Mankind’s most storied cities have employed sports to fulfill basic functions central to their society.
In ancient Chichen Itza, where religion was synonymous with the city’s namesake, Mayans played a deadly ball game – where the winners secured heroism and the losers fell subject to a sacrificial ritual – to earn favor with gods and religious chieftains.
In ancient Rome, sport in the Coliseum was the focal point in celebrating religious festivals and great military victories.
Both religion and military prowess were centerpieces for ordinary Romans.
In modern-day New Orleans, where culture is what’s synonymous with the city’s namesake and the focus of its residents, sport will be employed in a way no other American city should have the misfortune of using it for: healing a battered, bewildered and uncertain populace through one of the few certainties the city can count on nowadays.
Healing for Saints fans is in gold helmets and black jerseys. Hope is in the arm of #9 and the twinkle-toes of #25.
Saints fans lost their homes, their livelihoods and loved ones in the wrath Aug. 29, 2005, wrought. On top of that, it was unsure whether or not Saints fans would also suffer losing the team they loved.
Sunday afternoons in residential areas, once the time for sun-bathed barbecues for parents and touch football games in the street for the kids, stood as desolate as a nuclear wasteland.
What hurt most about the 2005 Saints season wasn’t that the Saints turned in a 3-13 stinker: it’s that fans, on top of the post-Katrina nightmare they were mired in, suffered the nagging of “relocating to San Antonio or L.A.” talk and the reality that their theater of dreams (the Superdome) had become the icon of an American disaster.
But, while healing and rebirth are the central realities of New Orleanians today, so is the rebirth of a staple of the city’s culture when Mike Vick and the Falcons come to town Monday night.
Because a Saints game at the Dome is as “New Orleans” as a streetcar ride under the oaks alongside St. Charles Avenue or a night of cocktails and Ellis Marsalis on Frenchman Street.
Our city is home to one of the oldest clubs in the single most electrifying sports league in the world. Archie, Dalton, and Rickey are pioneers as fondly revered as Satchmo and Fats Domino.
New Orleans was, is and always will be a world-class sports city: seven decades of Sugar Bowls, nine Super Bowls, three Final Fours and the upcoming 2008 NBA All-Star game say so.
On Monday night, hope and a cultural staple return.
With more press credentials requested by media outlets throughout the world – even Al-Jazeera will cover the event for the Middle East- than last year’s Super Bowl, New Orleans picks itself up from the canvass and re-establishes itself as a global-class venue with the world as its witness.
