CHAPTER 6

MUDBUGGERS

The New Orleans Saints were born in 1966 as a condition the NFL had to meet to be allowed to merge with the AFL. In June 1966 the leagues, which had been competing with each other since 1960, agreed to begin fully-interlocking play in 1970, with a new championship game, later dubbed the Super Bowl, to begin after the ’66 season. However, this was all contingent on Congress granting an exemption from antitrust laws designed to prevent such an obvious monopoly. That was the cue for Louisiana’s powerful Democratic congressman Hale Boggs, the House majority leader and an old hand at horse trading, to demand a new franchise in his backyard in exchange for moving the antitrust exemption along. On November 1, 1966—All Saints’ Day—Commissioner Pete Rozelle made the announcement of the franchise at the Pontchartrain Hotel, a proud moment indeed for the city and an ownership group led by John Mecom that had cobbled together the $8.5 million franchise fee (the value of the Saints today is $1.52 billion). The team was named after the gospel hymn “When the Saints Go Marching In,” a choice that beat out such suggestions as the Deltas, Jazz Kings, Ramparts, Crawfish, Mudbuggers, and Stevedores.

The Saints, whose first signed player was by chance an Ole Miss alumnus, kicker Paige Cothren, would play in the rapidly aging Tulane Stadium, where Archie had beaten Arkansas in the 1970 Sugar Bowl. Before going down in a plane crash, Boggs lived long enough to see John Gilliam return the first kickoff the Saints ever fielded, for a 94-yard touchdown. A long, cold winter then set in. The Saints won no more than five games in any of their first four seasons. During one extravagant halftime show reenacting the Battle of New Orleans, a real cannon backfired, blowing three fingers off one of the actors’ hands. Their original coach, Tom Fears, was replaced midway through the ’70 season by John David “J. D.” Roberts, a former Marine and All-America guard on Bud Wilkinson’s 1953 Oklahoma Sooners, but Roberts’s only win that season came on a then-record 63-yard field goal by club-footed Tom Dempsey, after which they lost 12 straight. And now Archie Manning came marching in, sparking delusions of glory.

When he got to the team’s summer camp in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, TV cameras recorded every moment of his workouts. But the long-suffering veterans on this moribund team hardly genuflected before him. As in college, he was hazed, forced to stand on tables in the cafeteria and sing the Ole Miss fight song, though he was allowed to keep his hair. Curiosity ran high when, after just a week of practice, the Saints played their first preseason game, against the Buffalo Bills. Roberts, who had told Archie he wouldn’t play, shocked him when, with five minutes to go, down by seven, he turned to him and barked, “Get in there.” He did, and promptly threw four passes, completing none.

That was par for the course with Roberts, who was at times as addled as John Vaught. During games, he would mumble non sequiturs. Surveying the field during that opening preseason game, he said, “I don’t know who that No. 32 is, but he’s a damn good-looking running back”—referring to one O. J. Simpson, the most famous player in the country. Still, Roberts knew what he had in Archie. Even with three other quarterbacks ahead of him on the depth chart, after Archie threw a touchdown and ran for 30 yards in another exhibition against the Dallas Cowboys, he was named the starter. The season opener, against the Los Angeles Rams, sold out Tulane Stadium on September 19, fed by headlines in the New Orleans Times-Picayune like “All New Orleans Hopes on Rookie QB Archie Manning.” The paper, going all in on the new kid in town, offered fans a 16-page booklet called The Making of a Saint for half a buck.

Remarkably comfortable in the glare of the spotlight, wearing a new number—8, because 18 was taken—he wore dashing white shoes à la Namath, but those shoes could not dance away fast enough from the constant pressure of the Rams’ Fearsome Foursome defensive line, which sacked him six times in the first half alone, thrice by the alwaysterrorizing Deacon Jones. Even so, at halftime the score was 3–3. And in the third quarter, he led a drive that ended with a six-yard touchdown pass to Dave Parks, then another with a two-yard plunge by fullback Bob Gresham, making it 17–3. There was a Mardi Gras atmosphere in the old stadium. However, the Rams roared back with 17 straight points and took the lead, 20–17. With the clock running down, Archie indeed marched the Saints, 70 yards in eight plays. He then hit Danny Abramowicz with a 12-yard pass to the L.A. 13. An interference call put the ball on the 1. Two plays failed, and it was third-and-goal, with time for just one play. Roberts, wanting it all, dismissed a tying field goal. “We’re going for it!” he shouted to Archie. But he was befuddled about what play to call. When Archie got into the huddle, Abramowicz asked him what the play was.

