Ever seen someone with a New Orleans Saints license plate – out of state? That’s either a true football fan or a person wanting to demonstrate solidarity with the city of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Needless to say, it’s usually both, a sports fan with a social conscience.
Sports are usually considered to be pure entertainment, some thing where everybody can forget about real-world issues and troubles and indulge in a primal urge to compete – or live vicariously through those who do. And so NFL license plates are popular, the mark of a dedicated sports fan, and they sell by the tens of thousands.
But it is a nice thing to see and read about in the papers when sports aspires towards something a lot more than just multi-million-dollar salaries. Not that there’s anything wrong with making money, but it’s nice to see that it’s not all about money, particularly with something which moves so many individuals so passionately.
And so rooting for the Saints and even going so far as to mount a New Orleans Saints license plate came to be some thing of a civic duty, almost, for the socially aware sports fan, if you will. For there’s practically nothing most Americans like better than their football than to root for the underdog, and sports franchises symbolize their cities in a way that few other goodwill ambassadors can.
And so it was that everybody cheered on the Saints in their first post-Katrina game. It wasn’t just about scores and bragging rights anymore; it was about a shared concern for fellow Americans, a way to show one’s own compassion and even support, even if only symbolic – and of course, in sports, it’s all about symbolism. Just as Katrina, in a catastrophic catharsis of Biblical proportions, symbolized a country stunned at its own impotence and bad luck. And what does sports center around if not power and the vagaries of fate?
