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

by Sean Payton;Ellis Henican

  Joe was on the headset, standing right next to me.

  We beat Cincinnati in that preseason game. After Friday’s practice, we made an announcement that we were going to put Kenny Chesney on waivers.

  “We couldn’t come to terms with the contract,” I said. “My gut instinct all along was that we weren’t gonna be able to afford him. So I think it was better for everyone.”

  The next week I got a text from Kenny: Had a great time. Really appreciated hangin’ out. You guys were great. You represent that city with so much class. And the next time your punt returner fumbles, I’m here.

  I chuckled. He’d caught the punt. He was right. That following Thursday at Arrowhead Stadium, wouldn’t you know it? Here was a punt bouncing off the head of our returner.

  We played lights-out in that game. I remember coming into the locker room and sending a text message to Chesney. I said, Check out SportsCenter. The first punt of the game bounced off our returner’s head and I thought of you. Maybe you should reconsider your contract demands.

  21

  NEXT SEASON

  WE GAVE 2006 A proper New Orleans burial.

  I’m not kidding.

  We gathered up some icons of the biggest accomplishments of the previous year. A few Player of the Week plaques. The trophies for MVP and Coach of the Year. A game ball from the play-off victory against the Eagles. Some other awards and mementos. We took all those happy symbols of the previous season and dumped them into a big wooden casket I’d brought into the weight room on Airline Drive.

  At the same time, I had a couple of guys from the Saints’ grounds crew dig a rectangular hole, six feet deep, right beside the practice field.

  This was the last day of minicamp in June ’07. After practice, I had all the players and coaches gather around the hole, which looked like maybe some plumbing work was being done. But this hole was bigger.

  The first thing the players heard was a brass funeral march, a slow, doleful version of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” The first thing they saw was a New Orleans jazz band marching toward them. Walking with the band was a clergyman in full altar vestments. Cliff and Bum and Dan and a couple of others from the equipment and fitness staff were carrying the casket toward the hole.

  Had someone died? Kind of. We were holding a fitting send-off for a year much beloved.

  The season was great. It was over. We were moving on.

  “It was a fine season,” the clergyman said once the casket had been lowered into the hole, “a glorious season. Now it has gone off to join its maker, delivered on angel wings to its just reward.” He spoke so movingly, you’d have thought a real person was heading home to God.

  There is nothing that can’t be commemorated with some preaching and a jazz band.

  When the clergyman finished speaking, the band kicked the music up several notches, as they do at all jazz funerals. Suddenly, instead of the slow dirges, the musicians were swinging into a rousing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” We had a real second-line party on the practice field.

  Good-bye, 2006, New Orleans-style.

  We practiced that summer with the same intensity we had the summer before. Hard on Airline Drive, even harder when we got to Millsaps College in Jackson for our late-summer training camp. As the sweaty days wore on, the guys kept asking: “When are we going back to the water park?” The veteran players even began taking bets on what day we would. Two weeks in, when everyone was exhausted, hot and beginning to tune out the coaches—I finally said, “Today.” Everyone was definitely ready for a break and a chance to cool down. But I suspected they were just as eager for a rematch in the five-on-five, defense-versus-offense competition on the monster waterslide. I probably should have known better and not encouraged any of this.

  Clearly both sides had been studying last year’s results. For all I know, they might have been reviewing waterslide game tape at night. Sliding technique had definitely improved. They were whizzing past last year’s Sharpie marks. One by one, they were coming down faster and landing farther out. They had built on Scott Fujita’s quick-succession technique from the previous competition: Send the three-hundred-pound lineman down first. He’ll force out the water. Follow him immediately with a lighter player built for speed.

  Just like football: The big guy blocks and the little guy runs.

  All that time, we were running out of slide room. The new Sharpie marks were getting closer and closer to the end.

  Then here came Scott Fujita. Down the slide, faster and faster. Rocketing into the flume. Zooming past the Sharpie marks right off the end of the slide. Across ten feet of wooden boardwalk. Past a small patch of concrete. And slamming squarely into a very solid fence.