“Damned if I know,” he said. “They never told me.”¹

He didn’t get cute with it. He took the snap, cut left against the grain, saw a hole, and dove over the goal line, winning his debut 24–20, whereupon he nearly needed a security detail to get off the field amid the rapturous fans. He had gone 16 of 29 for 218 yards, a modest total, but had kept his head and was only intercepted once. The fan base was convinced. The Baton Rouge State-Times and Morning Advocate’s sports editor, Bernell Ballard, wrote, “Archie Manning has done it. . . . Worth a half-million [sic] to sign? Brother, at $1 million, Manning would be the biggest bargain pro football ever found.” The Times-Picayune’s sports editor, Bob Roesler, seemed to break into song: “Archie Manning, Archie Manning, Archie Manning. That’s all you could hear Monday. At the service station, the cigar counter, butcher shop, laundry, lunch counter. . . . With Archie alive and well, who knows, maybe the Saints will go 14–0.” Roesler noted that, late in the game, after Jones had crashed in but missed the sack, Archie “walked over and offered to help Deacon to his feet. Manning is that sort of person.”

The Advocate’s Saints beat man, Bud Montet, even had biblical visions. “Archie Manning,” he wrote, “put the ‘halo’ back on the Saints when he rolled over the goal line.”

The euphoria lasted all week. Then the San Francisco 49ers came in and skated to a 38–20 win, sacking Archie eight times on the hard artificial turf. He scrambled to a 13–13 tie in Houston a week later. In Chicago, the Saints fell behind the Bears 35–0 at the half and lost 35–14, a game in which Archie pulled a thigh muscle and was benched. But he was a tough nut to crack. At home against the Cowboys, he put the Saints up with a 29-yard pass to halfback Tony Baker, then made it 17–0 on a 13-yard rush. The defense held tough, and his two-yard run capped the game, a 24–14 win—one so traumatic to Dallas coach Tom Landry that he junked his two-QB shuttle system and went solely with Roger Staubach; a few months later, the Cowboys would win the Super Bowl on this very turf.

Archie’s thigh remained a problem, and he missed some or all of the remaining games. When he was in the lineup, he was battered on nearly every drop back or scramble. Over the season, he was sacked 40 times and could only shake loose enough to run the ball 33 times, picking up 173 yards and four touchdowns. Toward the end, the fuddled Roberts tried a wishbone-type option play, which only made Archie more of a sitting duck. Abramowicz felt for him. “Archie, you’re living on borrowed time,” he told him in the huddle. “You’d better forget that damn thing,” meaning the wishbone.

“What can I do?” Archie said. “They keep sending [the play] in.”²

It could have been worse. Abramowicz swears he saw some very big and mean linemen pull back when they had Archie in their sights. The Rams’ great defensive end Jack Youngblood, he said, told him, “I can’t do it to that boy. So many times I’ve had a straight shot on him when his back was turned, but I just can’t do it.” Archie appreciated that. Youngblood, he said, “was nice enough to pick me up every time he knocked my ass off.”³

The Saints ended the season at 4–8–2, last in the NFC West Division, and Archie would have to get used to this. His own numbers were entirely anemic: 1,164 passing yards, a 48 percent completion rate, six touchdowns, seven fumbles, the last an all-time team worst. The NFL’s quarterback rating wasn’t adopted until 1973; calculated retroactively, it put him at 60.1 on a scale from 0 to 158.3.

