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Ex-Patriot Gay: 'That ring? That's special.'

Print | Comments () Posted by Albert Breer February 4, 2010 11:40 AM

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Before the NFC title game, we told you the story that Saints corner Randall Gay decided to help his teammates visualize a championship by bringing the ring he won with New England out for display.

This week, he has a different story to tell. After winning a national title as a senior at LSU, and a Super Bowl as a New England rookie, Gay became awfully spoiled. So Super Bowl XLII -- the Patriots loss to the Giants -- taught him a valuable lesson that he felt his teammates needed to hear.

"You get there you’re rookie year and you win a Super Bowl, the year after you won a national championship, you’re like, ‘Man, this football thing is easy. I’m gonna win all the time,’" Gay said. "Then we hit a little drought, then we make it there and lose, so it’s like, ‘Man, I don’t ever want this feeling again.’

"That losing feeling was terrible, makes you sick to your stomach. That’s what I’m trying to preach to these guys, you don’t want to lose this game, because that felt like it was a wasted season. 18-0 meant nothing. What did I get for going 18-0? A t-shirt? That doesn’t mean anything. But that ring? That’s something special."

As for showing the team the ring, Gay's the only player in New Orleans to have played in and won a Super Bowl (Jeremy Shockey has a ring, but didn't play in the game), and he thought the stakes would be raised by the gesture.

"Most of the team hadn’t played in one, I said, ‘Man, most of y’all haven’t played in this game? I’m gonna bring the ring,’” Gay said. "So I brought the ring to show them, ‘Look, in order to get one of these, we have to win this game today.’ And once they saw it, it was like everybody was amazed. A lot of the guys really took it in, and said, ‘Hey, we are really close to getting one of these, we gotta win this game so we have the opportunity to win one.’"

A lot of people thought that Gay lost any chance at adding to the collection when he joined the star-crossed Saints franchise. And that included his friends and family from Baton Rouge.

"When I left New England, it was one of those things where I didn’t really want to leave," Gay said. "There were two teams I wanted to play for, New England or the Saints, because I’m a low-key guy who doesn’t like much change. So when I either wanted to go home or stay where I was. When I told people I was going to visit the Saints, people at home were like, ‘You know you’re leaving a great team to go to the Saints? You’re not going to the playoffs no more.’

"I was like, ‘We’ll see.’"

And so it's more meaningful now that the Louisiana kid who used to love Dalton Hilliard and Craig "Ironhead" Heyward is part of this. He appreciate what the Saints' success has meant to the region, after seeing the way the team has connected to its fan base.

"When I was in New England, they were used to winning, it was a little more of a spoiled-type of thing," Gay said. "My last year there we got booed at halftime a couple times because we didn’t score enough points. In New Orleans, if we didn’t play well in the first half, it was more walking off the field getting cheered, because they were proud and we were still trying.

"It feels like now I’ve got a chance to do something to put a smile on people’s faces. Because the city all together hasn’t recovered yet."

He did add to that, "If feels good to say I signed with a team and now we’re in the Super Bowl. New England, they haven’t been there, I miss my guys, though. But it seems like I made a good choice."