fans and not feel part of something real.
The loyal refugees and their converts needed something to cheer about.
So the fan base today is different from the fan base before the levees broke. It stretches across the Gulf South region. We did what we could to build on that. Those first two preseason games—in Shreveport and Jackson—were part of that effort. North Louisiana and Central Mississippi were Saints Country now. This was happening, and it continued to grow.
All of a sudden, the Who Dat Nation was everywhere.
19
DO GOOD
THIS WAS NOT A team of takers. This was a team that understood. We were getting phenomenal support from the people of a troubled community. We’d damn well better be giving support back.
When I got to New Orleans and saw firsthand how Katrina had ravaged the city and its residents, I knew I had to do something to help these brave people rebuild their homes and their lives. Energizing a football team, winning games—that was important. But I also imagined efforts that were more direct. These people had supported the Saints for decades. They were supporting us still. Wasn’t it our turn now? We had to get directly into this fight. I vowed to myself from the beginning that this would be more than a media stunt to sell extra tickets or a quest for flattering PR. The proof would be in our actions. Judge us the same way our players are judged on the field: Not by stated intentions. Not by background or pedigree. Only by what our actions demonstrate. I feel genuine pride at the way the whole Saints organization has helped our community through hundreds of projects large and small.
Home Team: Coaching the Saints and New Orleans Back to Life Page 12