There were other transitions he had to make, off the field. In the heart of New Orleans, there were dozens of African-Americans on the field and thousands on the streets of the city. Suddenly, it was he who felt like the outsider. “When I first came to the Saints I was concerned with how the black players would accept me,” he recalled.⁴

Indeed, he had arrived in style, in his big, white Lincoln Continental, wondering “how black players might think of the rookie white guy from Ole Miss with the newfound ‘wealth.’”⁵ He even tried to hide the car, parking it on the street instead of in the players’ lot. In fact, many of the black Saints were wary of him. But defensive lineman Richard Neal, who would tragically die young at age 35 from a heart attack, was, Archie said, “kind of a leader among the black players, knew what I was going through.” Neal took the Mannings to dinner, the sight of two high-profile couples of different color more than a little symbolic.⁶ Archie’s new world also included the presence of a gay man, spare running back Dave Kopay, who wouldn’t come out until after his career but whose secret was quietly known. If Archie was “late coming” to such things, he was game to accept social change, even if uneasily. In his memoir with Peyton, he recalled—in perhaps a bit too much detail—the moment when he shared a locker room with a black man and his mind was fixed on a particular stereotype. Describing USC linebacker Charlie Weaver—the Detroit Lions’ first-round pick in ’71, whom he practiced against at the College All-Star Game—he wrote that Weaver was “the blackest man I’d ever seen,” adding with remarkable obtuseness that when he saw Weaver in the shower, “there he was, full view, and I have to say it startled me. The thought of showering with blacks—integration down to the bare essentials—had never occurred to me.”

He also cited one unnamed black receiver who had a racial chip on his shoulder pad, once telling him in the huddle, “We all been talking and we think you’re throwing more passes to the white guys.” That, he wrote, made him “see red,” and he nearly fought it out with the guy. His parting shot to this “knucklehead” was to slime him as someone who “couldn’t lay off the drugs,” no doubt hoping the object of the insult would know exactly who he meant. He then leaped into a self-congratulatory paean. “The ‘black community,’ if you will, has been wonderful to me. No, they’re not all people I see every day, but . . . I consider them blessings in my life.” He added, “For my boys, race has never been much of a concern either way.”⁷

New Orleans itself was going through a painful transition, aided in no small way by a biracial football franchise. Maurice “Moon” Landrieu, who was elected mayor in 1970, a rare liberal in the town, remembered, “We had a race issue back then. If you remember people sat in segregated seating at [the minor league baseball] Pelicans games. Now, all of a sudden we had NFL games and blacks and whites were seated together. I can recall very vividly John Gilliam’s return of the first kickoff. The stadium went wild, and I’m sitting here watching all of these white people cheering for a black player. That was unheard of before. In terms of race relations, the Saints were a tremendous gift to the fans and the people of New Orleans.”⁸ The Saints made an effort at optics; three of the team’s cheerleaders were black.

But any signs of progress came with lingering stubbornness, and they still do. Integration didn’t follow white fans or players out the stadium exits. Archie and Olivia’s first digs outside of Oxford were an apartment near the Saints’ training grounds in Metairie, a suburban cradle on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain where, in 1990, ex-Klan leader David Duke was elected to the state legislature. Racial divisions in New Orleans seemed to carry over to front-office decisions. Where Mecom père was a remarkable exception as a liberal oilman, Mecom fils was not. And the NFL had little to say about the segregated housing for black players and the separate hotels during the preseason in places like Birmingham. There was suspicion among black players and fans when the Saints traded Ken Burrough, the team’s No. 1 pick in 1970, to the Oilers for a draft pick and three ineffectual players—all because, it was said, J. D. Roberts thought Burrough, a black man, was “goldbricking.”⁹ Burrough, whose skills Archie could have used, would play 10 more years and make the Pro Bowl twice.

Richard Neal, too, was traded—in 1973, to the Jets. These kinds of strong, outspoken black men were by rote labeled “troublemakers.” Playing within these old shibboleths, Archie’s identity was carved by white privilege. The spoils of Southern football stardom were his. In 1973, he was made the grand marshal of the Peach Parade, on the eve of the Peach Bowl in Atlanta. In the Deep South, gigs like that were reserved for men of honor and distinction, as long as they were white. Like Drew, New Orleans would inevitably morph into a near-opposite image, to be defined by its black mayor in 2006 as a “chocolate” city. And even by the time Archie and Olivia arrived, the interracial vibe was strong within an overall stew of different cultures. Once, the couple thought they might move back to Mississippi after the season’s end, but that changed once they became addicted to the eateries in the French Quarter, on Basin Street, wherever the scent of gumbo led them—their favorite being Commander’s Palace in the Garden District, down by the Mississippi River, where they filled up on bread pudding soufflé and crawfish étouffée. Even now, Peyton says he will eat crawfish only in New Orleans.