  Wham! That must have hurt!

  Several players let out giant yelps. They were laughing and clapping and shouting all at once. “Oh, my God!” “Scott!”

  At about the same time, a rush of panic was sweeping over me. Our starting strong-side linebacker just went into a water-park fence, and he now was limping.

  As he pulled himself off the ground, Scott seemed genuinely conflicted. He didn’t want to diminish the fact that he had won so spectacularly, that he was now the back-to-back champion of the water-park games. He pumped his arms in the air. At the same time, he really couldn’t walk.

  A trainer ran for a bag of ice. He put it on Scott’s ankle. Scott hobbled to the bus. And for the next eight days, Saints linebacker Scott Fujita had to wear a boot on his foot and couldn’t practice with the team. He missed a preseason game.

  You try explaining that to the New Orleans media! Easier than the New York media, I guess. I was just waiting for the sports-page headlines in the Times-Picayune: “Not So Funny Now: Coach’s Reckless Outing Costs Saints Dearly” or “Water-Park Splash-Back: Under-Manned Defense Drowns.” He’d survived two weeks of two-a-days. He went to a water park and was sidelined for eight.

  All I can say is thank God we’d won in 2006. Something like that, on the heels of two losing seasons, the head coach would soon be looking for a job.

  We opened the season in Indianapolis with a Thursday night lopsided loss to the Super Bowl champion Colts, 41-10. We followed that with three more losses—Tampa Bay, Tennessee and Carolina. This was not nearly as fun as opening 3-0. Deuce McAllister injured his knee in the Tennessee game and would be out for the season. That was a costly injury for the team and the second major knee injury in three years for Deuce.

  It didn’t take long for some of the football experts to start labeling our team a one-hit wonder. And when a few turned skeptical, others quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Not the real fans. Not the New Orleans people. Certainly not the fifteen thousand who had turned out at the airport to greet us after we’d lost the NFC championship game—they had more patience than any fans I’d ever heard of. “Don’t let it rattle you, Coach,” a woman in a Saints jersey said to me as I walked out of the Superdome after the Carolina game, our fourth straight defeat. But the national media, even some in the local media, were asking tough questions, which was appropriate, and I really thought we needed to answer them. The pre-Katrina Saints defeatism was beginning to creep into the fan base.

  “Yeah, one good season!” I heard a man grumble while standing in line at the Winn-Dixie supermarket. “But they can’t win a championship.” I’m not sure if he knew it was me who was standing there.

  “We need to get a flatbed trailer in here,” I told Mickey after loss number four. “And I want enough musical instruments for a five- or six-piece band. Cheap ones. They won’t be returning in good shape.”

  Mickey arranged it.

  And so the week before we flew to Seattle to play the Seahawks, a flatbed trailer was parked at the corner of the indoor practice facility. On top of the trailer was a saxophone, a trombone, a trumpet, a drum set, a tuba and a guitar. There was also a metal pipe wrapped with tape like a baseball bat.

  I’m not sure what the players thought as they headed out to practice. Maybe that
there’d been a function there the night before and the band hadn’t returned to collect its instruments.

  After practice, we gathered everyone near the trailer and I addressed the team.

  “Do you know what a bandwagon is?” I asked the players. I got a few vague answers.

  “This is a bandwagon,” I said. “The bandwagon goes way back through the history of street parades. It’s a wagon or a trailer or a flatbed truck that carries the band in a parade. The bandwagon is a popular place to be. People like to follow the bandwagon and jump on it, even dance on the bandwagon. Some people do it because they see other people doing it too.

  “This is where the music was. But you’ll notice,” I continued, “this bandwagon is empty now. No one’s on it. There’s no music being played. That’s what happens when you’re 0 and 4. No one wants to be on this bandwagon with you.”

  And then I picked up the metal pipe and I started swinging hard. I beat the hell out of all those instruments. Bent the cymbals. Decimated the drums. That pipe was so heavy, even the trombone and the tuba didn’t have a chance. The trumpet or the guitar either. By the time I was finished, there was nothing but a pile of mangled junk on that bandwagon.

