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The days of Rita

The one-time Saints heir struggles to build a new life

Photo by: AP IMAGES

Editor’s note: This story is revised from the print edition.

The man is standing inside Galatoire’s, in the French Quarter, when he sees someone he thinks he knows. He stares to the point of rudeness before it hits him. Of course! She’d been on television a million times before the problems started. He’d heard she’d moved back to Texas, or was traveling abroad. But now she’s right beside him in a pretty dress, lips set tight. He can’t help whispering to a companion. “Isn’t that Rita Benson?”

So strange that it has come to this. She was the most visible woman in the city of New Orleans, the public face of the most important institution in town: the only one that united the businessmen and the panhandlers, the Creoles and the Cajuns, the flooded and the dry. Full of life, impulsive, she was a whirlwind heading off in every direction. Somehow, though, she remembered everyone’s name, knew how long they’d been going to games, even where they sat. She was the perfect complement to her grandfather, the New Orleans Saints’ majority owner. Tom Benson might shake your hand, it was said, but he wouldn’t look you in the eye.

In December 2014, Rita Benson LeBlanc was relieved of her role as owner-in-waiting and fired as vice chairman of the Saints in a rancorous family dispute involving Benson, his wife of more than a decade, and LeBlanc, her mother and her brother.

Since then, as a series of legal actions have played out in courts in Louisiana and Texas, she has all but vanished from public sight in New Orleans and the sports business, where she was heralded as a future star. She no longer serves on NFL committees. She doesn’t attend league meetings, though she’s officially still a co-owner of the team. (“No matter what happens in the litigation,” she likes to stress, “I’ll still be a partial owner.”)

Oh, you can find her if you look hard enough. She’s involved in the New Orleans Business Alliance and other civic associations. She participates in charity initiatives like the Ogden Museum for Southern Art and the Komen Race for the Cure.

Occasionally, she’ll go to dinner with a friend, like this wine event at Galatoire’s she’s attending even though she rarely drinks, or a concert in which Bold Square Music — a company she founded — is helping to stage.

Mostly, though, she stays home. The city is small, and her fate has divided it. Everyone is nice enough; “It’s the South,” she says. But she won’t come out unless she has to because she can’t bear to see the ghosts: the street corner where this happened, the courthouse where that happened, the Superdome where everything happened.

She stays busy tending to her various interests and holdings, especially the family car dealerships in Texas that she and her mother and brother control, and serving on various boards. She regularly travels to conferences, few of which have anything to do with sports. Her days are filled, but not her soul.

“I wouldn’t say I’m happy,” she says. “I’m fulfilled. I don’t have a private life. There’s miserable things in the press and miserable things that aren’t being reported. No family should have to go through this.”

THE PAST

When there was something to celebrate at the house in Johnson City, the Texas Hill Country town of some 1,000 inhabitants where Rita grew up, the LeBlancs threw a party. Even at 6 and 7, she’d sit with the adults and listen while they talked about money. “My mom ran our ranch,” she says. “So if my grandfather didn’t fund it, stuff didn’t happen. I was viscerally aware of that.”

The house where she lived with her mom and dad and her younger brother, until her parents split, sat on a hill. Getting there was no easy task. “And our parents were too busy to drive us anywhere,” she says. That led to long hours alone. She was popular, but by predilection and circumstance she had few friends. Anyway, she preferred books. “I’m self-actualized,” she says now.

The best times? Those were when her grandfather visited, or when the family traveled to see him in New Orleans. Tom Benson had made his money in car dealerships and banking. Rita was 8 when, in 1985, he bought the Saints. She’d go to a game or two every year, and she’d always see him at Christmas. “Being with him was easy,” she says. “Like peas and carrots. He was just cool. I wanted to be where he was.”

She’d disappear from family gatherings, ducking into a side room. He’d be the one to notice. He’d go check on her, sit beside her, ask what she was reading. “You have your unspoken patterns and habits with families,” she says. “The stuff you just know. It’s intuitive. We had that. A twinkle in each other’s eye.”

But life wasn’t easy. Her mother, Renee — Tom and the late Shirley Benson’s last surviving child — was a hippie who disdained the trappings of affluence. Yet she worried about making ends meet. Alone in the house, she’d lay her concerns on Rita, who was older than her years, an adult waiting to happen. At 13, Rita devoured Lee Iacocca’s autobiography. At 16, she dated an older boy who had an internship at a physical therapy office. She’d visit and end up doing all the work, reorganizing the filing, inputting all the data. “I wasn’t even a candy-striper,” she says.

She competed with her peers for the best grades. Somewhere beyond, she knew, was college. There was talk of Notre Dame, but who wanted to be that cold? She toured both Loyola and Tulane in Louisiana, but they seemed expensive. “I knew what my grandfather had set aside for me,” she says. “I wasn’t going to ask for more.” Besides, where she matriculated would hardly matter. Her future was planned. She and Paw Paw, as she called him, hadn’t discussed it, but they both knew. It was as tangible to her as the books on her shelf.