The town would never be fueled by football the way Dallas was in the early 1960s on its way to wealth and arrogance. But whatever the city is, the Saints made football a part of the equation, for better and worse. In the cynical words of one resident commenting on a story about the Saints on the Times-Picayune website in 2016, “Before the Saints, [New Orleans] was a party city with a corrupt administration, few major private sector employers. Now it’s a party city with a corrupt administration, few major private sector employers and a football team.”¹⁰

While John Vaught had said Archie would “revolutionize” pro football,¹¹ he never quite got there. But neither was he alone in the game of busted expectations. Jim Plunkett and Dan Pastorini would have almost as hard a time as Archie. Instead, Terry Bradshaw, helped to no end by the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Steel Curtain defense and talented playmakers, was headed for four Super Bowl wins in the ’70s. Roger Staubach was doing with his arm and legs in Dallas what Archie was supposed to do, albeit with the kind of coach Archie never had. Staubach, taking note of this, said, “You know, there are a lot of people who think that if Archie and I had been drafted by opposite teams, we would have had opposite careers. And they might be right.”¹²

During the 1972 season, Archie would work twice as hard for literally half as much. After a 34–14 loss on opening day to the Rams, the Saints made it close before losing to the Kansas City Chiefs, but lost the next three games badly. Then came two weeks of false hope. Playing the 49ers on the road, they were down all game until Archie hit Parks with a 30-yard TD pass for a late 20–17 lead, though the 49ers were able to ease their embarrassment with a late field goal. Next, at home against the Philadelphia Eagles, the Saints romped 21–3, Archie throwing for 295 yards. But six losses in the last seven games restored the usual order. They finished 2–11–1, with Archie needing to pass a league-high 449 times, completing 230 for 2,781 yards (second only to Joe Namath), 18 touchdowns (one off the league high), and 21 interceptions (fewer than Plunkett’s 25). He also led the league again in times sacked: 43. The Saints scored only five rushing touchdowns.

When it was over, Roberts’s offensive coordinator, Ken Shipp, a bright football man, jumped in a heartbeat to the Jets. The GM, Vic Schwenk, was fired and replaced—in what still seems like a practical joke—by Apollo 12 astronaut Richard “Dick” Gordon Jr., Mecom apparently believing that if Gordon could go to the moon, he could deliver something equally improbable: a winning Saints team. Gordon wasn’t so sure. “I have a great deal to learn,” he said.¹³ His first move was to can Roberts—not before the next season so that another coach could have some time to prepare, but after the fourth and final exhibition game. The new head coach—Roberts’s backfield coach, John North—was, like his predecessor, an ex-Marine, a Purple Heart recipient who was wounded so gravely in the Pacific Theater in World War II that his parents were told he had died. That sort of grit was needed by the Saints, and a player who had it, Oklahoma defensive tackle Derland Moore, was a second-round draft pick starting a 13-year career in New Orleans. Still, Archie had no chance in ’73.

On opening day, the Falcons wiped the Saints out, 62–7. The next week was an improvement—they lost 40–3 to the Cowboys. They played tough in Baltimore, losing 14–10, before finally winning, at home against the Bears, 21–16, with Archie running in two touchdowns. The Saints then won two in a row for the first time with Archie. They finished the season at 5–9, which could be measured as improvement, good enough for a tie for third place in their division. Gordon insisted the team was just three players away from winning the Super Bowl. That prompted local sportscaster Buddy Diliberto to say, “Only if those three players are God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.” Gordon wasn’t amused. Diliberto was banned from the team plane, as the edict went, “for life plus ten years,” which Diliberto snarked might not be long enough for the team to win. Indeed, Danny Abramowicz was overjoyed to be traded to the 49ers after the second game of that season. Before he cleared out, he had some advice for the beleaguered quarterback.

“Archie,” he said, “you’d better get out of this place. They’re going to kill you here.”¹⁴