The Saints-Falcons football game yesterday was memorable, even more memorable than I thought it would be. The result was unexpected, with the Saints thumping the Falcons like a parson’s Bible, 23-3. More remarkable was the broadcast itself, and all the news commentary surrounding it. The media were fascinated by the game, but also almost embarrassed over it. Every out-of-town sports commentator, from television to the radio to print, felt a need to balance the joy of the event with the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina.
The television broadcast was interspersed with pictures of destroyed neighborhoods. Repeatedly ESPN reporters emphasized that the Superdome rebuild cost $181 million (I lost count of the number of times that was repeated – three, four, five times) but that the city is in support of this. Everyone they talked to, one reporter after another said, believed a new Superdome was vital to the recovery and a symbol of the new New Orleans. They said it so often that it was obvious they were trying to persuade even themselves that it was all right to drive past the Ninth Ward and attend a party at the Dome.
Tony Kornheiser, one of ESPN’s announcers, expressed this angst before the game in this way: “You . . . have to take into consideration that if the people of New Orleans think that this is a wonderful thing that's happening, so should I. So should I, because it's their lives, and I'm just coming for a few days. But so should I.”
In other words, I am happy because you are happy. But I do not necessarily agree with your priorities.
In the Washington Post, Michael Wilbon wrote: “With everything else in upheaval, with family members and friends having been displaced and scattered to the winds, with an entire way of life demolished, there's one thing and pretty much only one thing that makes them feel connected: the Saints.”
And finally, from Douglas McCollam of Slate, we have this: “It's fair to ask why, in a city where vast swaths remain uninhabitable, all this money is being spent to fix a stadium. You won't hear that question in New Orleans . . . If they can fix the Dome up after all it endured, then perhaps other things can be fixed as well. Perhaps, after all, the city need not die.”
This angst is real, the conflict between tragedy and frivolity. New Orleanians feel it too, just as they felt it before as they celebrated the first Mardi Gras after Katrina. But in this town, tragedy and frivolity have always walked hand in hand. Name another city where cemeteries are promoted as a major tourist attraction. Where its most famous holiday (Mardi Gras), a celebration devoted to excess and debauchery, is counter-levered against the most solemn religious period on the calendar, Lent, and on purpose. In New Orleans, the jazz funeral starts with a dirge and ends with a riotous party at the gravesite. We don’t sweat it here. Maybe because we ignore tragedy. Or maybe because we are so used to it that we understand that if you don’t dance at somebody’s grave there is nowhere to dance at all.
Sports and history have often crossed paths. We can think of many examples. Jessie Owens winning four gold medals at the Nazi-dominated 1936 Olympics. Jackie Robinson going to bat for the first time in a major league baseball game. The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team beating the Soviets. And now, at least for New Orleans, the Saints crushing the Falcons in their first game back after Katrina.
Sports is irrelevant to history in the sense that sporting events never change historical events. Jessie Owens did not stop Hitler from invading Poland. He did not prevent a single death at Auschwitz. The U.S. hockey team did not end the Cold War. Only Jackie Robinson, it could be argued, opened any doors for anybody, but even with Robinson this is debatable. If Robinson had not lived someone else would have taken his place. And as millions of feet of film showing Southern police dispersing protesters with fire hoses can attest, Robinson did not solve the problems of racism. If he did anything, he only turned the clock forward a tick or two towards the midnight of the bloody conflict between blacks and segregationists.
But sports is a form of fiction. And fiction has a way of becoming living history. People love stories, and a good story will beat a quiver full of facts any day. I do not mean this as a cynical observation that people refuse to face facts. It is simply human nature – people organize their memories as a narrative, rather than as a series of unrelated events. A register of factual events, such as
7:03 AM Woke up.
7:13 AM Ate breakfast.
7:28 AM Showered.
7:45 AM Shaved and brushed teeth.
7:48 AM Got dressed.
8:01 AM Left for work
8:07 AM Got in car wreck
8:10 AM Taken to hospital by ambulance.
simply does not have the power of a narrative: “On the day I broke my neck, I ate breakfast, showered, and dressed for work as usual.” The story beats plain facts.
In a broader context, society often uses stories to string events together in a memorable way. This is where songs, movies, fashion, and even sporting events can become “history.” Jessie Owens is the opening chapter of America’s war against Nazism. He went to Europe and, in a sense, proclaimed that our system was better. Then, five years later, our soldiers came to Europe and proved what Owens had foretold.
Jackie Robinson, taken alone, looks like a historical singularity, a first among many firsts in human statistics. But link him to Martin Luther King, and you have a story of civil rights, starting in baseball, then moving to Selma. This is how people remember the story. Whether there was a cause and effect or not is not important. What is important is that there is a story to tell, and its progression organizes our thoughts and promotes understanding.
When the U.S. hockey team beat the Soviets in 1980, it was one of the most unlikely upsets in sports history. It happened at the height of the Cold War, and most people at the time saw it as a small victory against the evil Communist Empire. To us thirty years later, it looks like the beginning of the end for the Soviets – the first crack in the Berlin Wall. Another story. In 1980 we did not know how the tale would end, but knowing the ending now, we can organize it. Somehow that sports contest, which at the time seemed like a taunt in the face of Leonid Brezhnev, now seems like a transition from the standoff of the 70s to the crumbling and fall of Communism in the 80s.
This brings us to the Superdome. Though not as grand an event as Owens or Robinson or the U.S. Hockey Team, it nonetheless has equal importance in the minds of people around here. In the Book of Katrina, a page was turned and on the new, clean sheet someone wrote: “Chapter II: The Recovery” and then: “On the night the Superdome was re-opened after Hurricane Katrina, 70,003 fans and an international audience watched the Saints beat the Atlanta Falcons 23-3.”
The first line of a new story. Why not?