The truth of Sean Payton’s story is indeed stranger than fiction and proves the football gods are working overtime.
Sean is no relation to Walter, but he did play for the Bears. Played for Mike Ditka, in fact. He grew up in Naperville and played at Naperville Central High School. He played quarterback for Eastern Illinois. He is now coach of the New Orleans Saints, one of Ditka’s successors in New Orleans. He has yet to open a restaurant, but he could.
Payton rooted for Walter to win the 1985 Super Bowl, then played for the Bears in three games in 1987 on the strike-replacement team.
Now Payton brings his Saints to Chicago for the NFC title game and tries to keep the Bears from getting to the Super Bowl. Although New Orleans was rooting for the Seattle Seahawks so the Superdome would host the game, Payton will not feel out of place in Soldier Field.
“Home for me is Chicago,” Payton said Monday. “It’s a great town, great sports town. There are a lot of good memories for me.”
Those strike games are not among them.
“Ditka hated him, I think,” said Greg Bensel, the Saints’ public relations director who also worked with Ditka.
Reporters referred to the replacement team as “the spare Bears,” but Ditka called them “the real Bears,” alienating many players from his 1985 Super Bowl team.
Payton shared time at quarterback with Mike Hohensee, now a Ditka employee as coach the Arena League Rush. Ditka treated both the way he treated most of his regular quarterbacks, which at times could easily be confused with hate.
“Our last game was against the Saints and the last pass I threw was intercepted,” Payton said. “I think he likes me more now as a coach than he did as a player. That’s OK.”
Everybody does. Payton is NFL coach of the year after taking the Saints from 3-13 to 10-6 in the regular season, rebuilding them much faster and more unbelievably than this region is rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.
Payton has been so effective in his multifaceted roles as new leader, play-caller and ambassador for the city that new quarterback Drew Brees can only say, “He doesn’t seem like a first-year coach.”
Doesn’t look like one either. He just turned 43, going on 34, and was nicknamed “Dennis the Menace” by his most recent mentor, Bill Parcells of the Cowboys, because the work ethic didn’t match the haircut.
Payton sounds much more serious in front of cameras than he did a few years back in the second row of a Jimmy Buffett concert in Dallas. Accompanied by ex-Cowboys Troy Aikman and Daryl Johnston, Payton danced in the aisle with a 4-foot land shark poster on his head.
That is not the Payton who will be standing on the sidelines Sunday trying to enhance a fast-growing reputation as the best play-caller in football. Payton has worked wonders in one year, turning Brees into an All-Pro quarterback, perfectly dividing the workload of running backs Deuce McAllister and rookie phenom Reggie Bush and developing seventh-round rookie Marques Colston into the leading rookie receiver. And all behind an offensive line that has a new right tackle, a rookie right guard and a left tackle who had never played that side.
“I don’t think I could have ever imagined that it would be quite like this,” Brees told New Orleans reporters last week after leading the NFL with 4,418 passing yards despite undergoing surgery last January to repair a torn labrum and partially torn rotator cuff in his right throwing shoulder.
Bensel believes Payton’s background as a communications major helped equip him to handle his unique job. Although there were 27 new players on the roster, this team has embraced rather than shied away from its role as symbol for an area recovering from Katrina’s devastation.
It starts with Payton, who routinely slaps high-fives with fans in the Superdome after games and willingly interacts with team sponsors.
It’s all part of the “it” factor Carolina coach John Fox assured Saints general manager Mickey Loomis that his friend Payton possessed. Fox and Payton were the coordinators on Jim Fassel’s 2000 New York Giants Super Bowl team before Payton went to Dallas.
In New York, Payton convinced Fassel that Tiki Barber could be more than a third-down back. Barber acknowledged earlier this year, “As he’s doing in New Orleans, he finds ways to utilize his guys’ strengths. He did that with me and revolutionized my existence as a football player.”
Payton said Parcells told him to try to find out what has kept the Saints from winning for almost all of their 40 years.
“Character, toughness, discipline, penalties and turnovers,” Payton began. “Those are things that keep you from winning games regardless of what town you’re in. This is a tough town to accomplish some of the things you want to in football because you have some distractions. You can go down to Bourbon Street and the French Quarter. You have casinos. You have the daiquiri stands. There are a lot of distractions, so hopefully you bring the right type of player in here who understands what’s important.”
Saints players talk about playing with “one heartbeat.” Payton has brought New Orleans native and Dallas Mavericks coach Avery Johnson to speak to players.
“We have that trust and that feeling of togetherness,” Brees said. “We don’t feel like there’s ever a situation that we can’t overcome, any adversity that we can’t fight through, and our coach really brings a lot of that to the table.”
When Payton was named coach of the year, succeeding the Bears’ Lovie Smith, he said, “We’re in a sport that is probably in my opinion the most difficult sport to give out an individual award.”
It wasn’t difficult for New Orleans, where Payton already has surpassed anything Ditka or any other Saints coach has ever done in this city.
And did Payton learn anything as a player from Ditka?
“It was so brief,” Payton said. “I do think growing up there and watching the success he had with that team, you certainly saw his competitive spirit and what he brought to that team. It was significant. That’s the team it seems like everyone is measured against afterward.”
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dpierson@tribune.com
