On the March : Four Men Give Saints (9-1) a Super Bowl Shot

Snuggling up to the Mississippi River, as it winds from the French Quarter around to the colonnaded 1840s mansions of the Garden District, Louisiana’s largest city is perhaps America’s most vibrant.

As a sports town, though, New Orleans is like any other community with a good football team that has never won the Super Bowl.

What they talk about here is precisely what they are talking about in Buffalo or Houston this year: their shot at the Super Bowl.

They are ecstatic over the New Orleans Saints’ 9-1 start, but what they are pointing for is championship day.

So, at a recent Saint game, a Bourbon Street stripper showed up in the team’s colors, black and gold, with an inscription on her blouse that read, not “Go, Saints,” but “Black and Gold to the Super Bowl!”

And that’s “par for the course,” club President Jim Finks observed.

“A win is enough for most fans only when you’re not winning much,” he said. “When you’ve got a winning team, they always want it all.”

The Saints know about not winning much. They started in the NFL with 16 consecutive losing seasons before finishing 8-8 in 1983. And in the seven seasons since then, they have had only three winning teams.

Again last year they were 8-8.

Now the whole town wants the Super Bowl.

If, this time, the Saints are in position to get there, it’s because of the contributions of four very different men. The cast:

--Finks, 64, the club’s iron-willed president and general manager from small-town Salem, Ill.

Known for turning teams around, Finks, a former NFL quarterback, has built five winners in two countries and three leagues, baseball’s National League among them. The renaissance here dates from his arrival in 1986. A year later, the Saints, born in 1967, finally got over .500, finishing 12-3.

--Jim Mora, 56, the steady, demanding, Los Angeles-born coach.

Mora, in 32 years of coaching, has shown “the executive ability to run General Motors,” an employer, John Ralston, once said. In the three years of the United States Football League, Mora’s teams were always in the finals, winning the title twice.

--Bobby Hebert, 31, the effervescent Cajun quarterback from Cutoff, La.

In his 58 games as a New Orleans starter since 1985, the year before Finks and Mora came in, the club is 36-22. When Hebert sat out last season in a contract fight, the Saints fell to .500. In the USFL, he faced Mora in two title games, winning one and losing one.

--Tom Benson, 64, the dancing owner, a New Orleans native.

Benson started by saving the Saints for his hometown in 1985 after founder John Mecom departed.

He signed Hebert, then spent three months investigating sports executives before deciding on Finks. A car dealer in his other life, Benson controls a string of agencies in Louisiana and Texas.

“It’s a cliche, but winning is a team effort,” Benson said. “Why pretend otherwise?”

PRESCRIPTIONS FOR STAYING ON COURSE

Natives and visitors alike have noted two dramatic changes here in recent years.

The first is the most surprising--the virtual end of the jazz era in the city where jazz began. Although a Dixieland band or two can still be searched out, rock is heard on almost every corner now.

The second change was, in a sense, inevitable, for no football team can lose forever.

A big winner now, the Saints are the one shiny ornament in politically and economically troubled Louisiana.

“(The Saints) are something to be happy about,” said Pam Randazza, who owns a candy and gift shop in the French Quarter. “Everything else has been going down the tubes.”

Said New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Brian Allee-Walsh: “Things are so bad that people can only afford two things: the Saints and the lottery.”

In America today, if lotteries are pervasive, winning pro teams are rare. And it’s probably because of the traditional way the Saints put their team together that they’re a winner.

They first recruited a defensive powerhouse, getting a team with a particularly powerful front seven--linebackers Pat Swilling, Rickey Jackson and Sam Mills among them--plus two sets of defensive linemen.

Next, the Saints warned their offensive team: Just don’t give anything away.

The players obliged and they’re still obeying, even winning with backups now that injuries have taken out their whole starting backfield--quarterback Hebert, halfback Dalton Hilliard and fullback Craig (Ironhead) Heyward.

Hilliard and Heyward are on injured reserve because of leg problems.

Hebert’s shoulder problem--diagnosed by Dr. Frank Jobe of Los Angeles as rotator-cuff trauma--is believed to be temporary. Jobe advised two more weeks of rest.

Meanwhile, No. 2 quarterback Steve Walsh, proving each week that he is no Hebert, is 3-0 as a starter for a team that has taken a four-game lead in the NFC West.

The Super Bowl is a definite possibility, but to get there, the Saints eventually will need their three starting backs.

“We’ll have them,” Benson promised.

FINKS AND MORA: PLANNING AND PEOPLE

As an NFL executive, Finks began his career in Minnesota, where he turned around the Vikings in the late 1960s by hiring Bud Grant and drafting the Purple People Eaters.

