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.
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“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.”
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CenLamar 
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