  “From this point forward,” I said, “we’re not letting anyone else on this losers’ bandwagon. It’s time for us to be winners again.”

  Normally we traveled on Saturdays. But we went to Seattle a day early so everyone could get acclimated to the time-zone change. We had a light practice at Qwest Field that Saturday morning. We changed things up a bit. Instead of the offense running their scripted plays and the defense running theirs, we made everyone on defense play an offensive position, and vice versa. This lightened the mood. It quickly turned into a competitive pickup game, like the football we’d all known as kids.

  The following night, we defeated the Seattle Seahawks handily. It was a prime-time game, and we were a heavy underdog. But when you’re 0-4, any win’s a big win. The next week we beat the Atlanta Falcons. Could the momentum be going our way again?

  One other factor might have played a role. Two victories in, Fujita and a couple of other players went out at night and dug up the casket with last year’s accomplishments inside. They carried it into the players’ locker room.

  They put a sign on the casket that read: “We’re back.”

  I guess they’d met a woman in the city who supposedly knew about these things: “That’s not good mojo,” she said, “burying your success like that.”

  The mojo woman might have known what she was talking about. In the next two weeks, we beat the San Francisco 49ers and the Jacksonville Jaguars. Instead of 0-4, we were now 4-4. We didn’t manage to turn the season totally around. We finished the year 7-9. We didn’t make the play-offs. We didn’t experience the same improvement Scott Fujita had on the waterslide. But somehow or other, we rescued the season from embarrassment. And given how we’d started, that was an accomplishment right there.

  22

  NEW STORM

  NINE DAYS BEFORE THE start of the 2008 season, we got the first reports from the National Weather Service: A major storm was brewing in the open waters to the south.

  Oh, no. Not again!

  It had been almost exactly three years since Katrina. The recovery of the Gulf Coast region was still very much a work in progress. No one knew how the battered levees would hold up in the face of another powerful storm. And Hurricane Gustav, as the new storm was soon officially known, was packing strong winds, kicking up heavy water, and heading in the general direction of the Louisiana coast.

  No one was ready for another one. The city and the region understandably were on edge. Would it hit here? How bad would it be? Nobody knew. All we could do was wonder: Would the local economy, housing stock and communal psyche survive another big one? These were valid questions as Gustav was gaining strength. Already, people were topping off their gas tanks and stocking up on bottled water and Sterno. You could feel the anxiety everywhere. Meanwhile, we had a decision to make.

  Our opening game was September 7 against Tampa Bay in the Superdome. Whatever happened with Gustav—good or bad—would probably have happened by then. But what should we do in the meantime? Prepare to play in the Dome? Practice on Airline Drive? Take the whole team away to some distant city?

  After Katrina, Mickey Loomis, Tom Benson, Rita Benson LeBlanc and Dennis Lauscha, the team’s top executives, had put together a comprehensive hurricane-evacuation plan. Clearly, they’d learned some lessons from Katrina.

  We had a team meeting on Friday and I said to everyone: “Here’s what I want you to do. Over the next two days, take care of your families. I want your wife and your children to come first. Make sure they have a well thought-out evacuation plan. If there’s anything they need, let us know ahead of time. I’ll see you two days from now at the airport, five p.m. sharp. I’m still hoping we’ll play next Sunday in the Superdome. But we’re going to practice in Indianapolis this week.”

  It turned out the Colts weren’t using Lucas Oil Stadium that week. They were still at training camp in Terre Haute, Indiana. So, eight hundred and fifteen miles from New Orleans, with Gustav swirling and the Weather Channel on, we prepared for the opening game of the 2008 season.

  Some people might think of this scenario as a bad distraction. Maybe it was worrisome for the fans. But it created a change of scenery for us. It focused everyone’s attention. And, thankfully, Gustav veered west. It dumped some water around New Orleans and caused some flooding, but it was no repeat of Katrina. We went back to the Superdome and beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers 24-20.

