Emotional Rescue: Coach Inspires Saints and a City- NYT article

A really good read. Steve Gleason compares the Saints fans love for the team like a college atmosphere....

By LEE JENKINS
Published: October 29, 2006
NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 27 — This city can appreciate a leader who emphasizes accountability, inspires action and once represented a European brewery.

Over the past 150 years, the Everards Brewery in Leicester, England, has produced a variety of bitter ales and one sweet-talking football coach.

Sean Payton had failed as a player in the National Football League, the Canadian Football League and the Arena Football League when he got the call from a British beer league in 1987, asking him to be a quarterback and a coach for the Leicester Panthers.

Everards, which owned the Panthers, offered Payton free housing, a free car and a modest signing bonus — “all the beer I could drink,” Payton joked.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/sports/football/29payton.html