Every year around April or May, when Rita was in high school and then later after starting at Texas A&M, Renee would get a call from her father and hang up aggrieved. How could he presume to plot out his granddaughter’s summer without consulting her? Rita would laugh because her mother didn’t understand. She’d have proposed the same thing if he hadn’t proposed it first. Peas and carrots. “I didn’t have to have a conversation with him,” she says now. “I just knew one summer I’d be working for the car dealership, and after that would be the Saints. And then another in the league office.”

Once she started working with the team, she appreciated the platform that it provided. She could get so much more done around the city as Rita Benson LeBlanc of the Saints rather than plain old Rita LeBlanc. That became important after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

By then, she’d assumed the role of the face of the team. As always with her grandfather, there was nothing formal, no meeting at which she was anointed the spokesperson. It just made sense. She was so much more gregarious, so much more present in the lives of those who had invested in their football team, emotionally and financially, than Tom Benson could ever be.

Before the battles: The Benson family celebrates with Saints coach Sean Payton after the team’s victory over Indianapolis in Super Bowl XLIV.
Photo by: AP IMAGES

She was the one who assured fans and sponsors that the Saints would be back from San Antonio as soon as the stadium was ready for them. “All I can tell you,” she’d say again and again that spring and summer of 2006, “is that we’ve sold out the season in advance. We have 70,000 fans that plan to be there.” It was a mantra that became self-fulfilling. It isn’t a stretch to say that it saved the team for New Orleans.

Rita enjoyed the challenge of integrating the Saints into the other Benson businesses, and then, after they bought the Hornets (now the Pelicans), integrating them, too. But more than any of that, she liked being with Paw Paw. She reveled in the pride that he took in her. If she expected a lot out of the people who worked for her, well, that came from wanting to live up to that pride.

She had worked her way to a position of influence in the city and the league, made a name for herself while still in her 20s. Yet she’d often wonder where she would be without her grandfather. It wasn’t just his money that had sustained her family, or his status as an owner, or the inheritance that would eventually come her way.

She had no serious romantic interest. She had worked hard, and she’d put in her time at church, but none of it made her success seem any less precarious.

The sense of urgency she felt could make her seem frantic, out of control. She was criticized for berating her assistants, for pushing too hard. She raced around so much she’d be impossible to reach. She would often disdain the very good because it wasn’t quite perfect. In Rita’s life, it was always the fourth quarter, she was down by a field goal, the clock was ticking. “There hasn’t been a moment in my life when I wasn’t worried about losing my grandfather,” she said.

And then she lost him.

THE PRESENT

She bustles into Lilette late for lunch, wearing buds in both ears. “Conference call,” she apologizes. She has come to this elegant little bistro off Napoleon Street from a Catholic retreat that she used to attend with her grandfather. Thinking about that now makes her wistful. “I’d rather talk with him about that than a football game or a basketball game,” she says.

For at least a year after she was relieved of her duties, she was obsessed with getting them back. The Saints were merely a football team, a business like the car dealerships and the office tower. But their black-and-gold uniforms were inexorably intertwined with her grandfather. Recover one, she reasoned, and she’d have the other. So she mobilized to fight. She hired lawyers, one in New Orleans and one in Los Angeles.

Two Christmases on, the fight has taken its toll. “The change in my life has been extremely traumatic,” she reports. “It has been horrific in many ways. Not being able to see my grandfather. Not being able to share Christmas with him for two years now.”

She has headaches. She has trouble sleeping. Her memory is visual, and the scenes unspool in her head like a movie she can’t stop watching. Each time, she feels pain as though it were fresh. “It’s very embarrassing that this is such a public and unpleasant thing,” she says. Not long ago, the priest who had served the Bensons for years passed away. “We couldn’t grieve together,” she says, and starts to cry.

The football team means nothing, she understands now, compared with losing her partner and her mentor.

“There are still things I would have wanted to do,” she says, composed again. “But I can do them for other teams or other companies.”

Her lawyer calls the outcome of the ongoing legal actions a coin flip. This bodes well. She always considered herself lucky, perhaps with celestial help. “I know more priests than the average person,” she says.

But these days, she’s no longer sure what good luck might look like. What does she want, anyway? What constitutes winning? Nothing, really, other than the impossible: for none of this to ever have happened. “I will always love him,” she says of Benson. “It’s about him. My whole life is about him.”

At 39, she doesn’t date. Her close friends are far older than she is. “One of my best friends,” she says, “is 80. I’m used to being around people in their 70s. When I talk about my friends, it’s not my peer group. I know their parents. That’s who I’m close to.” When her grandfather made her an NBA governor, league officials politely inquired whether she’d be comfortable in a room full of gray-haired businessmen. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “That’s what I do all day long.”

