arthurracoon
The Cardinal Smiles
http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=jm-katrina082806&prov=yhoo&type=lgns
By John Murphy
Yahoo! Sports
On Friday, Aug. 26, 2005 around 6:45 p.m., I walked to my seat in the press box of the New Orleans Superdome to prepare another preseason scouting report of the New Orleans Saints for the Oakland Raiders. After seven years of traveling, watching games on my own and emailing thousands of reports around the NFL, I was finally sitting in the chair I wanted to be in.
The next morning, I turned on the TV to check out results of other preseason games. About 10 to 15 minutes into watching the highlights, an update on Hurricane Katrina flashed across the screen. It had been upgraded from Category 1 to Category 3, and its projected landfall was between the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and the mouth of the Louisiana coast.
In other words, right around my backyard.
My girlfriend Pauline was getting up for work when I asked her to call and see what her co-workers had planned to do. A year prior, we prepared for Hurricane Ivan and I got nothing more than a pinecone thrown on our back porch, so our decision was easy: We would wait it out like we did in 2004, but we would be prepared to make a late move if necessary.
Around 2 p.m., we went shopping for supplies. When we got back home, we kept the TV on for updates on Katrina while we cleared the porch, put up boards, taped windows and pushed everything inside toward the middle of the rooms. I also withdrew $250 from the bank in case there was a power outage and all the ATMs went down. Little did I know that the money would have to last until nearly the start of October – six weeks later.
Pauline, who felt sick most of the day, nodded off early Saturday evening. I went into my office and worked on some postgame reports and other items for the following week. My scouting business had steadily increased over the past eight to 10 months and was really coming around. I had increased my revenue by about $1,000 per month over a four-to-five month stretch heading into September, and we were contemplating moving later in the fall. I was about two months away from trading both of our used cars for newer ones, although I was really holding on tight to my Firebird.
At 4:15 a.m. the following morning, the dog woke me up.
I didn’t go back to sleep until sometime later in the year.
On the TV – shortly before 5 a.m. – a reporter dressed like no one I had ever seen on the local news looked as if he had not slept all night. "Folks this storm has nearly doubled in strength," the reporter said. "It is a Category 5, and its landfall will be directly headed at us … If you can hear this broadcast, you will need to evacuate."
My head dropped as I looked around at all of our possessions: my office, her school books, the life we had created the past few years. There was no way to pack all of it.
As Pauline nervously called her family, we realized there was room for just five to six giant rubber tubs in the car, along with the dog and cat. The bigger question was, "Where would we go?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At 2 p.m. on Sunday, we followed Pauline's uncle Vic up the coastline to the town of Dupont, La. Her relatives opened their door to us, and we watched the news in the morning. As the pictures came in, the more I knew what the results would be. The word "loss" would never have the same meaning again.
By Wednesday, we were standing in line after line, saying and writing the same things. We had little or no signal for our cell phones, and we couldn't use ATM or credit cards because the bank computers were down. At nighttime, when I ran out of beers to drink, the sobering thoughts that we were homeless and going to be starting from scratch brought me right back to reality. Well, that and the fact that we were out in the middle of nowhere.
After learning that our home had sustained major wind damage (and would later suffer massive mildew corrosion by the rain and floodwaters), we thought our best option for indefinite shelter would be with family friends of Pauline's outside of Atlanta. But an old friend of mine, Lance Botkin, who I had helped nearly a decade earlier when he was trying out for pro football teams, called from the Houston area. He said he had been trying to contact me since the hurricane and wanted to know what he could do.
Even though he had a wife and three kids and was coaching high school football, Botkin offered to drop everything the next day and come down to Louisiana and pick us up. His wife Lori is a teacher – which is what my girlfriend was going to school for – so it took all of an hour to agree that Houston sounded like a better place to be. True to his word, Lance arrived the following evening. We packed all of our gear and headed off to Texas.
Lance and his family let us use anything we needed, even his truck when we had to visit FEMA or other local area offices to try and get our new life started. However, those plans were short-lived as less than two weeks after arriving in Houston we had to re-evacuate due to the threat of Hurricane Rita. Once again, the Botkins came though and allowed us to tail along to a family residence about halfway between Houston and San Antonio.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When my girlfriend went back to New Orleans to help her family, I had to handle things by myself for a couple of months. That included waiting around for a FEMA representative to show up to classify our property so that we could receive our compensation. During that time, I took a long look at where I was and what was available to me. That led me to taking a job at the same high school where Lance coached football in Pearland, Texas.
Each morning, I walked about two miles to Sam Rayburn High School, where my initial position was working with Special Education classes under another very good person, Jim Young. Teaching at the school allowed me the chance to go out on Fridays and Saturdays and scout the football team's future opponents. It wasn't the NFL, but for those six weeks, it was the only thing that helped me keep my sanity.
