Last Friday, Rams equipment manager Todd Hewitt arrived to the team's Earth City complex at 5:50 a.m. -- 20 minutes late by his standards. It'd been a long week. The previous Sunday the Rams had dropped their season-ending game to the Seahawks, losing their bid to the playoffs. Hewitt had spent the next four days getting to work early so he could wash the final loads of laundry, strip down the locker room and help players prepare for their exit physicals. That Friday morning he was about to begin taking inventory for next season when he received a 7 a.m. call from head coach Steve Spagnuolo summoning him to his office.
Since Spagnuolo joined the team at the start of the 2009 season, he and Hewitt never warmed to each other; Spagnuolo had earned a reputation as a control freak, and it's possible he resented Hewitt's close relationship with the players. Hewitt, of course, was a Rams fixture, having served 10 different head coaches since 1978. He'd been appointed equipment manager in 1986, succeeding his father, the late Don Hewitt, who'd held the position since 1967.
When Hewitt entered Spagnuolo's office on Friday, he took a seat. But the head coach remained standing. General manager Billy Devaney hovered nearby.
Moments later, Hewitt experienced something he'd never anticipated in his 32-year career. He was fired.
"[Spagnuolo] said, 'There's no sense prolonging this. We're not going to bring you back,'" recalls Hewitt during an interview with Daily RFT at his Ballwin home.
It was a firing, pure and simple. No explanation. No negotiation. Not even a deftly crafted message by the team's spokesman along the lines of "Todd has decided he wants to spend more time with his family." The conversation lasted three minutes. Hewitt had until the end of the day to clear out his office; his request to do so over the weekend was denied. With the wind knocked out of him, Hewitt called his wife, who woke his three sons; they arrived at the complex in a moving truck. A security guard stood watch to make sure Hewitt didn't depart with anything that didn't belong to him.
In just one morning it had come to this: The man who'd spent more years with the Rams than anyone else since the '70s -- who joined the organizational family in 1967 as a ten-year-old ball boy, who screwed the face masks onto the helmets of Jack Youngblood, Eric Dickerson and Marshall Faulk, who in 1997 earned the NFL's Equipment Manager of the Year Award, who helped usher the team into a new city, fourteen playoff appearances and three Super Bowls -- was consigned to shuttling boxes into a moving truck in the freezing cold, as the clock ticked and a security guard stood watch.
Last week the team also decided to let go of assistant strength coach Chuck Faucette. Shortly after Hewitt's firing, a statement attributed to Spagnuolo went out to the media: "We have decided not to retain Todd Hewitt and Chuck Faucette going forward in 2011. We appreciate their efforts in the past and wish them well in the future."
Now, after five days, the 54-year-old Hewitt has had time to unpack some of his boxes and emotions. Sitting on his couch in jeans and sneakers, he described the way the firing went down.
