Pro. Jake Delhomme

[Turbine]

I was hoping they would put Charles Tillman "Peanut" up there as well.

He was so close to being NFL rookie of the year it isn't even funny. In his own right he had just as good a year as the other two famous UL alums.

Besides, he is in town right now, congrats on a GREAT season Peanut.

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CHARLOTTE -- Carolina Cobras defensive specialist Damon Mason figures that if Jake Delhomme could lead Southwestern Louisiana to a win at Texas A&M, it shouldn't be that difficult to lead the Carolina Panthers past the New England Patriots just down the road in Houston.

"If you give him a chance to be behind a good line with some good receivers, as people are in the NFL, he can do some wonders," said Mason, who played alongside Delhomme for the school that become known as Louisiana in 2000. "So I'm not surprised at what he's done with the Panthers. And I think he can win in the Super Bowl, too."

Mason and Delhomme played alongside one another for three seasons, helping the Ragin' Cajuns win that 1996 game at Texas A&M while each set all sorts of school records for defensive and offensive excellence, respectively.

"We did pretty good," Mason said. "I mean, most people would consider us one of those sacrificial lamb schools. We played all sort of big schools, but we did beat some of them, like Texas A&M."

Mason considers Delhomme's performance at Texas A&M to be his best, especially considering a slow start and the stiff competion of a Big 12 Conference opponent.

"He probably wouldn't like for me to say this, but on the first play of the game he had a pass interception and they ran it back for a touchdown," Mason said. "But, like Panthers fans have seen, Jake doesn't get rattled or bothered very easily. And then we came back and he orchestrated a bunch of drives for us to win the game."

Mason and Delhomme share another bond: Both were honored -- in the same ceremony -- by having their jersies retired.

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Richard Walker
Freedom News Service

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Brian Mitchell got a Super Bowl ring in his second year in the NFL with the Washington Redskins, and now he’s the most prolific kick returner in league history.

It’s taken Jake Delhomme longer to get his chance on football’s biggest stage, but he’s one week away from taking the Carolina Panthers onto the field in Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston.

If Mitchell gets a chance to offer a word of advice to his fellow UL Lafayette record-holder, his message would be a simple one.

“Jake needs to treat it like just another game,” Mitchell said. “It’s the biggest game of your life, but you can’t treat it that way.

“(Coach) John Fox has the right idea. He told the Panthers to just treat it like another road game.”

Amazingly, that is the feeling you get when you see Delhomme at quarterback for Carolina, despite the fact that he had just two starts in his career before landing with the Panthers this year.

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Bruce Brown
bbrown@theadvertiser.com

[1stTake]

I'm moving to Breaux Bridge

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Breaux Bridge alive with support for native son

BREAUX BRIDGE (AP) — At the edge of a park where Jake Delhomme played peewee football, there’s a cypress sculpture of a crawfish about the size of a refrigerator.

There’s no monument to the Carolina Panthers’ starting quarterback, but that could change soon.

Already, a local bar in this Cajun town of 7,500 has named a hamburger steak special for him. A musician is working on a song in his honor. A bank is putting up a Delhomme billboard. The marquee outside a restaurant reads: “Congratulations Jake.”

And the conversation in Breaux Bridge, where drivers tap their car horns whenever they spot friends, has a familiar theme lately: the hometown kid’s astonishing ride to the Super Bowl.

Delhomme went all the way to NFL Europe before landing a spot with the New Orleans Saints. The Saints even cut him twice before making him a backup to Aaron Brooks in 2001. Delhomme won his only start of 2002, then signed as a free agent with Carolina.

On opening day this season, Delhomme came off the bench to rally the Panthers to a victory. Carolina continued to win, and the excitement in Breaux Bridge reached a crescendo when the Panthers defeated the Philadelphia Eagles for the NFC title.

Next up is next Sunday’s Super Bowl in Houston against the New England Patriots.

Delhomme, who had an avid following in college at Louisiana, was the talk of his town when he made the Saints’ practice squad six years ago. Now that he’s the starter of a Super Bowl team, Breaux Bridge is in a state of Delhomme delirium.