I spent Thanksgiving alone in Texas. The only people I really met over that period were a manager from Wal-Mart (who gave me a big-screen television for the same price as the 27-inch set that was on sale) and Mr. Tom. He was my new downstairs neighbor who would ask from time to time how life was going.
It wasn't going well. I wasn't receiving the aid that FEMA promised because of a paperwork glitch or error in our account. All of my hard work scouting the NFL was seemingly being wasted, and my dreams were slipping away each day. My relationship with Pauline also took a beating. The constant questions about my girlfriend's absence, along with the daily jokes about Lance being my professional driver, brought my frustration to a boiling point.
I grew angry at myself, at her, at him – at everything. One morning while walking to work, I turned around and went back home. I requested a substitute teacher to replace me that day and I got on the phones.
My time at Sam Rayburn High lasted only four months.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite spending so much time waiting in offices and in lines to fill out FEMA paperwork, I still had enough time to watch DVDs of college prospects that I received and saved from the summer. I knew I had all the information I needed to re-start my scouting business, but I lacked the funds and financial stability. All I wanted was my old home office with the remote that I used to stick on fast-forward while watching games.
One of my first calls was to Jason Cole, one of Yahoo! Sports' national NFL writers who was covering the Miami Dolphins for the Miami Herald at the time. He gave me a few words of encouragement and said he would keep his eye out for any job opportunities. Several of the biggest agents in the business also helped me out when I inquired about everything from office space to short-term loans. None of them ever asked for anything in return. (I would mention them by name, but I know they would be embarrassed.)
When my cell phone finally worked again on a regular basis, I had people like NFL scout Tom Marino, former Washington Redskins vice president Joe Mendes and my best friend in radio, Orlando Alzugaray of WQAM in Miami, all saying Pauline and I could come visit for a few days or weeks if necessary. Those calls made me start to feel better about the future, but we still found ourselves without the short-term aid promised each day. FEMA now needed more pictures and info from us to judge our property loss.
The FEMA issues didn't stop me from getting involved in the college football postseason again. I worked on the selection committee of the East-West Shrine Game, and I was able to help a few pro prospects get into that game, one of them nearly winning Most Valuable Player honors.
My earlier contacts came back to use in late January as I was offered the chance to assist the Raiders at the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis. It was a real blessing to be around both Jon Kingdon and David Turner of the Raiders' scouting staff. I never mentioned it to either of them that week in Indy, but those hours made all my year-long struggles worthwhile because they gave me a glimpse at my future. I realized I could attain one of those scouting positions one day if I kept working at it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We eventually received our response from FEMA. We ended up receiving about 30 cents on the dollar for everything that we lost in New Orleans. However, nothing can replace our personal items.
We still receive monthly informational letters from FEMA, but we have really depended on the people closest to us for support over the past 12 months. Cole proved to be a man of his word, and the non-stop support of others like Kingdon, Turner, Yahoo! Sports' Charles Robinson, agents Brian Mackler and Bruce Tollner, Jacksonville Jaguars scout Tim Mingey and hundreds of others inside and around the NFL business world enabled me to find my way out of some of the darkest days.
One of my first actions was to start paying back the people that helped us during those low times. I hope to even mend the relationships that I abandoned with Lance, my old friends back home and others along the way in order to find myself again. I used to see the calendar come and go each day. Now, I try to make something positive happen for at least one of the activities I am involved in.
Besides writing for Yahoo! Sports, I also take pride in trying to raise funds to help start a high school football program at Faith Christian Academy here in Houston. I have even invested some of my recent earnings in the Bay Area Gamblers (a minor-league football team) with former NFL wide receiver Haywood Jeffries. I'm just to try giving something back to the City of Pearland, Texas, since it was our initial home when we relocated from New Orleans. But most of all, I hope I can become more like the people who helped me out.
A lot of people have tried to give me credit for how hard I fought to keep myself going through all of the trials and tribulations over the past 12 months. The real heroes would be people like Lance Botkin, the staff at Sam Rayburn High, the family and friends that sent money and, most of all, my girlfriend Pauline.
She took a part-time teaching job to give me the opportunity to chase my own private goals, even if it came at the expense of her own needs and desires. We often take the person we see or spend most of our time with every day for granted, and I still do that way too much. But the fact Pauline is still there when I wake up each morning means that I have another day to improve our lives.
I could look back and list for days all of the items (even that old white Firebird) that I lost. Instead, I would rather focus on the things I found, like my little friend Anna "Banana" Haywood and my boys in Pearland. I also discovered the following fact about life: If you pay attention long enough, it will teach you some truly valuable lessons.
