FORT LAUDERDALE — Peyton Manning doesn’t remember wearing the brown paper bag on his head.
Maybe it’s because he was about 4 years old at the time or maybe it’s because he is just being tactful.
He does remember going to New Orleans Saints games with his older brother, Cooper, and when the games were over, going down on to the field to wait for his dad, Archie, the beleaguered quarterback of those Saints.
“Cooper and I used to, while waiting on my dad, used to go out on the Superdome turf and play,” recalled Peyton.
“Get a big ball of tape, wad it up and play one-on-one, 100-yard football. The first person to score twice, you are pretty much exhausted after that.
“My dad would always come out and get us on the field and take a little time to be with us. He always would sign his autographs for all fans after the games. Most of these times after tough losses. But I couldn’t tell at the time.
“I didn’t really know if they won or lost at the time. I was 3, 4, 5 years old. He was always the same. So that always had a positive influence on me.”
Oh, the Saints, the Saints, the wretched Saints. They were an expansion team in 1967 and for their first 20 years they never had a winning record.
You had to know that the Saints were going to be a horrific outfit when they traded their very first draft pick, the first pick overall, to Baltimore in exchange for backup quarterback Gary Cuozzo. Cuozzo played 13 games.
And that draft pick? Baltimore turned it into defensive end Bubba Smith who is in the Hall of Fame.
Kicker Garo Yepremian, who spent the meat of his career with the Miami Dolphins, including the perfect 17-0 1973 season, became a Saint in 1979. “Everywhere I went that season in New Orleans, people cheered me and bought me stuff,” he said. “And you know why?
“The Saints went 8-8 that year. It was the first time they’d ever reached .500. That’d get you run out of Miami. Only with the Saints did it make you a hero.”
Even one of the team’s early defining moments, Tom Dempsey’s 63-yard field goal in 1970, the longest field goal in NFL history, has a comical angle.
Dempsey’s famous kick was made in the very first game coached by J.D. Roberts, who had been promoted from a minor-league club, the Richmond Roadrunners.
There’s little doubt that Roberts couldn’t have picked Dempsey out of a lineup, let alone known if he had 63-yard range. He let him kick it and, 40 years later, it remains the longest in history.
In the 1980s, under new owner Tom Benson, who still owns the team, the Saints went to the playoffs four times in seven years and Benson became famous for doing the “Benson Boogie”, a little dance on the sidelines, when his team would win.
More recently, in 1999, head coach Mike Ditka and running back Ricky Williams appeared on the cover of ESPN’s magazine, Ditka in a tuxedo and Williams in a bridal gown, after Ditka traded away all his draft picks — eight of them — to get the rights to pick Williams first overall out of Texas.
That’s when Ditka predicted: “We’re on the way to the Super Bowl.”
New Orleans has waited 10 years, but Ditka was long gone and so was Ricky Williams.
If there is a martyr to be found in this 43-year march through football’s wasteland, there is no doubt it is Archie Manning. He was plucked by the Saints in the first round of the 1971 draft out of Ole Miss to lead them to glory.
But the sad truth was that Manning was mostly all alone in the talent department. The absolute low point was the 1980 season when the team went 1-15. That’s when the nickname ‘Aints’ was born and fans started wearing bags over their heads in shame.
And that’s how Peyton Manning came to wear a bag on his head.
It’s a story that Cooper Manning tells on his little brother and we’re guessing that big bro put him up to it. But those days are history. Two weeks ago, when the Saints beat the Minnesota Vikings in overtime to win the NFC title, all the ghosts were purged.
Bobby Hebert, the New Orleans quarterback in the late 1980s, once vowed that he would stroll down Bourbon St. in a dress if the Saints ever made it to the Super Bowl.
Last week he made good on his promise, making the trek at the head of a parade of Saints fans in a fetching little number. Oh, those Saints really do know how to march in.
ken.fidlin@sunmedia.ca