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[NewsCopy]

Delhomme is one of NFL afterthoughts who have made it to title game

Enter onto the greatest stage in sports, ta-da! Jake Delhomme!

Uh, mute that trumpet call. Soft sounds that match Delhomme's Cajun twang are more fitting here. Think of a lazy day on the bayou and crawfish and a small, unhurried community named Breaux Bridge, La., and you've got the Carolina Panthers quarterback, the most appealing of figures.

Witness: He comes to a podium in an anteroom of a Philadelphia hotel on the Friday before the NFC Championship Game. "Jake Delhomme," he says, as if an introduction were necessary.

How humble was that? With his humility, Delhomme (pronounced Del-OM) has an engaging presence that is certain to make him a cynosure during the week preceding his team's date against the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVIII. It could even make him the one thing he seems least inclined to become, a star, if not on the field, then off it, as a personality.

The Super Bowl can do that. Play it and they'll know you everywhere, including in Peoria. If you're a hit with the media, you become an instant celebrity. One thinks of Cris Collinsworth of the Cincinnati Bengals. A three-time Pro Bowl receiver, he had an interview room rocking with laughter with his tales before XVI. Collinsworth now is a network television analyst.

One further thinks of Hollywood Henderson of the Dallas Cowboys contending before X that Terry Bradshaw couldn't spell "cat" if you spotted him the "c" and the "a." Of Jim McMahon of the Chicago Bears showing up before XX with his personal acupuncturist. And there was the most memorable of pre-Super Bowl pronouncements – Joe Namath guaranteeing that the New York Jets would upset the then-Baltimore Colts in III, which they did.

Delhomme, meantime, is every touching story in sports wrapped up in a 30-year-old Louisianan who was not drafted when he came out of Louisiana/Lafayette (formerly Southwestern Louisiana) and wasn't even a starter in NFL Europe. But he has persevered and in him the Panthers this season saw some things. Maybe they saw how likable he is, and how committed.

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By Jerry Magee
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

[NewsCopy]

BREAUX BRIDGE -- In this quintessential Louisiana town, where the street names are bigger on the signs in French than they are in English, family comes first and allegiances run deep.
This is a place where they love their Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns, revel in the successes of the LSU Tigers (two Breaux Bridge natives played this season on LSU's national championship team) and still pull for the New Orleans Saints -- though the club is no longer home to the town's favorite son.

"We watch the Saints," said Earl "Boogie" Hebert, owner of the Corner Bar Restaurant on Grand Pont Avenue. "I still love the Saints. But we turn the volume down low and we've got Carolina on the radio."

After Breaux Bridge native Jake Delhomme left the Saints and joined the Carolina Panthers as an unrestricted free agent quarterback last year, a Lafayette station began carrying the Panthers' radio network.

The last month or so, it's gotten a lot easier to see and hear what Delhomme and the Panthers are doing. That's because they've won three straight playoff games, and will play next Sunday in Houston in Super Bowl XXXVIII against the New England Patriots.

It's hard to imagine a bigger bastion of Panthers pride between Charlotte, N.C., and Houston than Breaux Bridge (population 7,163).

A billboard is going up this week on Interstate-10 at the Breaux Bridge exit. It will bear a photo of Delhomme in action with the Panthers and the words "Wow! What a season!" The billboard was going to read "Kee-yaw!" a close approximation of a Cajun yell, but that was vetoed.

In town, Panthers colors (blue, black and silver) have sprouted on storefronts, and words of encouragement for Delhomme cover homemade signs.

"It's like that with everybody," said Breaux Bridge mayor Jack Delhomme, Jake's cousin. "Jake is theirs. Jake is a part of their lives."

In a town where football and food vie for supremacy -- Breaux Bridge bills itself as the Crawfish Capital of the World -- Hebert's Corner Bar pays Delhomme the ultimate homage with a dish called The Jake. It's a hamburger steak covered with cheese, smothered onions, jalapeño peppers ... and a strip of bacon.

