Home Team

by Sean Payton

  I’m especially proud of Payton’s Play It Forward Foundation. From the start, our focus was on improving the lives of children and families across the Gulf Coast region. Much of the credit goes to Beth and to our executive director, Karen Hegner—and to all the thousands of generous people who keep buying tickets to our fund-raisers and clicking on the DONATE button at www.paytonsplayitforward.com. We’ve partnered with a couple dozen inspiring groups, including Brad Pitt’s Make It Right NOLA Foundation and Dr. Phil McGraw’s Dr. Phil Foundation and Blaine Kern’s Greater New Orleans First Responders Fund.

  Those efforts have made a real difference in real people’s lives. But it’s the person-to-person things that have meant the most to us.

  Like our Saturday tradition before every home game.

  Working with the Make-A-Wish Foundation and similar groups, we began inviting young patients with serious illnesses to our final pregame walk-throughs on Airline Drive. This has become enormously popular and brings great joy to these kids. The requests pour in. Nick Karl, the Saints’ community-affairs director, has the impossible task of combing through the hundreds of heart-wrenching letters and choosing a special case or two each week.

  This isn’t a formal program. It doesn’t have a budget or any official name. It’s just something we started doing—and never stopped. We don’t invite the media. It’s just a quiet thing we do on Saturdays. The kids and their families seem to appreciate it. It’s brought a huge emotional boost to us.

  After a behind-the-scenes tour of the training facility, the children and their parents are invited out onto the practice field. When I get a break, I go over and say hello.

  “I have a son your age,” I might say. Or “My daughter looks a lot like you.” I just try to make a personal connection.

  As practice is winding down, the players gather in a giant huddle around the child, applauding and welcoming the child to their practice. That scene is amazing to see, all these giant athletes surrounding a tiny child. By this point the parents are usually crying. Then we ask the kid to break the huddle for the team.

  If that doesn’t move you, nothing will. It’s a special experience for all of us.

  Then we’ll invite that week’s child to join us in the Superdome for the game, watch from the sideline, stand with us in victory or defeat and high-five the players in the tunnel as they run off the field.

  “Come with me,” I told one boy whose story had especially touched us. I brought him into the locker room and gave him that day’s game ball. Half the players were teary by the time they got to the showers.

  Some of these efforts were coordinated by the Saints organization. But many, the players and coaches did on their own. It wasn’t that any single effort can solve the problems of a region. It was that we’ve been trying to do our part. It created an infectious mind-set that said: “We are lucky. We are grateful. We want to give back.”

  We are always hearing how selfish and narcissistic professional athletes can be. And sometimes that’s true. That only makes what our guys have done that much more extraordinary.

  Pierre Thomas, Lance Moore, Usama Young—they’re constantly asking, “What can I do?” I don’t believe Malcolm Jenkins has ever refused a request. And it hasn’t been only the high-profile stars pitching in. Every Tuesday, backup tackle Zach Strief would ask Nick Karl, “What do you have for me to do?”

  “It used to be that when we had a request for a player to appear at a local event, I’d be begging people to go,” Nick said. “Now I’ve got ten guys lining up.”

  Jon Stinchcomb didn’t wait for us to organize anything. He made his own relationship at Children’s Hospital. He stopped by constantly and has let many of the patients and their families into his life. I know he’s been to the funerals of several young people he met there. He’s touched them, and they’ve touched him even more. This is so much more than the average athlete’s twenty-minute drop-by to sign some autographs.

  Scott Fujita is adopted. He wanted to do something with adopted kids. We partnered him with AdoptNOLA, the adoption-services arm of Catholic Charities Archdiocese of New Orleans. His mom was a two-time breast cancer survivor. Scott wore a pink hat on the sidelines.

  People kept asking, “Why’s the big guy wearing a pink hat?” That was why.

