On the Monday morning following the Super Bowl, the winning coach is expected to get up early for one final press conference. This year, Saints coach Sean Payton had a very hard time getting out of bed.
USA Today reports that Payton, in his forthcoming autobiography, describes the morning after the Super Bowl as one in which he was still recovering from a night of heavy partying.
“Did I mention the press conference was scheduled for 8:30 a.m.? The Lombardi Trophy was in the bed beside me,” Payton writes. “I was totally dead asleep when Mike Ornstein (marketing agent) was banging on my door at 7 a.m. sharp. I’d been asleep and hour and 40 minutes, and I’d had a couple cocktails and some Amstel Light. OK, more than a couple. As I’d said good night, I’d told Ornstein, “I’ll pay the fine. No way am I making that press conference. There’s only so much I can do.” “Look,” Ornstein said. “For 44 years, the head coach has always been there. You’re not gonna be the first one to miss it.”
Payton writes that the whole post-Super Bowl party is hard to remember.
“What can I say? I’m lucky I could string a sentence together at all,” Payton writes. “I got back in the Town Car and fell asleep on the ride back to the hotel. The next thing I remember, I was on the team charter flying home. That was Monday. It’s all a bit of a blur. Have you ever seen the movie, “The Hangover,” where the guy is asking, “How did this lion (actually tiger) get here? Where did my tooth go? Isn’t that Mike Tyson? That was Monday for me.”
Payton has said of the book, “I really want to make sure that someone that has finished reading it feels like they had five hours with me at an airport bar.”
