New Orleans sports fans are stupid. They are fiercely loyal and passionate, but stupid.
It’s the only way experts can explain why there’s a season ticket waiting list of 25,000 names for the NFL’s biggest disappointment this season (the Saints), and a culture of indifference surrounding the fifth-best team in the NBA’s stacked Western Conference (the Hornets).
“We’re a football town,” many local apologists say.
Incorrect. Knoxville, Oxford and Tuscaloosa are football towns. New Orleans is not. New Orleans is supposed to be a world-class hub of culture, history and entertainment. New Orleans is, in fact, Planet Earth’s destination sports city – the Sugar Bowl, BCS National Championship Game and the NBA All-Star Game in 2008’s first eight weeks prove that.
It’s just the sports fans in New Orleans act like they live in an SEC town painted black and gold, and they proudly embrace the mentality of a Deep South college town in a blind love-affair with their college football team. It seems that anything that gets in the way of that love affair is damned – even if it’s world-class entertainment, an NBA team that won 25 of its first 37 games, yet averaged a league-worst 11,871 fans in their first 15 games.
The fact of the matter is this: The Hornets and Louisiana have agreed to a two-year lease extension, which keeps the Bees here until the 2014 season. Yet the lease explains that the Hornets have the option of leaving if the SEC fans posing as sports-destination-citizens don’t average 14,735 a game, the team’s pre-Katrina average.
I’ve got it from good places that George Shinn won’t take the franchise anywhere – after poisoning the Charlotte, N.C., market in his move down here, NBA Commissioner David Stern isn’t about to let him declare New Orleans a failure and wreck a third market in less than a decade’s time. The only way he cashes out is by selling the franchise to the highest bidder – which may be a local who stays put or someone who pockets the franchise and skips town.
Only then will New Orleans sports fans remember how miserable life is between December and August and remember what it’s like grouping ourselves with one-sport towns like San Antonio and Green Bay (yawn).
Today’s Hornets aren’t the 2004-05 Hornets (18-64), whose top scorer Lee Nailon is now recklessly chucking up misses for the Russian SuperLeague’s Lokomotiv Novisibirsk. Today’s Hornets have Chris Paul, the NBA’s most valuable player at the moment. They’ve humbled “King” James and downed both the indomitable Phoenix Suns (twice) and the Dallas Mavericks (once).
So let’s drop the college town act and get some butts into the seats for the sports-destination city’s home team.