By John Murphy
Yahoo! Sports
On Friday, Aug. 26, 2005 around 6:45 p.m., I walked to my seat in the press box of the New Orleans Superdome to prepare another preseason scouting report of the New Orleans Saints for the Oakland Raiders. After seven years of traveling, watching games on my own and emailing thousands of reports around the NFL, I was finally sitting in the chair I wanted to be in.
The next morning, I turned on the TV to check out results of other preseason games. About 10 to 15 minutes into watching the highlights, an update on Hurricane Katrina flashed across the screen. It had been upgraded from Category 1 to Category 3, and its projected landfall was between the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and the mouth of the Louisiana coast.
In other words, right around my backyard.
My girlfriend Pauline was getting up for work when I asked her to call and see what her co-workers had planned to do. A year prior, we prepared for Hurricane Ivan and I got nothing more than a pinecone thrown on our back porch, so our decision was easy: We would wait it out like we did in 2004, but we would be prepared to make a late move if necessary.
Around 2 p.m., we went shopping for supplies. When we got back home, we kept the TV on for updates on Katrina while we cleared the porch, put up boards, taped windows and pushed everything inside toward the middle of the rooms. I also withdrew $250 from the bank in case there was a power outage and all the ATMs went down. Little did I know that the money would have to last until nearly the start of October – six weeks later.
Pauline, who felt sick most of the day, nodded off early Saturday evening. I went into my office and worked on some postgame reports and other items for the following week. My scouting business had steadily increased over the past eight to 10 months and was really coming around. I had increased my revenue by about $1,000 per month over a four-to-five month stretch heading into September, and we were contemplating moving later in the fall. I was about two months away from trading both of our used cars for newer ones, although I was really holding on tight to my Firebird.
At 4:15 a.m. the following morning, the dog woke me up.
I didn’t go back to sleep until sometime later in the year.
On the TV – shortly before 5 a.m. – a reporter dressed like no one I had ever seen on the local news looked as if he had not slept all night. "Folks this storm has nearly doubled in strength," the reporter said. "It is a Category 5, and its landfall will be directly headed at us … If you can hear this broadcast, you will need to evacuate."
My head dropped as I looked around at all of our possessions: my office, her school books, the life we had created the past few years. There was no way to pack all of it.
As Pauline nervously called her family, we realized there was room for just five to six giant rubber tubs in the car, along with the dog and cat. The bigger question was, "Where would we go?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At 2 p.m. on Sunday, we followed Pauline's uncle Vic up the coastline to the town of Dupont, La. Her relatives opened their door to us, and we watched the news in the morning. As the pictures came in, the more I knew what the results would be. The word "loss" would never have the same meaning again.
By Wednesday, we were standing in line after line, saying and writing the same things. We had little or no signal for our cell phones, and we couldn't use ATM or credit cards because the bank computers were down. At nighttime, when I ran out of beers to drink, the sobering thoughts that we were homeless and going to be starting from scratch brought me right back to reality. Well, that and the fact that we were out in the middle of nowhere.
After learning that our home had sustained major wind damage (and would later suffer massive mildew corrosion by the rain and floodwaters), we thought our best option for indefinite shelter would be with family friends of Pauline's outside of Atlanta. But an old friend of mine, Lance Botkin, who I had helped nearly a decade earlier when he was trying out for pro football teams, called from the Houston area. He said he had been trying to contact me since the hurricane and wanted to know what he could do.
Even though he had a wife and three kids and was coaching high school football, Botkin offered to drop everything the next day and come down to Louisiana and pick us up. His wife Lori is a teacher – which is what my girlfriend was going to school for – so it took all of an hour to agree that Houston sounded like a better place to be. True to his word, Lance arrived the following evening. We packed all of our gear and headed off to Texas.
Lance and his family let us use anything we needed, even his truck when we had to visit FEMA or other local area offices to try and get our new life started. However, those plans were short-lived as less than two weeks after arriving in Houston we had to re-evacuate due to the threat of Hurricane Rita. Once again, the Botkins came though and allowed us to tail along to a family residence about halfway between Houston and San Antonio.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When my girlfriend went back to New Orleans to help her family, I had to handle things by myself for a couple of months. That included waiting around for a FEMA representative to show up to classify our property so that we could receive our compensation. During that time, I took a long look at where I was and what was available to me. That led me to taking a job at the same high school where Lance coached football in Pearland, Texas.
Each morning, I walked about two miles to Sam Rayburn High School, where my initial position was working with Special Education classes under another very good person, Jim Young. Teaching at the school allowed me the chance to go out on Fridays and Saturdays and scout the football team's future opponents. It wasn't the NFL, but for those six weeks, it was the only thing that helped me keep my sanity.
