Home Team (23 page)

Here it was, the championship game, and I felt like I was going to die.

I slept OK at the hotel Saturday night but got up and still felt awful. I got to the Dome a little earlier than normal, about six hours before the game. At the stadium, I had to do something. I got two bags of IVs and then a Toradol shot just to try to feel better. I wore a sweatshirt to ease the chills. And all I kept thinking was, “Here we are in the NFC championship, and I couldn’t feel any worse.”

I have great respect for Brett Favre and not just because the Vikings quarterback grew up in Kiln, Mississippi, as a big Saints fan. Truly, he’s one of the top two or three quarterbacks ever to play this game. Earlier in the year, when Brett was trying to decide whether to play another season, he and I exchanged some texts. I gave him my two cents about playing until you can’t play anymore.

“You still have the talent and the ability and the arm strength,” I told him. “If you still have the fire, why not?”

He made the decision to come back. And periodically during the year, I might get a text from him or I’d text him. “Great job . . . Nice game.” Just friendly stuff. We followed each other’s teams. And now the Saints and the Vikings were playing one another for the championship, and Brett was the opposing quarterback.

It might surprise some people that the head coach of one team would think of the opposing quarterback as a friend of his. What can I say? It’s a small industry.

When I saw Brett before the game, we bumped fists but that’s all. “Look, I’m sick,” I said to him. “I don’t want to give you guys the flu.”

He smiled and nodded toward Vikings coach Brad Childress and said: “Go over there and give it to Chilly.”

He was joking. I think.

The night before the game, Joe Vitt had spoken to the team. That was fairly common on Saturday evenings. He went through our “keys to victory” for this game.

“Win the turnover battle.”

“Be the most physical team.”

“Win the field position through special teams.”

Ronnie Lott had spoken to the team as well. He’d addressed us in Oakland in the preseason. He was definitely worth a return visit. There was a natural progression to these speakers, bringing the best ones back in the postseason. This was greatest-hits time. Gruden before the Arizona Cardinals game. Now Ronnie Lott.

When Joe finished his “keys to victory,” a video came up—loud. Aerosmith was singing “Dream On.” And the pictures captured a series of sports triumphs from every realm. Everything from Michael Jordan to Muhammad Ali to the U.S. hockey team beating the Soviets to the Boston Celtics to the Pittsburgh Steelers—this video really captured the essence of sports. We wanted to put ourselves in that winning company.

Red Auerbach and the Celtics. Jim Valvano at NC State. The U.S. Olympic runners. It went on a while, maybe fifteen minutes, with Aerosmith blasting through the hotel meeting room. It was magnificent. When the video was over, it was totally quiet in the room. Ronnie Lott stood up.

Ronnie, a Hall of Fame cornerback and safety with the San Francisco 49ers, was one of the best defensive backs ever to play the game. A first-round draft choice from Southern Cal, he was known for his pounding-hard hits.

Not surprisingly Ronnie picked up our bat metaphor. As Ronnie stood there he had one of our “Bring the wood” bats in his hand. In his plain, flat voice, he read what was inscribed there: “Bring the wood.”

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.

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.

“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.