April 22, 2001 — Paul Newberry looked confused.
The Associated Press sports writer walked into the media area at the Atlanta Falcons complex in Flowery Branch late Saturday morning and his eyes opened wide.
The room was packed. And that’s almost never the case. Not for this forlorn franchise.
“I’m not used to having a policeman directing traffic outside the Falcons complex,” Newberry said after he struggled to find a spot to plug in his laptop computer. “Usually, it would be a handful of TV and just a couple of reporters. Basically, we’d sit around and be lonely most of the day.”
But all that was before the 2001 NFL Draft, before Michael Vick — that pigskin panacea — was headed to town.
It was late Friday afternoon when news of Atlanta’s stunning deal for the draft’s No. 1 selection — the Vick pick — began to swirl across the country. Suddenly Flowery Branch became sports central.
“I had the weekend off until yesterday,” said ESPN on-air personality Scott Walker, whose last-minute flight from Chicago landed in Atlanta at 11:30 Friday night. “We completely changed the way we were going to cover the top pick.”
ESPN wasn’t even planning on having a reporter in Flowery Branch before the Falcons moved from No. 5 to No. 1 on the draft board. But when they did, Walker had to trade in his weekend golf plans for a 12-hour work day.
He didn’t seem to mind.
“This is the biggest story of the day and to be on the biggest story of the day gets your blood pumping, no question about it,” Walker said. “This is what we live for. The players live for being the number one pick. We live for covering it.”
The media room at the new Falcons complex is sterile and small — much too small, it seemed, to hold the biggest sports story of the day. On Saturday as the draft’s noon start time approached, it was crowded yet oddly quiet in there.
These are minutes normally filled with speculation. But there was no doubt who the Falcons would be picking. Little doubt when it would be happening, either.
“So much of what we were planning on talking about today was what will the Falcons do on the fifth pick,” said John Kincade, talk show host on 680-AM “The Fan.” “When you’re preparing for something like that and you’re doing live radio, you’ve got to be prepared for at least four or five potential dominoes to fall. When the Falcons have the first pick it makes the day very easy. It’s all talking about what we know they’re going to do.”
So while Kincade and his crew broadcast live outside, the rest of us sat and waited … and wondered when the catered food would arrive. Journalists love to eat. We’re not picky, either. Just as long as it’s free.
We ate fried chicken and watched ESPN’s coverage as if we were in our living rooms. At 12:13 p.m., we watched NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue walk to the podium and announce that the Falcons were on the clock. At 12:14 p.m. we watched him return to announce that Falcons had selected Vick.
What a surprise. No oohs. No ahhs. Just more waiting in the media room.
We watched Vick talk to ESPN’s Chris Fowler and say all the right things, then we waited for him to say all of the right things to us. Vick spoke to us by speaker phone as soon as he was off camera.
This made me chuckle. The phone from which Vick’s voice sounded was attached to a wall in a room that measured 6 feet long and 5 feet wide — maybe. But reporters, 17 of them in fact, squeezed in there to shout questions at this single phone on the wall.
The phone suddenly became quite popular. Microphones were placed before it. Some reporters stood on their tiptoes just to catch a glimpse of it.
The phone kept answering questions, even after Falcons head coach Dan Reeves took the podium in the other room. By this time, Falcons fans had wandered over to where we were. Some of them peered inside the media room window.
Over in the team’s indoor practice facility, a carnival atmosphere prevailed. There was a private draft party for Falcons season ticket holders, and a reported 7,000 of them showed up. Before the Vick pick, only 1,000 guests were confirmed.
“It’s unbelievable, because they did the right thing,” said Melvin Clemons, a Falcons fan from DeKalb County on hand for the festivities. “The Falcons don’t normally do the right thing. This is exactly what they needed. It gives new life to the franchise.”
That optimism carried over into the media room and upstairs in the “war room,” where the Falcons scouts and front office personnel enjoyed their day in the sun.
I caught up with Falcons draft guru Ron Hill, vice president of football operations, more than an hour after Tagliabue announced the pick that so many believe could be Atlanta’s elixir. The media room wasn’t quite as crowded as before. A few stragglers sat at their cubicles and typed away.
Hill, fresh from the war room, appeared relaxed.
“We’re just watching ESPN up there right now,” he said. “I slept better last night than I have in 23 years of these things. We had the first pick and we knew exactly where we were going with it.
“But we’ve still got a lot of things we need to do. We’re going to be very busy up there. We’ve got a pick coming up here in the next two or three hours.”
And with that second pick, the Falcons selected a guy named Alge Crumpler. The media room was nearly empty by then. And the fried chicken was all gone.