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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The Saints win a game and are anointed inspirational heroes in the feel-good story of the weekend. My, that was an easy template to follow.
Sep 12, 2005 | Call me a killjoy, a cynic. I want to be wrong. I hope I'm wrong about this.
But I just can't help feeling suspicious about the big story coming out of the first Sunday of the NFL season, the New Orleans Saints' last-minute victory over the Carolina Panthers providing hope, uplift and inspiration to their fans in hurricane-ravaged Louisiana.
I feel like it's too easy, too reflexive a move on the part of the media. We love to tell feel-good stories in dark times. They make us feel better, make our readers and viewers and listeners feel better. I think we reach for them sometimes.
I don't mean to diminish any hope, uplift and inspiration the Saints really did provide to real people who really need it. I know that happens.
I don't think reporters made up stories about cops huddled around a patrol-car radio, reveling in the near normalcy of listening to the game. I don't believe Saints players were lying when they said people in the Astrodome or other shelters they visited told them they had to go out and win some games to give the people hope.
But I don't think that's all that happens.
What I think is that we in the media like to use templates when we can, and the template for this weekend was "sports victory provides inspiration." It was applied to LSU's win over Arizona State Saturday night too.
Inspiring the Saints' victory was, and let's take a second to praise them for overcoming incredible difficulties and pressure to stay focused and win in a way the Saints aren't known for doing in the best of times.
But I get a little leery when the scenes the TV networks show of people watching the game at shelters are suspiciously tight shots of a few guys sitting around a single table, and their reaction to the game-winning field goal looks more like weary, semi-interested applause than unfettered, thank you for letting me forget joy.
I'm suspicious because, as much as I love sports, as much, yes, comfort as I take in them sometimes, if my house and city were destroyed and I'd just lived through two weeks of death and terror, my reaction to the home 11 winning or losing would, I think, be that I couldn't care less.
Even a winning streak would leave me cold. Great, I'd think, my team finally puts together a decent season and I can't even enjoy it. Maybe I'm the only person in the world who thinks this way. I'm just saying I suspect I'm not, and that those who feel this way weren't going to get their stories told on Sunday because it didn't fit the narrative.
I'm saying this from a place far removed from Katrina's path, but I have some experience in this area. I lived through the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California, the one that interrupted the World Series. That was, of course, a fender bender compared with Hurricane Katrina, and I was relatively unscathed.