  Several years in a row, Steve Gleason let his hair grow to his shoulders and then cut it off, put it in a Ziploc bag and mailed the hair to a group called Locks of Love, which creates hairpieces for children who’ve lost their own hair. Somewhere, there are several young cancer patients running around with Steve Gleason’s hair.

  The giving goes on. I think most of the players would tell you they’ve gotten as much as they gave.

  Many of these players are barely out of college when they come to us. They’re twenty-two, twenty-three years old, living in a strange new city where they hardly know anyone. I’ve seen this happen over and over. By getting involved in the community, they discover that some things in life are more gratifying than sitting on the couch in their off time playing Xbox all day.

  “It’s much more rewarding to get out and help people,” I’ll tell anyone who asks. “You’ll meet people outside of pro football. You’ll be connected to this place you’re living in. You’ll care about some brand-new people. They’ll care about you.”

  Defensive tackle Anthony Hargrove, who’s had some troubles in his life, wanted to help young people who maybe weren’t going down such a good path. He found them at the juvenile detention center in New Orleans. He brought Reggie Bush along.

  The young inmates were in shackles when the players got there. Their shoelaces had been taken away. Anthony related personally to all of that. He described his own childhood in a Brooklyn tenement, his mother’s early death, his time in homeless shelters and foster care and the drug tests that he’d failed. “You are never so far down,” he said that day, “that you can’t get back up again.”

  Anthony was proof of that, and those kids heard him. From what I heard, even tough-guy Reggie was moved. He’d been through some stuff, but never Hargrove-level stuff.

  Every team in the NFL has some kind of community-relations program. All of them do good works. But I challenge you to find any team where giving back is more central.

  It’s a fair exchange, I figure. No community has meant more to a team.

  One special day still sticks in my mind. On that June morning, we called off our regular practice. Instead of taking the team to play paintball or to a water park, we loaded everyone onto buses and rode into the city’s low-lying Hollygrove neighborhood. This is an area that floods in a stiff August rainstorm. After Katrina, Noah’s Ark would have fit right in. Some of the local residents were already rebuilding. Ever so slowly, the neighborhood was coming back. But lots of folks were still waiting for their insurance checks and their Road Home funds. Others didn’t know what to do. Some were losing hope that assistance would ever arrive.

  Again, we didn’t turn this into a media event. I just told the players the afternoon before: “We won’t be having a regular practice. You may want to wear your jeans.”

  This was a whole lot more than a ribbon-cutting or a shovel-in-the-earth photo op. The Saints organization made a $50,000 donation to the Hurricane Katrina Fund. And ninety people from the team—players, coaches, office staff, even Mr. Benson—put four New Orleans families back in their homes. Hammering nails. Hanging drywall. Painting walls. Hauling lumber. Raking debris. Building fences. Planting trees. You should have seen me with that Weed Wacker. Those weeds didn’t stand a chance. Guys with construction experience climbed up on scaffoldings and worked with power tools. These were highly skilled professional football players working as laborers now. Here was Will Smith, wearing a fiberglass mask as he pulled down drywall. There was Charles Grant, using a power drill. Everyone did what they could. As a group, we did pretty much everything that had to be done to renovate some badly flooded homes. This was a large, focused crew used to working together. Even in a day
, we made real progress.

  I think it’s fair to say that no one expected a professional football team to do something on this scale.

  “Within half an hour of getting off the bus, they were all on the job,” marveled Kristin Gisleson Palmer, director of Rebuilding Together New Orleans, the group that helped to organize the project. “It wasn’t until they were nearly finished that people in the neighborhood knew what was going on. There wasn’t a lot of stopping and gawking. Coach really wanted his guys to work.”

  Kristin got that right.

  When we were finished, every one of us was dirty and sweaty. We had blisters and scrapes and bruises. These guys were used to football practice. But this was real work. And yet there was an almost giddy feeling of “Look what we just did.”

  This addressed a tiny fraction of the total need in the New Orleans area. But it was another step in a long march of progress, and the results were right there to see. A crew of ninety people, many of them large, strong men, can accomplish a lot in a hurry when they turn their attention to it.

