(March 20)
“We really need a guard. Why haven’t we made a strong play for a starting left guard?!?”
Note the “we.”
This is how obsessive New Orleans Saints fans — many tens of thousands of us — talk about Louisiana’s major professional football team. It’s visceral. Sure, other fan bases identify with their teams, but there really is something different, something profound, in the combination of a love affair and borderline codependency between the Saints and our fans. (“Our,” not “their.”)
We all know this instinctively and experientially, of course, but it’s still worth considering why and how this love-dependency happened.
Was it that the denizens of this state so accustomed to beating nature’s odds, so scrappily insistent on joy during hurricanes and epidemics, identified so strongly with the early, misfit Saints? There we were with our two most prominent players being a slow-footed wide receiver who was cut from the team but literally told the coach he refused to leave, and then became an All-Pro, and a whiskey-swilling quarterback who had been a tailback before a car accident so bad that doctors feared he might never walk again.
And as if Danny Abramowicz and Billy Kilmer didn’t provide enough underdog vibes, we then latched onto a half-footed kicker whose astonishing 63-yard field goal couldn’t be heard on live radio because a swarm of bees flew into the transmitter.
At least kicker Tom Dempsey had a “normal,” un-jokeifiable name. Unlike his successor, Happy Feller, and unlike Joe Don Looney, D’Artagnan Martin, Cephus Weatherspoon, Wimpy Winther, or the nickname my dad had for Margene Adkins — Margarine Adkins — because he supposedly had “butterfingers” and couldn’t hold onto the ball.
Saints fans embraced our woebegone team not just despite the seemingly doomed prospects, but in some ways because the odds against us were so long…. [The full column is here.]
