It’s guest columnist time, and today we take a big ol’ hammer and smash some NOLA stereotypes. Here’s Alex Hickey, a full time journalist in Louisiana who points out that, contrary to all the Super Bowl hype, New Orleans residents are not sitting on their rooftops with their pets waiting for Drew Brees to deliver their salvation. They simply want to see a good game on Sunday. Take it away, Alex.
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By Alex Hickey
One of the most interesting prop bets you’ll see this Super Bowl is the over/under on the number of times Hurricane Katrina is mentioned during the telecast. With the traditional 23-hour pregame show leading up to kickoff and the always schmaltzy Jim Nantz behind the mike in the booth, I would probably advise you to take the over. By the end of the game, most Americans will probably be annoyed that the Superdome didn’t just float off somewhere into the Gulf of Mexico.
However, the nationally based perception of SAINTS: TRIUMPH OVER KATRINA! is as off-target as a Rick Ankiel fastball circa 2002. The reason most people are fired up about the Saints being in the Super Bowl is because, well, they’ve had to watch the Saints play football since 1967.
Certainly, it’s true that the recovery from the storm isn’t complete. Five years removed, the University of New Orleans became Katrina’s latest victim when the administration decided to move its once successful athletic programs to the Division III level. They just couldn’t keep the funding to stay at the D-I level. And there are still areas in Louisiana’s southernmost parishes that look like they dealt with a hurricane last month, though that’s more because every hurricane that brushes against the state seems to get them pretty good.
There is no understating the Saints’ role in giving people some hope in 2006 by reaching the NFC Championship game in their first season back in New Orleans. Much like the Yankees 2001 playoff run in post-9/11 New York, it’s something that bonded everyone.
However, when the Yankees reached the World Series this past fall, no one was saying “Boy, the people of New York really needed this boost after the horrors of that day eight years ago.” And yet five years after the fact, somehow people are allowing themselves to make that generalization about New Orleans. Pretty much any Saints fan will tell you otherwise.
Take my buddy Brandon. A New Orleans native, he had to flee New Orleans for Lake Charles, La. when Katrina hit. Then, when Hurricane Rita hit Lake Charles just a few weeks later, it was time to do it all over again. Needless to say, 2005 was not a good year for anyone who lives in the geographical confines of the Who Dat Nation.
It was pretty traumatic stuff at the time, but thoughts of hurricanes have not once popped into Brandon’s head during the current playoff run. Saints fans like him have spent more time thinking about Aaron Brooks and Billy Joe Tolliver and Billy Joe Hobert and John Carney missing an extra point after a 75-yard miracle touchdown and every lousy defensive back that ever wore a fleur-de-lis helmet.
Like The Boss — Springsteen, not Steinbrenner — once said, someday we’ll look back at this and it will all seem funny. And now that the Saints have made it, all of that previous pain and suffering has given way to unadulterated joy.
“They could have made it a year before Katrina and we would still be going just as crazy,” Brandon said.
This is the Cubs making the World Series, the Clippers reaching the NBA Finals and Northwestern basketball reaching the Final Four. Maybe rolled into one.
Anywhere you go in Louisiana these days — even in the northern regions that never get licked by hurricanes — you’re bound to find some sort of Who Dat sign or other symbol of the Saints. The only other NFL franchise that can compare in terms of devotion is the Packers, and it makes sense — people in Green Bay and New Orleans feel privileged to have a franchise and put their hearts and souls into the matter. That’s particularly true in New Orleans, where fans spent many a day hearing the rumors that San Antonio or Los Angeles would be the place the Saints would eventually call home.
Instead, they call New Orleans home. And despite what the national stories will have you believe, it turns out that’s not such a bad place to be these days.
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Hick Flick (Alex Hickey) is, among other things, a Yankee living in Louisiana and a blogger for the site Rumors and Rants. And contrary to common stereotypes, he is also a full-time journalist and does not live in his parents’ basement. There are no basements in Louisiana.