  And you know what made the day totally worthwhile? Spending a little time with the families who were moving back into those homes.

  I don’t know if eighty-year-old Doris Garrett was a Saints fan before the team showed up that day. After Katrina, she’d been evacuated to Lake Charles, relocated to Georgia and then moved back into a FEMA trailer next to her house in Hollygrove. But I’ll bet she’s a Saints fan now. Just like retired dockworker Alex Tumblin, who’d been staying in Texas and was thrilled finally to be coming home. And Harry Vanderson, who’d owned his house since 1972 and was evacuated to Gray, Louisiana. And Reedell Parker, who lost his sight in a car accident before Katrina and had been living on relatives’ couches since the storm.

  They were moving back into houses that they loved, houses we’d helped prepare for them.

  Tell me, what could possibly be more satisfying than that?

  20

  GETTING KENNY

  I MET KENNY CHESNEY for the first time in 2001 when I was still with the Giants. He showed up one day at our training camp. Our quarterback Kerry Collins was a real big fan of the country singer. So were several other Giants. Kenny was doing a show at the Pepsi Arena in Albany. The next morning, Jim Fassel said to me: “Sixteen guys missed bed check last night.”

  “Sixteen guys?”

  “Sixteen,” Fassel said. The thing was, it was Dan Campbell, Kerry Collins—guys you just wouldn’t expect to be missing bed check. I began to put two and two together. It added up to Kenny Chesney.

  I saw him play in Dallas and caught a couple of his other shows. He was really on a roll—a couple dozen Top 10 singles, repeat Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year awards, the most successful artist in a new breed of down-to-earth singer-songwriters. He and his band were amazing in concert. By the time I got to New Orleans, I was becoming a real Kenny Chesney fan.

  The weekend before the 2006 NFL draft, we still needed a place to hold training camp. A group of us—including Beth, Mickey and Mickey’s fiancée, Melanie—drove into Cajun country to look at the campus of ULL, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. That Saturday night, there was a Kenny Chesney show at the Cajundome.

  If you said to me, what do you really like to do in the off-season? What are your vices? I’d say my life is really centered around family, vacations, going out to dinner, maybe working out. I’ll play some golf. But there are also cold beer and live music. I love that, those two together.

  We made the mistake of not really eating a lot on the way over. We checked in to a little Holiday Inn across the street from the Cajundome. We had our tickets and Kenny’s road manager, David Farmer, met us at the gate and took us backstage. There’s a little vibe room with drinks and a few appetizers, just a place the band could hang out before the show and visit with guests. Very laid-back. Reggae music playing. Carrie Underwood was opening for Kenny. I know we had some beers.

  We went out to watch the show in the mosh-pit area in front of the stage. My brother-in-law was with us, and all of us were singing along. After the show, we went back to the vibe room, and I ended up on a beanbag chair. It was a high-energy show, and I was exhausted.

  David Farmer told me later that when Kenny finished the show, he’d asked, “Who’s that?” and Farmer replied: “Oh, that’s the head coach of the Saints.”

  “Man, they got no chance,” Kenny said.

  More than a year later, before the 2007 season, we had a preseason game in Week Three in Cincinnati against the Bengals. I learned that Chesney would be doing a show in Cincinnati that Thursday night.

  It’s not uncommon in preseason to practice or scrimmage with the other team. I talked to Marvin Lewis, the Bengals’ head coach, and we made plans. We’d got a couple good practices in, getting ready for Saturday night’s game.

  I got a call from David Farmer about the idea of those guys coming out to watch us practice.

  Why not? Well, one thing led to another and we decided, Why stop there? We cooked up this crazy idea about signing Kenny Chesney to a contract. He would be a wide receiver for the New Orleans Saints. That’s what he played in high school. He was number seven.

