Somehow it seems fitting that Super Bowl XX found its home here.
Sure, everyone loves Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras and the city`s revelous bent. But all the carousing masks a more pensive side to New Orleans` soul, a wistfulness distilled by the pain of losing out too many times on too many things.
For the years have not been kind to this belle of the Old South. Once the toast of a mannerly world, she has become, in many ways, a city of underdogs, of also-rans longing for a big score–a city, in short, out to prove that she still belongs in the big leagues.
What place, then, could better reflect the spirit of the Chicago Bears and the New England Patriots, gritty teams with a lot to prove themselves? And what city could better appreciate the money and international publicity pouring in with the fans and the television cameras?
One has only to look at New Orleans` own National Football League team, the hapless Saints, to understand the city`s deep sympathy for long-suffering Chicago and Boston fans.
Saints` fever rocked the town like a hot jazz tune in the expansion club`s first year, 1967. The excitement built as the team swept through a 5-1 preseason and hit a frenzy as John Gilliam gathered in the opening kickoff of the regular season and streaked 94 yards for a touchdown.
But the letdown came quickly, as the Los Angeles Rams rallied to win that game, and losing season after losing season eventually pushed the city over the border into despair. Fans took to hiding their heads under paper bags, deriding the team as the ”Aints” when it followed one of its best seasons, 8-8 in 1979, with a 1-15 mark in 1980.
Even Bum Phillips, the crusty magician who had pulled a winner out of his cowboy hat in Houston, ended up hightailing it out of town with four games left last fall after failing to work any wonders. The Saints went on to lose their last three games to stretch the NFL`s record for futility to 19 straight nonwinning seasons.
To Saints` fans, then, the rejuvenated Bears seem like God`s–or the devil`s–own team, proof that there can be life after slow death.
”Absolutely,” said Lee Green, a patron at the Milan Lounge, one of the city`s many neighborhood sports bars, when asked if most New Orleanians are pulling for the Bears. ”Because they`ve been down so long. If the Bears win, there`s hope for the Saints.”
Others seeking solace at the pub`s polished wooden bar said Saints` fans envied the Bears` ”get-down” style and identified, in true carnival spirit, with the Bears` ”hard-drinking loony tunes” kind of players.
But most New Orleanians also were delighted to see the Patriots upset the Miami Dolphins to join the Bears in reaching their first Super Bowl, and the reasons for this may tell even more about the city`s melancholy.
One has to do with sports, the other with business, but both help chronicle how New Orleans, a town of 500,000 people, has fallen behind Sun Belt rivals that weren`t even dreamed of when a Frenchman named Bienville started driving stakes in the swampy ground here in 1718.
The Dolphins entered the NFL just a year before the Saints did. So their relatively quick success in molding one of football`s winningest teams is a nagging reminder here of what might have been.
There also is no love lost here for Miami`s upstart business community
–or for any of the other great trade centers that have come into their own in recent years with the emergence of the Sun Belt.
Blessed by its location at the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans prospered before the Civil War by exporting cotton and importing luxury items for nearby plantations. Despite some dismal days during Reconstruction and the Great Depression, its port and banks generally kept growing, and it remained the South`s premier city through World War II.
But then many of its old-monied families apparently got too snug in their Garden District mansions.
Houston and Dallas, which had started growing with the first oil boom in the 1920s, grabbed control of that high-stakes game and left New Orleans to take care of the drilling operators and roughnecks. Miami`s industrious Cuban refugees fanned out across Latin America in the 1960s and picked off a significant share of New Orleans` shipping trade.
Even Orlando joined in with the construction of Disney World, which quickly supplanted the French Quarter as the Southeast`s leading tourist attraction.
As a result, except for an oil boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, New Orleans` economy has performed more like a Rust Belt clunker in recent years than a souped-up Sun Belt coupe. It is in particularly bad shape these days, with oil and gas, shipping and tourism all sputtering at once.
It`s this gloomy backdrop, of course, that has made the city so eager to throw open its doors to Super Bowl visitors.
Tourism officials estimate that the teams, their fans and assorted hangers-on will pump more than $100 million into the local economy. Moreover, the game will be the sixth Super Bowl played here. That will put New Orleans one contest ahead of Miami and the Los Angeles area (Pasadena has had three Super Bowls), the other leaders on the host circuit, and, local officials hope, reinforce the city`s image as one of the nation`s top party towns.
”To have the Super Bowl gives us a tremendous shot in the arm, not only in money but in PR, too,” said August Perez III, who heads the city`s largest architecture firm. ”It also keeps our spirits up.”
Still, most civic leaders recognize that the game represents no more than a temporary fix for the city`s problems, which include widespread poverty. But they haven`t had much luck in coming up with a broader cure.
People here credit construction of the Superdome, one of New Orleans`
most exuberant gestures, with reviving an unsightly part of the downtown area and with keeping the city in the Super Bowl round robin.
But the nine-acre bubble has failed to attract a major-league baseball team. And its high rental charges helped chase the city`s pro basketball team, the Jazz, to Salt Lake City, and its United States Football League club, the Breakers, to Portland, Ore.
The last stab at revitalization was last year`s disastrous world`s fair, which lost $120 million. The latest idea for rolling the dice is to legalize casino gambling and pitch New Orleans as an alternative to Las Vegas and Atlantic City. That idea is being pushed by Gov. Edwin Edwards. If gambling is legalized, however, it probably would cost New Orleans any future Super Bowls because NFL officials have made it known they want no association with gambling.
Throughout all the recent troubles, a saving grace for many New Orleanians has been their ability to shrug off the most intractable problems and find refuge in their neighborhoods. Another has been their ability to maintain a sense of humor.
Like Chicago and Boston, two other old waterfront cities with large working-class populations, New Orleans is a city of ethnic neighborhoods, each with its own bars, seafood restaurants and churches.
And like their Rust Belt compatriots, many people here like to sit on their front stoops and hoot at folly wherever they may find it–usually in politics or in tales of absurdities, such as pasta jambalaya being foisted on unsuspecting diners caught up in the Cajun-food craze in other cities.
Together with Mardi Gras and the French Quarter`s all-night bars and strip joints, this mirthfulness has helped the city hold onto its quirky charm and its reputation as the ”Big Easy” and ”The City That Care Forgot.”
Still, even the most ardent idlers here never seem to give up hope of dramatically improving their lot.
At the Milan Lounge, a posterboard covered with names entered in a $5,000 Super Bowl pool hangs on one wall, and owner David McCammon watches over a pile of Illinois Lotto tickets purchased by a traveling patron. Bookies seem to be on every street corner, and even some of the poorest people in town while away their afternoons betting on horses at the Fair Grounds.
Most know that they–and the city as a whole–may never get lucky. But some say that if they did, they`re sure they`d always keep a soft spot in their hearts for people and teams that didn`t quite measure up–teams like last year`s Cubs, for instance.
When the Cubs were hot two summers ago, McCammon gained national publicity for stringing ivy on the bar walls and setting up bleachers to help accommodate overflow crowds that came to watch the games on cable TV.
But even after the Cubs lost in the 1984 playoffs and then fell into a long losing streak last season, no one here abandoned them, he said. ”We had people ducking work for a couple of hours every day to come in and watch, just hoping they would break the streak.”