The dish is actually a favorite of Jake's older brother Jeff, a former football player at McNeese State, but Hebert decided to name it for the more famous Delhomme.

"I said, 'Jeff I'm gonna name it 'The Jake', I don't want to name it 'The McNeese','" Hebert said.

Perhaps the reason Breaux Bridge feels so close to Jake Delhomme is that he is still such a fixture there. You can sometimes spot him at the Corner Bar, picking up a sack of hamburgers to take back to the men working at the stables where Jake and his father raise racehorses.

Delhomme's story is that of a small-town boy made good. It would seem stereotypically trite if it weren't true.

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By SCOTT RABALAIS
srabalais@theadvocate.com
Advocate sportswriter

[NewsCopy]

Two summers ago, Jake Delhomme and his father spent a stretch of a bayou summer in Breaux Bridge, La., pulling bricks off a small, old house. The heat soared into the 90's, the humidity as thick and wet as the bayou itself. Jake was moving his grandparents' house a quarter-mile down the road, so he and his wife, Keri, could refurbish it and live in it. People zipping by on the two-lane highway stared in disbelief. An N.F.L. quarterback and his father, sweating through their clothes, tore down the bricks by hand.

"It's funny," Delhomme said. "You get started doing it, and the next thing you know you've got a few friends see you and say, `I'll come help you.' And they do it. That's what I mean by a way of life.

That's how people are."

Jake Delhomme laughed at the memory. He was sitting a long way from that house — on some steps outside the Carolina Panthers' locker room in Charlotte, N.C., wolfing down a few slices of pizza, a quick break from the whirlwind that has made him the Panthers' improbable Super Bowl quarterback.

His face, still wide-eyed and boyish at 29, will be beamed around the world this week, as the world's media line up to hear his story in a Cajun accent. They will latch onto the underdog's tale, the guy from nowhere who made it big, built his career the way he moved that house, by hand, brick by brick.

Delhomme has never left Breaux Bridge, a place so special that none of his huge family — none of the 21 Delhomme grandchildren — has moved away. Delhomme moved the house his father had grown up in to a spot right next to his parents, Jerry and Marcia. It is a stone's throw from his brother, Jeff, next to the stables where the family trains thoroughbreds. The extended family can get together for any reason. If someone picks up a couple of sacks of crawfish, a Delhomme reunion is launched.

Jake Delhomme would live nowhere else.

"I think it's a magical place," he said.

The magic that has delivered Delhomme to the top of his sport started in Breaux Bridge, population 7,281 in the 2000 census, a wisp of a town two hours west of New Orleans. The three-block downtown has street signs written in French and English, homage to Cajuns' French-speaking roots.

In this small, quiet place, the ultimate underdog was born. Jake, youngest of the Delhomme grandchildren, always chased the older ones around. He would do anything to stay in their games. The challenges did not look so big when the alternative was being the only one left out.

He had enthusiasm and a belief that he could do anything, and people could not help but get swept up in it.
"I can remember Jake on the back of the sofa with a jockey helmet and a whip, pretending he was a jockey," Jerry said. "Or he'd be running around competing with Jeff in something."

The world saw Delhomme only after he left home. He had played college football a few miles away, at the university now called Louisiana, and he stuck for six seasons with the Saints, two hours down I-10. He could have stayed there, as the backup everyone loved, but the Saints kept bouncing him around, from the practice squad to the roster with two stops in N.F.L. Europe. He believed he could start, but the Saints never did.

With Delhomme a free agent last off-season, the Carolina Panthers saw something in him. They offered him a contract and told him he could compete for the starting job. He felt a few pangs, but he signed.
He broke the news to his hometown last spring at a Breaux Bridge Chamber of Commerce meeting, which usually draws about 50 people but swelled to 400 to hear him. He said he hoped everyone could support him. There was no question everyone would.

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New York Times
By LYNN ZINSER

[Turbine]

Originally posted by RaginCajun08
On the way home last night I saw "Go Jake" on the sign at the Broken Spoke on the Breaux Bridge Highway.