I spent Thanksgiving alone in Texas. The only people I really met over that period were a manager from Wal-Mart (who gave me a big-screen television for the same price as the 27-inch set that was on sale) and Mr. Tom. He was my new downstairs neighbor who would ask from time to time how life was going.
It wasn't going well. I wasn't receiving the aid that FEMA promised because of a paperwork glitch or error in our account. All of my hard work scouting the NFL was seemingly being wasted, and my dreams were slipping away each day. My relationship with Pauline also took a beating. The constant questions about my girlfriend's absence, along with the daily jokes about Lance being my professional driver, brought my frustration to a boiling point.
I grew angry at myself, at her, at him – at everything. One morning while walking to work, I turned around and went back home. I requested a substitute teacher to replace me that day and I got on the phones.
My time at Sam Rayburn High lasted only four months.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Despite spending so much time waiting in offices and in lines to fill out FEMA paperwork, I still had enough time to watch DVDs of college prospects that I received and saved from the summer. I knew I had all the information I needed to re-start my scouting business, but I lacked the funds and financial stability. All I wanted was my old home office with the remote that I used to stick on fast-forward while watching games.
One of my first calls was to Jason Cole, one of Yahoo! Sports' national NFL writers who was covering the Miami Dolphins for the Miami Herald at the time. He gave me a few words of encouragement and said he would keep his eye out for any job opportunities. Several of the biggest agents in the business also helped me out when I inquired about everything from office space to short-term loans. None of them ever asked for anything in return. (I would mention them by name, but I know they would be embarrassed.)
When my cell phone finally worked again on a regular basis, I had people like NFL scout Tom Marino, former Washington Redskins vice president Joe Mendes and my best friend in radio, Orlando Alzugaray of WQAM in Miami, all saying Pauline and I could come visit for a few days or weeks if necessary. Those calls made me start to feel better about the future, but we still found ourselves without the short-term aid promised each day. FEMA now needed more pictures and info from us to judge our property loss.
The FEMA issues didn't stop me from getting involved in the college football postseason again. I worked on the selection committee of the East-West Shrine Game, and I was able to help a few pro prospects get into that game, one of them nearly winning Most Valuable Player honors.
My earlier contacts came back to use in late January as I was offered the chance to assist the Raiders at the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis. It was a real blessing to be around both Jon Kingdon and David Turner of the Raiders' scouting staff. I never mentioned it to either of them that week in Indy, but those hours made all my year-long struggles worthwhile because they gave me a glimpse at my future. I realized I could attain one of those scouting positions one day if I kept working at it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We eventually received our response from FEMA. We ended up receiving about 30 cents on the dollar for everything that we lost in New Orleans. However, nothing can replace our personal items.
We still receive monthly informational letters from FEMA, but we have really depended on the people closest to us for support over the past 12 months. Cole proved to be a man of his word, and the non-stop support of others like Kingdon, Turner, Yahoo! Sports' Charles Robinson, agents Brian Mackler and Bruce Tollner, Jacksonville Jaguars scout Tim Mingey and hundreds of others inside and around the NFL business world enabled me to find my way out of some of the darkest days.
One of my first actions was to start paying back the people that helped us during those low times. I hope to even mend the relationships that I abandoned with Lance, my old friends back home and others along the way in order to find myself again. I used to see the calendar come and go each day. Now, I try to make something positive happen for at least one of the activities I am involved in.
Besides writing for Yahoo! Sports, I also take pride in trying to raise funds to help start a high school football program at Faith Christian Academy here in Houston. I have even invested some of my recent earnings in the Bay Area Gamblers (a minor-league football team) with former NFL wide receiver Haywood Jeffries. I'm just to try giving something back to the City of Pearland, Texas, since it was our initial home when we relocated from New Orleans. But most of all, I hope I can become more like the people who helped me out.
A lot of people have tried to give me credit for how hard I fought to keep myself going through all of the trials and tribulations over the past 12 months. The real heroes would be people like Lance Botkin, the staff at Sam Rayburn High, the family and friends that sent money and, most of all, my girlfriend Pauline.
She took a part-time teaching job to give me the opportunity to chase my own private goals, even if it came at the expense of her own needs and desires. We often take the person we see or spend most of our time with every day for granted, and I still do that way too much. But the fact Pauline is still there when I wake up each morning means that I have another day to improve our lives.
I could look back and list for days all of the items (even that old white Firebird) that I lost. Instead, I would rather focus on the things I found, like my little friend Anna "Banana" Haywood and my boys in Pearland. I also discovered the following fact about life: If you pay attention long enough, it will teach you some truly valuable lessons.