  Now you have to understand this: Kenny’s a guy who lifts weights, works out religiously. But he’s a size seven shoe. His stature is lean and smaller than we normally see in the NFL. It was not easy to find a place that sells football shoes in his size. We came up with a plan. Friday morning, we called a press conference to announce the signing of a wide receiver. We did it right in Bengals Stadium, in their little pressroom. We set up a locker for him—helmet, jersey, everything.

  I asked Joe Vitt what he thought.

  The veteran coach was absolutely dead-set against the idea. “This dog-and-pony show,” he said. “What are we doing? This is crazy. We’re trying to get ready for a season.”

  But I like Chesney a lot. And Jersey Joe, you know, doesn’t know one country artist from another. But every once in a while, I have to tell Joe, “I hear you. But screw it. We’re doing this anyway.”

  So Friday came. Kenny’s bus pulled up. He went into the locker room. We got him squared away. And we walked him in his fresh New Orleans Saints jersey into the pressroom.

  There were twenty-three reporters in there. Half the room were NFL beat writers. The others were people from the Nashville Network, CMT and other music and entertainment outlets. I don’t think they had ever been in the same room together before.

  I started off with a long-winded announcement.

  “We need to get more experience in the receiver position,” I said. “We need some guys who are used to playing in big lights and big stadiums, guys who aren’t afraid of the crowds.”

  People who don’t know country music may not understand. What Ali was to boxing, what Michael Jordan was to basketball, that’s Kenny Chesney in his world.

  I went on. “We need some experience and somebody who’s willing to play in a big spot, very comfortable in that role. Now we are in the midst of negotiations because we don’t know if we can afford him. And he has some concerns about running pass patterns over the middle.”

  This was a full-fledged pregame press conference. Backdrop New Orleans Saints, First Bank and Trust. “And without further ado, we want to welcome our new addition to the New Orleans Saints, Kenny Chesney.”

  He came up. He had his hat on backward. He had his Saints jersey on.

  “If we can get the contract done, and he doesn’t run me on any slant or post patterns, we’ll have a deal,” Kenny said. “I just gotta work it into my calendar.”

  We had some fun with this and headed out to practice. Kenny practiced with us that Friday.

  We got out there, did some drills and a walk-through. The whole time, Joe Vitt had this pout on his face. Joe was dying for us to play poorly in this preseason so he could tell me he was right. So Joe was scowling, and Kenny was having a great time. Our players seemed to be enjoying it. Kenny was in all the drills. He was doi
ng exactly what the players were doing. We put in a couple plays for him. We were coaching him up. I have an album from that day with some fabulous pictures. A Saint for a Day.

  As practice neared the end, we decided we were going to punt the ball to Chesney. If he could catch the punt, we decided, we’d give the players Monday off in New Orleans. We had a Thursday night game scheduled with the Kansas City Chiefs. So it was already a short week. Now, all the players were hoping Kenny would catch the punt. This was the end of training camp. Any extra day off was big.

  Here’s what I noticed: Regardless of the interest level in his music, all the players’ attention was riveted on this punt. Will he catch it? Will he drop the ball? Will Monday be a practice day?

  They were paying close attention to Kenny. They were paying close attention to our punter, Steve Weatherford. They wanted to make sure Steve would feed Kenny a nice, clean, easy-to-catch one—nothing too high.

  Steve hit the punt. Chesney got underneath it. He caught the thing, and I’m telling you this was one of those moments when eighty-five grown men looked like they had just been let out of school early.

  The whole time, Vitt wasn’t smiling. The East Coast-Jersey- South Philly guy wasn’t charmed by any of it. Maybe if we’d signed Bruce Springsteen.

  The next night we played Cincinnati. In the quarters he played, Drew Brees was nearly perfect. We had two scoring drives. I’d seen enough. I pulled him out. “And by the way,” I said, “tell Vitt we’re working just fuckin’ fine right now with our itinerary and Chesney last week. Make sure he knows that.”

  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.