The No-Call Heard Round the World
Well, New Orleans Saints Fans, Where Do We Go From Here?
Author’s note: I wrote this piece on a Saints fan forum, SaintsReport. This is not for those of you who think football is stupid. It’s for those of us who know it’s stupid and don’t care.
The recent unpleasantness regarding certain NFC Championship game refs deciding not to do their jobs has created an existential crisis among Saints fans that may surpass the team’s uncertain future after Hurricane Katrina or the pain of the Ditka era. I decided to throw in my two cents. The other guys on the forum also have only two cents to throw in, as they blew the rest on season tickets.
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I see all these links about who the Saints should draft or keep or pick up next year, but right now I don’t have a next year of football in my head. I haven’t looked at a single post about next year – not after the outrageous pass interference no-call that cheated us out of another Super Bowl.
I seriously don’t know how I can continue to care about these games if the blood, sweat and tears of players and fans mean nothing. If after all we go through it turns out to be for a team that is kept dangling at the strings of a league that laughs at our naive faith, swims in our money, and chooses its own winners according to which contests would be the most profitable to a handful of billionaires, then what are we doing?
Even if we be honest for a moment and admit that this is America, where nearly everything the average person does is ultimately for the enrichment of the wealthy, and that football can’t be expected to be any different, I still throw a flag at the current state of pro football affairs. Americans are willing to accept a certain amount of official corruption so long as we get a little piece of the action, but the current level of impunity wielded by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is too much. It’s way too much.
I don’t watch TV shows like “Game of Thrones” because I don’t like to be emotionally manipulated week after week. I have better things to do than stare at a television as writers dream up just enough of a story to keep me on the couch, with no idea how of where they are going with it – the writing titillates, but that’s not good enough.
Football is supposed to be about talent and coaching and struggle and competition, about heart, soul, faith and all that stuff. Then one day you understand it isn’t true; it’s just “Game of Thrones” written, week after week, season after season, by accountants and lawyers.
So where does that leave the Saints, the good old Black and Gold, the Who Dat Nation, the City of New Orleans and all of us? Can we really convince ourselves we no longer love our team; that we can walk away from decades of devotion? I don’t think so.
We have been Saints fans for a long time. This identity is a major part of who we are. I’m not sure where we are now emotionally, or, as is the New Orleans way, spiritually. How can we be any other place but behind our team, as pathetic as that position now seems? I wonder. Has Who Dat finally become a question?
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.