  2008 had its frustrations, but it got us used to life on the road. Our 8-8 record wouldn’t be enough to get us into the play-offs. But that comfort on the road would serve us very well at the end of the following year.

  For several years, the NFL has been working to popularize American football around the world. As part of that effort, we were asked to play the San Diego Chargers at Wembley Stadium in London in Week Eight. I was disappointed. Not because I don’t like London. I do. But this game would count as a home game for us, and I hated to give up the home-team advantage of playing in the Superdome, even for one game. It’s a little easier to swallow if it’s an away game. You’re traveling anyway. But to lose a home game is different.

  Talk about cultural diversity. The Who Dats in London! Crawfish and crumpets! The common ground was good beer. And the locals treated us like, well, royalty. Our following was growing stronger and stronger. New Orleans’ home team was picking up fans everywhere. Even in England, people were wearing black and gold.

  In the end the experience was a pleasure for all of us. Our players loved London. Our team won the game. Rita Benson LeBlanc and Tom and Gayle Benson did an excellent job hosting the team, the employees, and their families. Everyone did their part—our equipment staff, the video people and the training crew. Football-operations chief James Nagaoka, our everything man Jay Romig—those guys were key. Despite my early reservations, events like this one brought us closer together as an organization. We were getting the one-week road routine down pat. Just like on a concert tour, we brought everything. A year and a half later, this very same traveling road show would pack up its act and head to Miami for an even bigger game.

  Something else was becoming apparent: how much we depended on our two main football scouts, Rick Reiprish and Ryan Pace. The strength of our roster over the years has benefited tremendously from the work of these two men and their staffs.

  Rick is our director of college scouting. His job is to scour the college ranks for potential Saints players. He studies players. He reviews statistics. He interviews coaches at colleges large and small. He attends more bowl games than anyone should ever attend. His Super Bowl every year is the NFL college draft. Rick and his staff guide all our decisions there. Their efforts didn’t begin and end with Reggie Bush. They’ve also brought us Jahri Evans, Marques Colston, Tracy Porter and many other valuable Saints.

  Ryan is our
pro-scouting director. He and his staff keep an up-to-date go-to list for every position on the field. Ryan knows the free agents. He knows who is about to go on waivers from the other teams. He knows who’s doing anything in the Canadian Football League and elsewhere. If a defensive end or offensive guard gets injured in a game on Sunday, by Monday morning Ryan will be telling Mickey and me: “OK, here are our possibilities. Here are the three best players available now. I can fly all three in tonight. We’ll work them out tomorrow.” And by Tuesday night, that position will be filled. Ryan finds players like Jon Vilma, David Thomas, Garrett Hartley, Mike Bell, Jeff Charleston, Darren Sharper and many other great finds. It’s his job to bring them to Mickey and me.

  But we still had a season to finish and some lessons to learn. Thank God we had advisers like Joey Imparato.

  Joey was a high school classmate of mine, a street kid from Chicago. As teenagers, we’d played poker at his house. His parents were divorced. We all thought his stepfather was in the mob. I have no idea if that was true.

  He was just one of these little wise guys, Joey was. If you heard him talk, you’d think he was a little shady. After high school, Joey went on to Las Vegas. I went on to playing and coaching. He worked at a casino for a couple of years, and then he had an accident in Vegas. No one knows the details of it. But he walked with a limp after that and used a cane.

  Joey was down in Florida now, married, no kids. But somewhere along this journey, Joey showed back up in my life.

  “Tampa Bay,” “Coach,” “tickets”—classic Imparato. I arranged for him to come to a game. Within twenty minutes, he was talking to a national sportswriter. Then he had a hot dog in the owner’s suite. Joey’s a guy who, once he’s in the building, you can’t get rid of him. We all know a guy like Joey.

  After that, Joey developed a routine with me. He’d call my cell phone every Thursday with what he thought should be my message for the team before the next game. Joey loves sports. He used to play sports, and he’d been studying coaching for years. One thing Joey has is an ability to get a good read on people.