Finks, who came within a vote or two of the commissioner’s office during the long months of NFL balloting last year, is known to his peers as a football man who understands what it takes to be competitive. To ownership, he has been known as an administrator who knows the value of a dollar.

“The Saints’ net (profit) is in the (league’s) top five,” an NFL source said.

Mora, the man Finks picked to coach the Saints, has been similarly successful.

But when Mora’s associates talk about him, the thing they mention first is his passion for loyalty. He both demands and gives it.

“(Mora) brought his entire USFL staff over here with him when he got this job,” said John Pease, a former Ram who coaches the Saints’ defensive line. “This is our ninth year together.”

Finks and Mora are somewhat alike--athletic, good-looking, ambitious, intense. Mora could be Finks’ younger brother.

But Mora got the job for other reasons.

“I’d never hire anyone but a good head coach to be a head coach,” Finks said.

During Finks’ boyhood, his father was a superintendent for the company making Buster Brown shoes. On his way to the Saints, Finks went from the University of Tulsa to the Pittsburgh Steelers, where he was a Pro Bowl quarterback, then got his first coaching job as a Notre Dame assistant.

When Mora was growing up in Los Angeles, his father was a film editor at 20th Century Fox. On his way to the Saints, Mora, a tight end, roomed at Occidental with the quarterback, Jack Kemp, then went to USC for his master’s degree. He started his coaching career at Oxy.

In New Orleans, Mora is 48-27 since the turnaround season five years ago. How did he make such a big change in a team that couldn’t win under such coaches as Hank Stram, Bum Phillips, and Tom Fears?

Said Mora: “We’ve had a program and stuck to it.”

Said Finks: “It takes two things, planning and people. The plan doesn’t matter a lot. There’s a lot of good ways to do it. What counts is everyone going along with the plan you want. Nobody can have his own agenda.

“I rely on my own judgment to choose the right people. What counts is giving everyone all the authority he needs to do his job.”

In coaching the Saints, Mora, a tight-lipped perfectionist, is autonomous--and ultimately responsible--even though Finks is a pretty good football man himself.

BOBBY AND THE BOSS HOMETOWN CONNECTION

When Benson took over the Saints in 1985, he recalls that he was in no hurry to get a new coach or a general manager or players. He was determined to avoid the kind of big mistake that had crippled the franchise since the 1960s.

Benson recalls that he knew only two things about football. He’d heard that it was played 11 to a side. And, he said, “I was pretty sure that quarterbacks don’t grow on trees--leastways in Louisiana.”

Accordingly, Benson ignored the coach and went to work on the quarterback. Moving swiftly when the USFL folded, he outbid the rest of the NFL for Hebert.

“I’m honored that (Benson) signed me personally,” Hebert said. “He gave me a a signing bonus of $1.3 million--the largest ever in the NFL up to that time.”

One thing that distinguishes Benson and Hebert from most other NFL owners and quarterbacks is that they are natives of the state in which they do business.

An earlier member of Benson’s New Orleans family was an architect who helped found the Sugar Bowl and designed the original facility, Tulane Stadium. Three Super Bowl games were played there.

Hebert’s family has lived in Louisiana for more than 200 years.

“They were in the Cajun community that was founded here on Aug. 15, 1785,” the quarterback said. “After 130 years in Nova Scotia, they were kicked out, went back to France, regrouped and sailed back to Louisiana.

“My dad’s dad made a good living on the river with four tugboats. My dad was the first Hebert to go to college. He graduated from LSU as a civil engineer.”

Benson and Hebert are also products of Louisiana schools--Benson of Loyola, here in town; Hebert of Northwestern Louisiana, in Natchitoches.

In Benson’s NFL career, nothing has bugged him more than Hebert’s absence last year.

But the owner didn’t interfere in the Finks-Hebert negotiations.

“There’s only one way to operate a pro club,” Benson said. “You put a guy in charge and let him run it. (Finks) is responsible to me, of course, but everyone else is responsible to him. That’s why I wanted him to choose the football coach.”

Said Finks of what began last year as a holdout by Hebert: “I still don’t know what he wanted.”

Hebert, however, is very clear on what he wanted--a chance to play where he chose to play, maybe with the Raiders, maybe with the Saints.

“This is America,” he said. “Why can’t an American work where he wants to work?”

It’s a question that will be before the courts before another football season begins. Hebert was just ahead of his time, and in New Orleans there are lots of people glad about that. What they want here is a Super Bowl team. That’s what they are clear about.