Is this the one? It is in front of Daniel Green's tree service on the Breaux bridge hiway.

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BREAUX BRIDGE, La. -- When folks here give directions, they prefer to tell you how many stoplights to count, as opposed to using street names. And once you cross into town over the Bridge of 1950, it doesn't take long to learn where Jake Delhomme, the Carolina Panthers' quarterback, resides.

Want to find Jake's mother, Marcia, at work? They'll tell you to keep going straight until you see the "green building" belonging to the St. Martin School Board.

Need the mayor, Jake's cousin, Jack Dale Delhomme? They'll tell you his office is in the first building after the second stoplight on your drive into town. Leaving the mayor's office in search of Jake's home? Exit left and keep going until you reach the second stoplight. The house is about three miles after you turn left at that light, folks promise.

Even people who aren't related to Delhomme claim the Panthers quarterback as part of their families this week. Heading into Super Bowl XXXVIII against the Patriots, he belongs to all 7,600 residents of Breaux Bridge.

Actually, most of St. Martin Parish is laying claim to Delhomme. A "Paint the Parish Panther Style" contest will be held Friday for the parish's 48,583 residents.

There also is a strong legion of supporters a few miles to the west in Lafayette, where Delhomme attended Teurlings Catholic High School and the University of Louisiana.

"It makes me feel good to see the reaction," said Delhomme's father, Jerry. "True blue is what we call it. He's just good people. Jake never strayed far from the nest. The name stayed local except for two stints he did in (NFL) Europe.

"Jake did all of his playing here or in Lafayette at Teurlings. And the reason he went there was because it was a parochial school. They know what kind of personality he is."

He is one of them.

"Coming from a small town, we say, `That could be us,' " Breaux Bridge's mayor said. "It's a great ride. It's something you get once in a lifetime."

The stores around downtown are decorated with Carolina blue, and "Go, Jake" signs are everywhere.

"It's wonderful," said Jake's maternal grandmother, Marcelle Bienvenu, who lives in nearby St. Martinville. "I went to Breaux Bridge the other day, and everybody is so excited. They even have a sandwich named after him: `The Jake Hamburger.' I'm really and truly proud. He was born and raised in Breaux Bridge, and the Delhomme family is an old family there.

"There's not a day goes by that somebody doesn't call to tell me how proud they are of Jake. As a matter of fact, I can't get anything done because I spend so much time with people calling me about Jake, especially after a game on Sunday."


The Crawfish Capital, as Breaux Bridge has billed itself since its first Crawfish Festival was held in May 1960, has had much to celebrate in sports lately. Three players from here were on the LSU football team that won a share of the national championship in the Sugar Bowl. Texans running back Domanick Davis, who earned consideration for NFL Rookie of the Year this season, also is from here.

The residents of Breaux Bridge followed the Texans and Panthers closely this past season, but their attention is now placed squarely on Delhomme.

"So far it's great," Davis' 24-year-old cousin, Marlon Alexander, said as Snoop Dogg played in the background while Alexander detailed a car at Spanky's Detailing and Cleaning. "I've been here all my life, so to me it's off the chain to see our guy in the Super Bowl."

Super Bowl XXXVIII is an opportunity for the folks of Breaux Bridge to support and share in the success of one of their own. The community hasn't been so energized for an event since Breaux Bridge's Ali Landry won the Miss USA pageant in 1996.

Yet there is a clear sense that the admiration is not as much about celebrity as it is about familial bonds. Legitimate stars have visited the town over the years for the Crawfish Festival. Dizzy Gillespie, Robert Duvall, Oliver Stone, Huey Lewis and Dennis Quaid are only a few of the celebrities who have eaten at Mulate's, the town's popular Cajun restaurant.

"Everybody here is very excited," said Sheila Lasseigne, a waitress at Mulate's for the last 16 years. "I'm sure there will be a lot of house parties for the game, but not too many people can afford the tickets."

Breaux Bridge's love affair with Delhomme is definitely enriched by his refusal to move away or claim another city.

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By JOSE DE JESUS ORTIZ
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle