Home Team (12 page)

We played defend the hill. We played capture the flag. The gold team attacked. The black team defended. In the next scenario, the roles were turned around. When you got hit, an official would wave his flag, declaring you dead. But you could go inside, recharge and return to fight again.

Under any circumstances, paintball is a raucous activity. But when the combatants are highly competitive professional athletes finally freed from their protocols after months of rigorous training—well, the firefights quickly took on a crazed, frantic edge. And the rules of engagement—what rules of engagement? Mammoth linemen—320, 340 pounds—coming at one another, guns blazing. Wily special teams guys, seeking every advantage. Brees in face paint. Scott Fujita barking orders. Reggie Bush totally wild-eyed. Paint was everywhere. The coaches were as bloody as anyone.

Me? I had my little setup in the fort—very protected, a spot I was sure wasn’t vulnerable. I had a couple of bags of ammo. I was the sniper I had always imagined myself to be. I managed to hit a few people and stay pretty clean.

At some point, I bent slightly to my left to lift some ammo—and wham! A solid hit on my shoulder.

Somebody got me.

I scanned the bushes quickly. There was safety Steve Gleason, who had been waiting patiently for the shot.

“I got him,” Gleason yelled, laughing. “I got him. I was waiting forever for that!”

This was perfect. Gleason was one of the players we had inherited from the old regime. He’d been a Saint since 2000. And although he didn’t have the size or the speed or the paper credentials of some other defensive backs, he had something more important than any of that: He had the heart. He had the drive and the passion and the dedication to get it done, whatever
it
was. When I had first gotten to the Saints and met him, I thought he was an employee, not a player. He was a true special teams guy. Three months later, in one of the greatest moments in New Orleans Saints history, he would block the first punt against the Atlanta Falcons in our return to the Superdome. There’s a player on the team now just like him, Chris Reis, who recovered the onside kick that was called an ambush in Super Bowl XLIV. These are players who deserve every success they’ve had.

The paintball battle continued for another ninety minutes, nothing but paint pellets flying through the woods. Black on gold. Gold on black. And lots of friendly fire.

When the war finally ended, we all went back to the grove to eat. We gave awards to the players for their performance in the off-season program. Most improved. Biggest lifter. Perfect attendance. As a memento of the day, they all got Bose iPod docks.

It was hot. This was June in Louisiana. After a full-throttle, two-hour firefight, I think every one of them had lost ten pounds. I’m sure we burned through more calories than we would have on the practice field.

So much for the day off.

There was a moment when we were finished eating lunch, just enjoying the watermelon, when I looked around at these players and thought: “These guys may be highly trained athletes. They are also little kids.”

To this day, some of the players still have a scar, a nick or some other souvenir they can point to on their body and say, “This is from that paintball game in ’06.” The pellets were made to be shot from twenty yards, not two feet. So the next day in the locker room, our players looked like some horrible dermatological experiment gone wrong. Everyone had two or three major bruises.

What made the day so special wasn’t just how hard they had fought the paintball battles. It was how hard they had worked in March, April and May. We had gotten on them. We had not let up. We practiced at a pace most of them had never experienced before. And that gave paintball, at that late point in the process, a near-mythic impact.

And it cut across every line.

On a normal day, the assistant coaches might spend 90 or 95 percent of their time with their own position group. The D line coach with the defensive line and the running back coach with the running backs. There’s some interaction with the other players in the locker room, but not a lot. When you do something like this, you get to know some other players and coaches a little more intimately than you had known them before the day began.

It was an experience. It was something the guys would always talk about. We were bonding and creating memories here. It wasn’t just the finish line we were going for. This was something we learned eventually at the Super Bowl. The journey was just as important as the getting there.

MICKEY AND I BOTH
felt like it would be good to take this year’s training camp out of town. This wouldn’t be the first time the Saints had gone away for camp. Training camp had been held in several different places. The team had been to Thibodaux in southwest Louisiana. They’d gone as far as Wisconsin. And many years, camp was held right on Airline Drive. But in the summer of 2006, we believed, there were too many distractions in New Orleans. Too many things still weren’t working right. If we were expecting these players to devote themselves 100 percent to football, we knew a little distance couldn’t hurt.

We would serve New Orleans better, I thought, by briefly getting away.

I liked the idea of setting up training camp on a small college campus where everything we needed could be self-contained. Away from the city but not too far away. “Let’s look at a radius of a couple hours,” I told Mickey. “Maybe there’s a place we can find.”

We visited the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. We visited Southeastern and Northeastern. We’d heard about Millsaps in Jackson, Mississippi. The team had another reason for sending us out on this Gulf-region campus-scouting tour. We were doing a PR deal with Mr. Benson to help generate season-ticket sales. We flew up to Shreveport and made an announcement about an upcoming preseason game. Then we flew over to Jackson. While we were there, we had a chance to look at the facilities at Millsaps. We loved what we saw.

Millsaps College was Old South. Founded in 1889 and affiliated with the United Methodist Church, the school has a lovely campus on the edge of downtown Jackson, surrounded by a tall iron fence. I liked the fact that it was just two hours from New Orleans. But I especially liked the fact that here was an entire universe cut off from the many distractions of outside life. Where the players would sleep, where we’d all eat, where we’d hold our meetings, where we’d practice—all that was in close proximity. Millsaps was a place where you could put your dorm key on a shoelace and not worry about anything except the things you were supposed to be worrying about. I don’t know if our players that summer would describe it the same way. But the campus seemed ideal for a brutally tough New Orleans Saints training camp.

The fields were beat up a little. One had a slope. And the dorms were old. The beds were so small, I wasn’t sure how a football player could squeeze into one. We came up with an arrangement and placed a large order with a bedding company: In every room, there were two double box springs with a queen mattress on top. It looked a little ridiculous, like a multilayered wedding cake with sheets and blankets. But it worked.

The players understood training camp was going to be hot. This was late July in Mississippi. What did they expect? But I asked the college maintenance chief to keep the inside temperature as low as he possibly could. It might be an oven on the practice field, but I wanted a deep freeze inside.

This would keep the players from dozing off in the meetings after a long day on the field.

The maintenance man lowered all the thermostats—the players would say to 61 or 62 degrees in the meeting rooms, in the dorms, everywhere we were that was inside. I blamed this on the maintenance crew in the same breath I was telling the director: “Thanks. It’s perfect.” Dan Dalrymple, our strength coach who weighs about 340 pounds, claimed he had frost on his windows. Dan was exaggerating. But watching him climb on his bed was a treat. Players, coaches, everyone—we all wore sweatshirts inside.

When a professional team arrives on campus and sets up a training camp, the relationship with the college can be a little dicey. The college administrators like the activity. They appreciate the income. But we’re using their facilities. Maybe the staff and the students are inconvenienced. From the president on down, people at the college can sometimes ask, “Is it really worth the headaches? We don’t need to be the summer landlord of an NFL team.” But the character of our players seemed to matter. The people at Millsaps, the people in greater Jackson—they kept coming up and telling me, “We love your team. They are such good guys. Coach, we love the players you’re signing. They’re respectful in the cafeteria. They’ll sign autographs. Please keep coming here.”

One thing was obvious: The people at Millsaps were totally committed to making everything right. They were awesome.

Certainly, we were pushing hard on the practice fields, harder even than we had on Airline Drive. This was a new level of brutal practice. Running and hitting. Running some more. Full-pad practices twice a day in the Mississippi sun. Really, what choice did we have? This team was going to have to be in excellent shape to win in this league.

It was difficult. It was drudgery. It was stiflingly hot.

And practice was never rained out. The big joke at training camp was that it rained often in the humid Jackson summer—but it never seemed to rain until our practice was done. It was as if we had made some deal with the devil.

“This is like that movie
The Truman Show
,” I told the media one day. “We are controlling the rain to fit our schedule. Nothing gets in the way of our practice.”

The way our players were practicing, they could have fallen asleep on a big pile of jagged bricks. Those wedding cake beds never looked so good.

The first question each day was always, “How hot is the turf going to be at nine a.m.?” That’s where we started practice every morning. That’s where I wanted our first conditioning test to be.

One morning, our head trainer, Scottie Patton, came over to me. He had the little heat index. He said, “Sean, the heat index is 128 right now.”

You have to understand the role of a head trainer. Their job is to worry. Scottie had been dealing with the IVs each day. The temperatures weren’t getting any cooler. Players used to say they saw no birds flying over Jackson, only low-buzzing horseflies.

Mainly what we did was practice and practice some more.

In the years since that summer, our players have never forgotten that training camp. Complaints about our stay there are an ingrained part of New Orleans Saints folklore. It was something that everyone suffered through together. We were laying a foundation for what was coming next.

The back-and-forth became like a ritual.

“Hey, Coach,” someone would say, “cold enough in here for you? You think maybe we could get ’em to lower it a few more degrees before the meeting starts?”

“I wanted it cold,” I’d bark. “It’s cold, all right?”

And we were seeing progress.

Gradually, but only gradually, the strength was returning to Drew Brees’s arm and Deuce McAllister’s knee. We were all impatient, of course—no one more than Drew and Deuce. We watched them both closely and tried to measure each day’s progress. In practice one day, I told Pete Carmichael, the quarterbacks coach: “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of velocity with Drew’s passing. Is this what we’re getting?”

Pete was the only coach who could compare Drew’s velocity to how it was before the injury when they’d worked together in San Diego.

“No, no, Coach,” Pete assured me. “It’s not looking good right now. But this isn’t it. This isn’t his arm strength at all.”

Just say we were concerned.

Midway through training camp, we saw Drew and Deuce begin to get better. In Drew’s case, his timing started to click. Deuce was beginning to move more quickly on his surgically repaired knee. Both of them were making visible progress. But would it be enough? And would it be in time?

This was Training Camp 101. There was nothing about it that was easy. I asked Joe Vitt: “Do we go tomorrow in pads, or do we back off?”

That was a dumb question to ask Joe Vitt.

“We keep fuckin’ going full pads,” he said. That was always Vitt’s message. Always. It wasn’t until I heard his tone change that we all began to wonder: Maybe we needed to back off a little.

The results we were seeing could not be ignored. These players were getting stronger. More important, they were getting tougher. Even the coaches were starting to get some rhythm here. This was the first time most of these guys had ever coached together. They too were becoming a team.

But it was becoming obvious, the importance of occasional breaks. Everyone needed a break. Not necessarily paintball. Something a little cooler maybe. A training camp excursion more appropriate for the Mississippi heat. These breaks would become as crucial to the curriculum as block-and-tackle drills and wind sprints.

Twenty-five minutes outside Jackson, there was a water park. The owner is a big Saints fan. He agreed to shut down the park on a Wednesday. He said he’d leave the concession stand open with pizza, burgers and cold drinks. It would just be us. Again, we kept the trip a surprise.

“I do not want word getting out,” I told the coaches in our staff meeting. Everyone got assignments. One coach coordinated the buses. Someone else led the start of practice. Someone slipped shorts and towels into every player’s locker while the team was on the field. Again, every detail mattered.

These guys had put up with a whole lot of punishment. But by now, they were approaching the point of mutiny. I know I didn’t feel like walking any planks. First thing in the morning, the coaches led them through the usual stretches and warm-ups. Then we pulled everyone up. I gave them some long-winded speech that transitioned gradually into the important of temperature control.