Hallelujah. The Saints finally came marching in. Kings of the football world. Hell has frozen over. Pigs are flying, as broadcaster Jim Henderson put it so eloquently.
And we actually lived to see it. Only took the better part of a half-century.
Euphoria has gripped the Gulf Coast region. There’s kind of a surreal, almost dreamy consciousness that we, or at least our team—not the Packers, Cowboys or Patriots—is on top.
Think about this: As many as a million people, from a population base of 1.1 million in the metro New Orleans area, turned out for the Super Bowl Victory parade in freezing weather two days after the game.
That’s what you call backing your team.
And remember, we’re not talking about a perennial championship contender, one of those teams that are easy to love. The Saints first kicked off 43 years ago, and notched just nine winning seasons in a history noted mostly for a handful of memorable single plays and many, many forgettable games.
This team wasn’t so much “Saints’’ as it was martyrs.
But the 2009 Super Bowl run consummated, at long last, the love affair between team and region.
And the parade served as a subliminal guide to show just how far both have come in the last four years. The cavalcade started at the Superdome, wended its way 3.7 miles and ended at the Morial Convention Center. Both sites, the start and the finish, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were frightening symbols of squalor and anguish.
Now there was quarterback Drew Brees, perceived locally as a true saint for his football acumen and his altruistic nature, dancing atop a float and flinging trinkets by the bushels to the adoring throngs with nothing on their minds but the very best of times, brought on by Brees and his football team.
Pieces of the puzzle
You could hardly help but feel the Super Bowl victory—indeed, the whole season—was the handiwork of divine providence. There was:
The inescapable backdrop of Katrina, the misery of a region devastated by the worst natural disaster in American history, a place once musically described as a “Land of Dreamy Scenes’’ transformed into a nightmarish water-world, where more than 1.2 million people across the Gulf region had to be evacuated to other parts of the country. And which remains, more than four years later, a long way from complete recovery. It’s almost as if a higher force decided to give these people a tangible symbol of hope, a clear demonstration of what can be overcome.
The cast-off yoke of historical ineptitude. This was the franchise that didn’t enjoy so much as a winning season for its first 20 years of existence; didn’t qualify for the playoffs for a quarter-century after its first kickoff; didn’t win a playoff game until its 35th season. Yet, in the Big Easy, despite the self-deprecating “Bagheads,’’ a fad born in the 1-15 season of 1980, the team retained almost universal support. The proof being a regularly filled Superdome, week in and week out, with little shown to fans for their fealty. That, folks, is the embodiment of the term “long-suffering.” To be fair, the product on the field wasn’t all bad all the time. The Saints made progress under Coach Jim Mora, taking their first toddling steps toward respectability. But perhaps that turned out even more frustrating than the early, futile seasons. When the Saints became good, they were in the same division as the 49ers when San Francisco was in its championship heyday.
The near-miraculous coalescence of the composition of the 2009 team—and the fact that they are still the New Orleans Saints. Following Katrina, the Saints had to operate out of San Antonio during the week while playing “home” games in the Alamodome, East Rutherford, N.J., and Baton Rouge.
With 80% of the city underwater for weeks, owner Tom Benson wanted to pull the plug on New Orleans and permanently base the Saints in Texas. It was then-NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue who ordered Benson to stay put. Were it not for that decision, the Lombardi Trophy would be in the showcase of the San Antonio Saints. It’s one of the ironies of this whole unreal scenario that Benson rode on the first float of the victory parade, smiling broadly at and waving to the members of the Who Dat Nation he wanted to abandon.
And for a team used to the quarterbacking likes of Aaron Brooks and Billy Joe Hobert, what were the odds of getting the linchpin of everything good that’s happened since? Consider the strange sequence of cause and effect set off when Brees, playing quarterback for the San Diego Chargers in the last game of the 2005 season, was hit in the end zone trying to recover a fumble, and tore the labrum in his throwing shoulder?
Coach Marty Schottenheimer, smitten with young backup Philip Rivers, didn’t want the damaged Brees anymore, and the only two teams showing any interest after his surgery were the Miami Dolphins and water-logged New Orleans. Skeptical Dolphins Coach Nick Saban made a choice to go with Daunte Culpepper, despite a statement from the renowned Dr. James Andrews, who performed the surgery on Brees, saying the shoulder was back to 100% capability “and not any more likely to be reinjured than it ever was.”
So the Saints got their leader by default; a quarterback who would throw for a league-leading 18,238 yards and 122 touchdowns over the next four years, complete an NFL-record 70.6% of his passes in 2009, and ignite the team that used to be disparaged as the “Aints’’ to two NFC championship games—and the Super Bowl title.
There also is the surprising advent of the coach, an assistant who turned down his first shot as head coach when offered the Oakland Raiders job, but jumped at the opportunity in flood-ravaged New Orleans in 2006.
There were hints of promise from the start of his tenure—including a berth in the 2006 NFC championship game—but when he fell short, Sean Peyton began a systematic effort of collecting all the essential staff and members he needed for a complete team. He took castoffs like former All-Pro safety Darren Sharper, and paid out of his own pocket the difference in the necessary compensation to lure defensive coordinator Gregg Williams. Doing whatever it took, he filled in the holes.
In the end, with 17 players who went undrafted coming out of college, the team became one of the unlikeliest franchises to ascend to the throne of professional football.
Perception vs. reality
Now comes the hard part. What happens when the party ends? Does this achievement have any real meaning on any level other than a feel-good sports story, particularly in a town and a region burdened with major problems, even long before Katrina? Does it translate beyond the sports world?
Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley, who formerly served at the University of New Orleans under the distinguished Stephen Ambrose and then later at Tulane University, says cryptically, “Saints mania is very exciting, but sports can be an opiate for the masses. You can’t build a sustainable urban community on football wins.”
True enough. New Orleans had a stagnant economy long before Katrina, and a high crime rate, with the highest murder rate in the country. It’s still plagued by political corruption. It’s been losing population since the 1960s.
There’s still significant erosion of the Louisiana coast, and who’s to say there’s not another Katrina lurking in the future to sidetrack any progress?
The Rev. Jesse Jackson dismisses the notion that a football team can inspire the people, pointedly saying, “No Saints live in the Lower Ninth.’’
But UNO Chancellor Tim Ryan counters, “A lot of it is perception.” Ryan, an economist, points out that in a nationwide survey taken just a year ago 65% of the respondents thought New Orleans was still under water, and 75% were under the impression the French Quarter had been destroyed.
“They still remembered the scenes they saw on television of the misery after the storm,’’ Ryan says.
Ryan maintains the television scenes of the celebration on Bourbon Street after the Super Bowl will stay in people’s minds for a long time. “Those scenes have already made an impression of New Orleans coming back.”
So too, Ryan says, will the election of Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu as mayor of New Orleans. Critics saw outgoing Mayor Ray Nagin as a bumbler who hindered the recovery as much as he helped.
“Now, will the Super Bowl and a new mayor by themselves help bring in business, help our crime rate, ensure the levees won’t break? Of course not,” Ryan says. “But things can be found wrong with every city. There could be businessmen somewhere now looking to make an investment. Maybe they’d say, ‘We’ll consider New Orleans.’
“Right now New Orleans is seen as a different place than it was a year ago. And perceptions do make a difference.”
New Orleans now is perceived as a winner. It needs to be perceived as winner off the field.
That would be super.
