SAN FRANCISCO — All these years later, this is perhaps the tale that best defines who Sam Mills was, and why his spirit and his words still resonate almost 11 years after his passing. This was the summer of 1986, a sweaty slog of a grind at Southeastern Louisiana University, where the Saints had set up training camp.
Jim Mora was just starting out as New Orleans’ head coach, and he had brought with him from the Baltimore Stars of the USFL a 5-foot-9, 225-pound dynamo of a linebacker. The USFL had provided an opportunity for Mills, a New Jersey kid, a star at Montclair State who hadn’t been able to stick in the NFL or the CFL.
Mora loved him unconditionally. They had won two of the three championships the league ever had, and nearly won a third.
Still, that was the USFL.
“This is the NFL,” Mora told a few of his assistants one day that summer. “Can we really afford to have a 5-foot-nothing linebacker playing for us if anybody’s ever going to take us seriously?”
“Coach,” he was told, “if we’re talking about this linebacker, we can’t afford to not have him.”
Mora told that story during Super Bowl week 12 years ago. By then, Mills had helped Mora provide New Orleans with the first winning seasons in Saints history. He had moved on to Carolina (coached by Mora’s old defensive coordinator, Dom Capers) and had such an immediate impact that after three splendid years as a Panther, the franchise not only retired his number, 51, but built a bronze statue of him outside their home stadium.
The inscription: “Sam Mills. Leader and Gentleman.”
By January 2004, Mills was coaching linebackers for the Panthers. By then, he also was well into his fifth month fighting intestinal cancer, a grim battle doctors believed he already should have lost.
Instead, during a typical game week that year, as the Panthers blossomed into a championship-caliber team, Mills endured seven hours of chemotherapy on Monday, seven more on Tuesday, three more on Wednesday. Even as the treatment ransacked his body and robbed his strength, Mills returned to work every Thursday, coached through the game on Sunday, then started the process all over again.
“He never complained,” his son, Sam Mills III, recalled earlier this week, “and I’m not just saying that because he was strong in front of his son. He never complained to anybody.”
It was on the eve of the Panthers’ first playoff game that season, Jan. 3, 2004, when the elder Mills gave a speech that defined his courage and his legacy every bit as much as the one Lou Gehrig had given almost 65 years earlier. Gehrig’s had been public, in front of 75,000 people at Yankee Stadium, millions more on radio.
Mills’ had been private, at least initially. He gathered the Panthers, asked them to take a knee.
“When I found out I had cancer,” he told them, “there were two things I could do: Quit or keep pounding. I’m a fighter. I kept pounding. You’re fighters, too. Keep pounding!”
The Panthers scorched the Cowboys the next day, 29-10, wound up winning the NFC, wound up battling the Patriots in Super Bowl XXXVIII right to the final gun. Mills passed away in April 2005, far too soon, at age 45. It was a loss that could have left a permanent abscess in the franchise’s soul.
Instead, Mills’ words have become forever, and so have their impact. If you buy a Panthers’ jersey, “KEEP POUNDING” is embroidered on the collar. Before games in Charlotte, honorary captains pound an enormous drum with “KEEP POUNDING!” on either side. Outside the locker room is painted a permanent motto: “KEEP POUNDING!” Game days at Bank of America Stadium, one side of the stadium will shout “KEEP!”
The other side will reply “POUNDING!”
“Gives me chills just thinking about it,” Mills III said.
He, too, keeps his father’s legacy alive, serving five years as the Panthers’ assistant defensive line coach. Sunday, the Panthers will try to complete the journey on which, 12 years ago, they fell three points shy. Most of the players were barely teenagers when Mills died, but all of them remain touched by the impact of a man they never met.
“You hear a lot of the bad when it comes to football players,” said Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly, who, at 6-foot-3 and 235 pounds, is far more a prototype of the position than Mills ever could be, but who plays with every bit the ferocity and heart of his Carolina antecedent. “Sam Mills was a reminder that we can do an awful lot of good. It’s good to remember that.”
Actually, in so many ways, you can’t afford not to remember that.