Super Bowl helps clear names for Saints, Colts owners

FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. -- Their similarities are far deeper than simply owning the franchises that will play in Super Bowl XLIV on Sunday at Sun Life Stadium. For the New Orleans Saints' Tom Benson and the Indianapolis Colts' Jim Irsay, the success of their teams has produced something more significant than the normal degree of gratification that comes with winning football games.

For them, success has brought redemption.

The names Benson and Irsay once were reviled by fans in a couple NFL cities. Many in New Orleans expressed their contempt for Benson when they suspected in the months after Hurricane Katrina that he wanted to move the Saints from the city, something that Benson now says he never intended to do. In Irsay's case, the ire from fans in Baltimore was aimed at his father, not him, after the late Robert Irsay had the Colts' belongings loaded into Mayflower moving vans on a snowy night in 1984 and relocated the franchise to Indianapolis.

So when Jim Irsay was asked this week if he could empathize with the way Benson once was viewed in New Orleans, he said yes.

"It's always difficult when you have a very unusual situation like what happened in New Orleans," Irsay said. "Tom was loyal to the community. They worked through that great difficulty . . . and I think it speaks volumes for our league as well because as owners we said 'this is our partner and we need to consider his circumstances.' The league and all 31 other owners stepped up and participated in seeing it through to make sure this day would come, and it has. And what a great story it is -- them being in the Super Bowl, them having the Super Bowl in 2013 and just the rejuvenation that's happened there."

Many longtime Saints followers say they're in disbelief that the formerly downtrodden franchise has reached a Super Bowl. Benson said he doesn't share that perspective.

"I had no doubt at all," Benson said this week. "This is my 25th year, you know. It couldn't be any better."

The post-Katrina scorn for Benson was expressed in part in written messages posted in yards in hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods; anti-Benson signs on discarded refrigerators containing rotting food drew news coverage. The Saints were displaced from New Orleans by Katrina and spent the 2005 season based in San Antonio, playing home games there and in Baton Rouge. There was speculation that Benson wanted to keep the Saints in San Antonio.

"It's different than most people thought," Benson said this week. "It was just a matter of working through the circumstances. New Orleans needed the team there. And so at no time did we look anyplace else. Now, we moved to San Antonio because we couldn't play there [in New Orleans in 2005]. We practiced there and everything. But that whole year, we continued on working on getting back to New Orleans. As we look at it, it was the right decision because it certainly has been a great thing for New Orleans. . . . We know it's back. But now we're telling the whole world that it's back."

Based in the basement

Benson recalled Saints officials working out of the basement of the Alamodome in San Antonio in 2005 while the team's headquarters in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, La., was used for relief efforts. "The Army had taken over our facilities," Benson said. "I didn't know if we were going to get it back. That was one problem. Then if we could get the Superdome ready, that was the other. We were ready. It was just a matter of doing that. . . . That was a tough year for everybody concerned. Our staff -- we were working out of a basement. I have to give them credit. They were there. Just think what it took to operate a club, when you have 200 people and all of a sudden you're operating out of a basement. But I think it made us a better club. We came back in 2006, and look what we've done since."

Former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said last week that Sean Payton, the coach hired by the Saints in 2006, and Benson "really played off of each other's strengths," and also credited Benson's granddaughter, Rita Benson LeBlanc. She's an owner and executive vice president of the team, and is to take over for her grandfather someday.

"Everyone was so shocked during and right after Katrina," Tagliabue said. "The country had never seen anything like it before. You couldn't get your balance until after it was over. When it was over, when it was clear he was going back to New Orleans, I think he had a renaissance of energy of sorts. He hired Sean Payton. He did other things.