“I will always love him,” Rita says of grandfather Tom Benson
Photo by: AP IMAGES
More than any ward or neighborhood, the NFL was her community. She loved being surrounded by wise men, pillars of the league like Wellington Mara and Ralph Wilson. “Malcolm Glazer was so kind to me,” she says. But time has passed, and these men are now gone. And because the NFL has procedures and protocols and each franchise speaks with one voice, she no longer has access to this camaraderie. “Some people want to get into sports because they think it’s glorified or they want their name in the paper,” she says. “But I really like the people that I’ve met in the room.”

It seems improbable to say that an attractive woman in her 30s could be lonely because she has lost access to the septuagenarians she regarded as her peers, but there it is.

Last year was the first football season of her adult life that she didn’t have football. It was liberating, she told herself. One weekend, she flew to Chicago for a conference about teaching veterans to be entrepreneurial. When it ended, two Navy SEALs asked her to tour used bookstores with them. She saw no reason not to. For the first time in her adult life, she had nothing but time.

They were hunting down books in Hyde Park when she recognized one of her favorites on a high shelf. “It was beaming out at me,” she says. “I said, ‘Look! That’s it!’”

By the Pulitzer-winning historian Tom Reiss, the book is called “The Black Count.” It’s about the relationship between Alexandre Dumas, the author of “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers,” and his father, Alex, who was the son of a slave and the inspiration for his son’s tales. “The Black Count” is the story of a son who is devoted to his father almost to the point of worship. It is a narrative with which Rita LeBlanc can plainly identify.

She didn’t ask for help. She never does. She dragged over a stool, pulled down the book, reveled in her prize. “A first edition,” she says with a book lover’s pride. That was a weekend that stood out among the others. Sunday came and went, and it never even occurred to her to check a score.

THE FUTURE

Bad Company is belting out a classic-rock standard when Rita arrives at Champions Square. Wedged between the Mercedes-Benz Superdome and Smoothie King Arena, the land was covered in broken glass after Katrina. The Bensons bought the parcel, which included an office tower and room to stage events like this one, and overhauled it. The concept was to make it a community space, fill it with something 365 days a year.

The stage they installed proved too small for mainstream bands. When she heard that, Rita spent her own money for a new one. Now she’s a partner in a series of concert dates featuring Live Nation acts. The attraction on this night is Joe Walsh, the former Eagles guitarist. Rita sits on a folding chair in a roped-off section near the stage.

Her friends hope that music will be a landing place, somewhere to channel her formidable organizational skills. She likes events with a defined start and finish — like a football season. “If I have a concert, I still sometimes call it day-of-game, at least in my head,” she confides. “That’s my de facto lingo.”

She’s also partial to undertakings of grand scope and ambition. How could she not be after getting through the hurricane and then the Super Bowl? Recently she flew to Nevada and attended a test run of Hyperloop, an Elon Musk project that involves putting people and cargo into pneumatic tubes, like the drive-through window at the bank, and sending them under oceans and across continents. Earlier this month, she was in Culver City, Calif., at the Produced By Conference, watching futurist Ted Schilowitz and NextVR’s DJ Roller talk about virtual reality. What her role might be in such ventures is unclear, but for the daughter of a rancher who has made a career in football, she’s more New Age than anyone might guess. “I’m looking at things that transcend sports,” she says now. “Life as a story is not a start and end. We all have ellipses, and we have waves of energy. The question is, what do we do with them?”

Bad Company finishes with a flourish. After a wait, Walsh appears to raucous cheers. Night has fallen. With it has come a festival atmosphere. Rita surveys the crowd of several thousand with pride. Backlit by the colors illuminating the Superdome, she poses for a picture. She has a friend from high school with her and a friend she has recently made in New Orleans. Every so often, an employee working the event approaches and gives her a warm greeting. Nearly always, the interaction ends with a hug.

The lawsuits that will determine her future still have years to run, and the disputes that are playing out now are small compared with the inevitable challenge to Benson’s will that will occur after he dies. For now, Rita LeBlanc, granddaughter of an NFL owner, has two choices — and one of them, trying to turn the future into the past, is untenable. She has learned this over 18 months, but putting it into practice can be difficult. Emotion gets in the way.

Then Walsh plays some familiar chords and she throws an arm around the nearest acquaintance. “I’ve always been a dreamer, and it’s so hard to change,” he croons. Rita is right in tune with him, her eyes moist.

No matter what happens with the lawsuits, she’ll be financially set for life. What she had before, and what she needs to find, is something to be passionate about. Something for her to dream about beyond what used to be. Virtual reality? Rock concerts? Ultra-high-speed travel? The Saints? A football team? It’s out there, she knows for sure.

She’s smiling now. For the first time all day, happiness seems within her grasp. “Put me on a highway,” she sings, her voice strong and clear. “Show me a sign. Take it to the limit … one more time.”

Bruce Schoenfeld is a writer in Colorado.

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