re: Two LSU Tigers and two Saints on new NFL Hall of Fame ballot.....

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was not just on the field that Atkins cut a giant swath. He rumbled around training camps--armed and accompanied by his pit bull Rebel--through bars, and over anyone who got in his way.

Atkins would arrive at training camp each summer packing two .44-caliber Magnums, several derringers and a shotgun. Sometimes, when the Saints trained in San Diego, he fired his shotgun at destroyers cruising off the coast, claiming that coach George Allen was spying on the team from the ships.

He once silenced some noisy rookies in the room above him by firing a gun into the overhang outside their window.

"I needed my sleep," Atkins said. "I was old. I came in at curfew and needed to rest up. They wanted to keep that music playing so I just quieted them down."

Atkins was no fan of rock 'n' roll. His first day in the Saints locker room, he turned off a player's radio that was tuned to a top 40 station.

"He said, 'We're going to listen to American music here because we're all Americans,"' Ariail remembered. "Then he put on a Johnny Cash song and everybody listened to country and western the rest of the years. There weren't any complaints."


Rebel was Atkins' constant companion, jogging with him and sleeping in his locker during practice. He even went with Atkins to a little French Quarter bar.

"Doug would sit on one stool and Rebel would sit on another and they would get drunk together," Ariail said.

Even after Atkins decided he was tired of looking at his picture on the wall of the bar and shot it down, he and Rebel were welcome.

"He liked to drink, but I never saw it bother him," said Joe Impastato, who was his regular waiter at a French Quarter restaurant where Atkins dined after Saints games. "I'd ice down a quart of gin for his martinis and about a half-dozen bottles of beer, then he'd have a few Grand Marniers and walk out of there perfectly straight.""

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