Sports Nut -- Football in New Orleans

Sports Nut

McCollam's piece on the Superdome was the best of a number of obvious, but still compelling, pieces yesterday that talked about football and New Orleans. I tend to be opposed to using football as urban renewal, but it's hard to deny that this game put a major spotlight on the city, its tragedy, and rebuilding. The economics of the game are hard to argue: hotel capacity at Mardi-Gras levels, excellent press for the new dome, an image of life that can contrast with the corpses.

And a win! It was a football game, dammit, and a testimony to the power of raw emotions in sports. It's important not just because of the dome, but because of how people feel about their team. If I can be a Baltimore Orioles fan in Yankeetown, then how much more powerful is the ability to root for a team that reminds you you have a hometown, that you left it, that you could go back. And then they win! Who dat?

I don't feel I'm in a postion to second-guess the allocation of resources in New Orleans. But as a sports fan, I have to say that last nights game will rank as one of the most important football games ever played. I sometimes get nervous about "important" (as opposed to "good") games, but there are some things that remain in memory because of context -- Jessie Owens, U.S. Olympic hockey, and now this. The superdome made this game.

Idiot! The play's the thing -- the article may have come out before the game, but it still could have spoken about what was to transpire in this stadium. How the Saints are a team. How they had to practice to learn their own field. How people feel about them, not just the dome. It's like talking about temples without the rituals that take place inside. What made Jessie Owens, the hockey team, Jackie Robinson immortal was the excellence of their accomplishments, not merely the "importance" of their lives.

Great article, I enjoyed it.

Football is a ritual: it is a collective enterprise of waste, a grand spectacle of communal violence and intimacy that is not contained by any building, no matter how super.