“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. And always with a sense of humor: Four years before the famous “baghead” fans during the 1-15 season in 1980, the Saints played so badly in a 1976 season-opening 40-9 loss to the Vikings that the biggest (and perhaps only) cheers came for a paper airplane lofted from one sideline terrace that managed to waft all the way to the other side.
And never let it be said that Saints fans aren’t trend-setters: That paper airplane feat catalyzed a brief mania of paper airplanes in losing NFL stadiums across the land.
So, yes, the Saints matched the whimsy of their southern Louisiana home. And when, under Tom Benson and Jim Mora, the Saints finally began winning, the emotional cocktail produced a long-lasting high.
Of course, years later everybody well understood how the Saints became an ongoing symbol of civic renewal after Hurricane Katrina. Steve Gleason’s blocked punt; Drew Brees’ mind-bending excellence; the onside kick; the Super Bowl victory. Oh, how great it felt to be with the Saints, alive!
Since then, we’ve had self-inflicted wounds (the Seahawks going “Beast Mode,” the “Minneapolis Miracle”) and awful breaks (the Rams mugging Tommylee Lewis without a flag, the Vikes’ Kyle Rudolph committing unpenalized offensive pass interference). The repeated heartbreaks combined to add to Saints fandom an us-against-the-world mentality that made the bond between team and supporters even more all-encompassing. There’s nothing, anywhere, like a Saints-obsessed fan — a fan, for example, like the one in my own mirror.
That’s why, once the free-agent “tampering” window opens, some of us refresh our Saints web search at least 20 times a day, all the way to and through the first week after the NFL draft. We keep hoping for that free agent, rock-solid guard to come aboard, hoping not to lose our favorite Saints veteran, hoping for the “wow” of an unexpected splash of a dazzling receiver or runner somehow fitting under our salary cap.
General Manager Mickey Loomis’ annual cap manipulations are like a high-wire act, infuriating but also adding to the spectacle and fun.
The same obsessive fan-hood is why we all think that reading a host of scouting reports and watching five minutes of highlight footage can give us better judgment than Loomis on a potential college draftee. We all have our “I-toldja-so” stories about how we were on record desperately wanting to draft Alvin Kamara (hooray!), Pro-Bowler (the Rams got him), and Chiefs tackling machine , while conveniently forgetting that we swore (out of the NFL already) would be the next superstar quarterback.
We think we know so much, and by gosh, if the Saints would just listen, we’d be back in the Super Bowl again.
And oh, in case you’re wondering, the Saints need to draft safety this year. His athleticism and production, you see, are off the charts, and ...