The Independent Weekly, a news magazine based out of Lafayette, has a fantastic new story about the New Orleans Saints, written by Scott Jordan, a Connecticut native who,  since moving to Louisiana over ten years ago, has embraced the Saints as his team. Normally, CenLamar doesn’t cover sports stories, but this is such a well-written piece that it deserves everyone’s attention.

Oyster, over at the Right Hand Thief, has been writing about what the Saints mean to New Orleanians during this trying time of reconstruction, and this article is written in the same spirit.

Jordan takes us through the history of the ill-fated team– what it means to be a Saints fan and what the Saints mean to the state of Louisiana.

Some excerpts:

The Saints — and the unwavering devotion of their fans — were a perplexing oddity to me since I’d moved to Louisiana from Connecticut in 1993. They had never won a playoff game in their 30-year-plus history, but ignoring them was impossible. The Saints were inescapable on talk radio, in the newspapers, and in chatter across the city. The franchise’s woebegone history hovered over every fresh loss, and even the most uninterested onlookers knew the lore of downtrodden “Aints” fans wearing paper bags over their heads at games and the theories about voodoo curses on the Superdome. Riding the bus down Canal Street, buying a cup of coffee at a po-boy shop on St. Charles Avenue, waiting in a Lakeview doctor’s office or taking the elevator up the old Maison Blanche building, someone would always try and initiate a conversation.

….

The 1999 Saints were the perfect immersion into my newfound attachment to the Saints — the team was terrible. There was playcalling from the stone ages, a pair of likeable but unreliable quarterbacks both named Billy Joe, a dreadlocked Heisman Trophy winner who gave bizarre interviews with his helmet on, a last-minute loss to Cleveland on a Hail Mary pass, and the growing realization that Da Coach was now Da Fraud. The Saints went 3-13 that year. I didn’t care. I was now locked into the rhythms of Sunday morning gameday drives to the Dome and hanging on every malapropism of beloved marble-mouth Saints commentator Buddy Diliberto on WWL. We renewed our season tickets without a second thought and got to witness the storybook 2000 season when new head coach Jim Haslett led the team to its first-ever playoff victory.

…

“The Monday night game against Atlanta when they came back to open the Superdome was one of the most emotional moments and evenings I’ve ever spent in my life,” says Henderson. “The energy and the feeling and the emotion in that place was so great; it was so much more than just a football game that it’s something that will always stay with me. It was one of the most difficult games I’ve ever been a part of, simply because I was afraid I was going to lose it the entire night from the moment I walked in that place. As soon as we got on the air, there were so many moments that you choked up and you felt tears well up in your eyes. Just watching the pregame festivities, listening to the fans as the team ran out on the field, and the whole pregame thing was so well done with U2 and Green Day.”

…

Read the entire article here.

2 thoughts

  1. I’d describe myself as a relatively passive sports fan. I wait for the playoffs in both baseball and basketball before I’ll pay any attention, and I’ll catch a regular season NFL game when I do without normally making a special effort. If I caught the Super Bowl on TV, then lucky for the advertisers. That being said I consider myself an LSU and Saints fan.

    This year’s Saints mark a turning point for me. In part because I think the most important domestic issue for this country is the recovery of New Orleans, and also because of the razzing my girlfriend, who is a rabid Green Bay Packer fan, gives me for being a Saints fan, I feel more connected to the team and sport than ever.

    This season has given me more to “chew” on aside from enjoying the solid wins and playoff berth. I think I can sum most of this up from the game against Dallas on Sunday Night football last month. I explained to my girlfriend that as a Saints fan I didn’t know what it was like to watch the team I’ve always rooted for to have two consecutive offensive posessions that ate up so much clock and resulted in touchdowns while the defense could hold the other team to 3-and-out in-between the drives. This, to me anyway — despite some difficult losses (like the game after the bye-week at the start of the season which made me think “the Saints of old” were back) — makes this season so much better than any in the past. They won by playing the game well. They won by playing the game as it always should be played.

    The team’s success transcends the football field. The intangible yet deeply emotional “I Believe” has come to represent the most positive/feel-good accomplishment for New Orleans since the devastation from Katrina. The wins, the playoffs, and the goodwill for the Saints unite the city (and much of the region) across racial and class lines in a way only sports can. It reminds us that perhaps we should all work harder to translate “I Believe” to the way we rebuild New Orleans and overcome the problems plaguing the recovery. Sports analogies and metaphors can be tired cliches, but if there was ever a case for cliches to influence something truly positive and extraordinary, then surely New Orleans is that case.

    If and when the Saints make it to the Super Bowl (which has the biggest and most diverse television audience of the year), the image of the beleagured city will be redefined by the glorious ambassadors the Saints have become. It will remind and inspire the people of New Orleans that great things still come from there, while it will show the rest of the country that the spirit of New Orleans is not gone and it only continues to get better.

    Go Saints. I believe.

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