'Dirty-Dirty' Landry: Just What the Redskins Need

Just before signing Landry, Saban was unsure of the rocket-fast Landry's position, and went back to Valdin.

"He asked me if he was a corner or a safety," Valdin said. "I told him he was a safety, because he hits like a train."

'This Is Louisiana'

Finding Ama means traveling south on Interstate 310, away from the Louis Armstrong Airport, over the brown currents of the Mississippi into St. Charles Parish along the Hale Boggs Bridge, better known to locals as the Luling Bridge. Rhonda Landry remembers the day in 1976, back when she was 14 and the only way to cross the river at Luling was by boat, when the passenger ferry was struck by a tanker, killing 78 people. The bridge came a few years later.

There are intermittent footprints of Hurricane Katrina, but outside of moderate flooding and inconvenience, catastrophe largely avoided Ama. Mount Zion Baptist, Rhonda Landry's church since birth, was hit so hard, Frank says, "that it looked like a wrecking ball went right through it." Along River Road, whole pine and maple trees lay sideways, ripped from the earth. Sitting across the street from the Landry house are three FEMA trailers.

East on Route 18, along River Road, past the looming Monsanto plant where Frank Landry worked 31 years as an electrical engineer before retiring two months ago, is Kennedy Street, a middle-class street of bungalows, raised ranches and missions. For 28 years, the Landrys have lived in a modest, one-story structure with low gables that Ama realtors call a "Louisiana ranch," the distinction stemming from its brick exterior instead of the customary wood or siding.

On their street, neighbors honk each time they drive by, a combination of common custom in a place where virtually every resident knows each other and the reverence for a family that is football royalty here.

"This is Louisiana," says Rhonda Landry, whose warm eyes belie what people in town call her "very serious streak," especially when it comes to her youngest son. "It's the South. If you don't wave back, people will think there's something wrong with you. They'll think you're stuck up."

Frank played at Hahnville High School before tearing up both knees as an outside linebacker at Northeast Louisiana University (known now as University of Louisiana-Monroe). Rhonda also attended Hahnville, where she insists she was not a cheerleader but a member of the "pep squad," the difference being cheerleaders ran out on the field during timeouts. The first son, Derick, played football at Hahnville in the late 1980s and later college ball at Vanderbilt. The second, Dawan, was the Hahnville quarterback who moved on to Georgia Tech and now begins his second season with the Baltimore Ravens. Only the Landry brothers have left Hahnville to play in the NFL. Hahnville's great in-parish rival, Destrehan, produced Baltimore Ravens star safety Ed Reed.

"I didn't have any idea two of my sons would play in the NFL," Frank Landry says. "But LaRon was the one . . . if you were in front of a brick wall, Dawan would find the easiest way to get around it; LaRon would run right through it."

If Frank and Derick Landry were good players and Dawan a cut above, then LaRon was the prodigy.

"He was different," Valdin said. "Dawan led by example. LaRon led by fear."

In Hahnville, Frank Landry is known as big and opinionated, but respectful of the coaching hierarchy.