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.
Right there, one of the first things we agreed on, Gary and I, was that we would never blame the hurricane for any failure we might have. Even if it was responsible, we wouldn’t blame it. That became an inside joke with us and with the other coaches as they began to arrive. Whenever something didn’t go right, whatever it was, we’d roll our eyes and say: “Katrina?”
By the second day at Hotel Hell, Gary and I had run out of patience with that dump. “All right,” I told Gary, “we’re not gonna be in this hotel long.” When we got to the office, I went in to see Mickey immediately.
“If we want any chance of hiring any coaches or signing any players,” I said, “the last place we want to put them is in that hotel.” He laughed and agreed, and we moved to the Airport Hilton. That was one of the few places that had hunkered down and stayed open during the whole mess of Katrina. They could handle a wake-up call. They had a housekeeping staff. They had a restaurant, even if the menu was somewhat limited. I can still recite to you verbatim every item they had. We ate there almost every night. Most important, they had a general manager named Craig Mooney who understood the idea of service, even at a difficult time. He was a great role model for a city pulling itself back up. He never blamed anything on Katrina. That hotel was our home for seven months while we began to build a football team.
Every day, I would go into the office on Airline Drive. I say
the
office, not
my
office. My office wasn’t ready yet. Lots of things around the office weren’t ready yet. The Saints staff was still getting settled back in New Orleans after San Antonio. They were still having trouble finding painters and carpenters. But we had to get started, nice accommodations or not. And we did.
Mickey and I would sit there with two depth charts on the wall of my makeshift work space, going through the personnel. One chart was coaches. The other was players. Who was already here? Who did we have a chance of getting? What were our biggest needs? The needs were so great, it was hard to know even where to begin.
Priority number one: hiring a coaching staff. I would need sixteen, seventeen, maybe eighteen assistant coaches. That’s what it takes to run an NFL team. I had to find them, hire them, convince them to come and get them on board.
The Senior Bowl is held in Mobile every January. It’s a two-hour drive from New Orleans, and it’s also a place to hire coaches. I was interviewing a defensive line coach by the name of Bill Kollar. He flew into New Orleans. We interviewed at the Saints complex, and he traveled with me to Mobile. The drive from New Orleans to Mobile after Katrina, if you hadn’t seen it already, might have been the worst two-hour stretch of highway on Earth. For a good year after Katrina, it was like that.
There were boats on the side of the road. Casinos that had moved and tumbled. Just unthinkable devastation all along this road. At one point Bill said, “You know, you’re lucky my kids are out of the house or you’d have no chance of hiring me.” Two days later he took the same job with the Buffalo Bills.
I tried to get permission to hire Tony Sparano from the Dallas Cowboys. He was under contract. That permission was denied by Parcells. I tried to hire Dave Magazu of the Carolina Panthers. Permission denied. Aaron Kromer, Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Permission denied. These were guys I knew well and had worked with.
I got a call about Pete Carmichael. Pete was a quality-control coach at San Diego. He agreed to come. Now he was going to be my quarterbacks coach. Pete looks just like the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie
Papillon
. He has the wire-rimmed glasses and same kind of smile. He was a really good baseball player at Boston College but doesn’t look athletic at all. He’s very intelligent and sharp on the computer, and he has a great work ethic. Pete was the third or fourth coach I was able to hire.
One thing we figured out in a hurry: There weren’t a lot of experienced NFL coaches just itching to come to New Orleans. It would take a special coach to want this job. Or someone who would come for a special opportunity like a chance to move from college to the pros or for a promotion in the NFL.
Our strength coach, Dan Dalrymple, we hired from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It was his first NFL job. Curtis Johnson, New Orleans native and receivers coach, came from the University of Miami for his first NFL job. Gary Gibbs, who came with me from Dallas, was now defensive coordinator, his first coordinator’s job. The line coach, Marion Hobby, I hired out of Clemson. Terry Malone, the tight ends coach, came from college too, the University of Michigan. Greg McMahon came out of East Carolina University to be assistant to special teams. Doug Marrone I had to pry out of the New York Jets, where he was an offensive line coach and would be our offensive coordinator, a nice step up.
It’s not that these guys weren’t talented or driven or great. But they’d all come for a significant promotion or the opportunity to work in the NFL. They and their families were taking the same risk all of us were.