SmashMouth

Though he’s now on his fourth NFL team, this was the first time in Johnathan Abram’s professional career he was able to choose where he wanted to play.

There were a couple of reasons he chose to sign a one-year contract with the New Orleans Saints, including the usual talking points — the winning, the electric home games, et cetera. But there was that major draw for Abram specifically.

That can best be explained by the game-used NFL football that, he believes, is sitting with a bunch of his other memorabilia at his grandmother’s house in Mississippi. That ball was once thrown by Aaron Brooks and caught by Joe Horn before it was hand-delivered to a young Johnathan Abram in the stands.



“It was a home game in New Orleans. My parents brought me down, we were there pretty early and got to see the warmups and how things worked out,” Abram said. “I remember screaming at Joe Horn, like, ‘I want a ball! I want a ball! I want a ball!’ When he scored, he jumped up and gave it to me.

“I’ll probably have to bring it the first day of work (here).”

Abram was born and raised in Mississippi. He played his high school football at East Marion High, about two hours north of his new home stadium, the Caesars Superdome.

He spent the first four years of his career about as geographically and culturally far from home as the NFL could take him — Oakland, Las Vegas, Green Bay, Seattle — and he’s looking forward to changing that.

“It means a little bit more when you’re playing for what they call the home team,” Abram said.

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