Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook
Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.
Equating a tax-supported stadium with the ultimate health of a city is an activity with roots in ancient times. In the eighth century, the monk known as the Venerable Bede wrote: "As long as the Colosseum stands, so shall Rome; when the Colosseum falls, so shall Rome."
Of course, Saint Bede wasn't writing on behalf of sports team owners trying to extort publicly funded renovations to the Colosseum by threatening to move the Roman gladiators to Naples. He was noting the hopes and dreams that are represented in stadiums. As stadiums are to their cities today, the Roman Colosseum was the most striking architectural representation of its might, ambition and hubris. It also represented the stratifications in Rome's class system, with certain tiers reserved for certain classes. If the Colosseum fell, that would denote, in Bede's mind, the crumbling of the Roman Empire itself.
The idea that the dilapidation of a stadium would be the undoing of any city, or a nation itself, is patently ridiculous; New York is on its third Madison Square Garden, and the city didn't die with each passing of the World's Most Famous Arena. However, Bede's words do ring true for one stadium: the Louisiana Superdome.
For all the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, it is the sight of a destroyed Superdome that most signifies the perhaps permanent destruction of New Orleans, as well as the magnification of the stratifications of America's own unofficial class system.
The Superdome opened in 1975 as the culmination of a dream fostered by local businessman David Dixon, who believed a 70,000-seat domed stadium would be the ultimate sign of the arrival of New Orleans — popular with tourists, but relatively small in population for a metro area, and very poor — as a convention and business center. It was massive enough that until the opening of London's Millennium Dome in 1999, the Superdome was the largest domed structure in the world.
The stadium was an immediate, awe-inspiring hit. Not many stadiums get their own movie, but the Superdome did — the 1978 TV movie "Superdome," starring Tom Selleck. The Superdome hosted the NFL's New Orleans Saints and Tulane college football games, but more importantly for New Orleans it was a magnet for big, tourist-drawing sporting events: six Super Bowls; four NCAA men's college basketball Final Fours; one of the major college football bowls, the Sugar Bowl; and the Bayou Classic, featuring Grambling State and Southern, the most prestigious football rivalry among historically black colleges. The Superdome also was the site of the 1988 Republican convention, which nominated George H.W. Bush for president.
Like most stadiums in America, however, its steadiest tenant grew to despise it. The Saints for years have toyed with moving elsewhere, getting greater and greater state subsidies — in the tens of millions of dollars annually — while they negotiate with the state and city for an improved Superdome, or a new stadium altogether. (This, after the Superdome itself opened after massive cost overruns that put the final price tag at more than five times its original $31 million estimate.)
The underlying issues for Saints owner Tom Benson were that New Orleans was one of the smallest — a metro area of 1.3 million — and one of the poorest markets in the NFL. Still, the Superdome for outsiders still held much of its thrall, especially if your team was in the Super Bowl or Final Four. The tourists loved New Orleans and never noticed its problems.
That is, until Katrina. On Aug. 26, 44,485 spectators, mostly white and well-heeled, filed into the Superdome to watch a preseason NFL game between the New Orleans Saints and the Baltimore Ravens. Two days later, about 20,000 New Orleans residents, mostly black and poor, filed into the Superdome to watch their lives get smashed to bits. They went to the Superdome because they could not otherwise get out of town before Katrina's arrival, and they went there because it was deemed to be a safe place, just as it might be for those football fans.
As we all know now, the Superdome was anything but safe, a rotten, stinking, leaking hellhole where making it through the night meant facing more hell the next day. And far from the Superdome, it was particularly jarring to see a place
that had held so much joy, a center of entertainment, turn into a center of desperation. And it was particularly embarrassing to see that this desperate situation made nakedly clear that there existed an America that could get into the Superdome only when its city and the stadium itself turned into Bangladesh-on-the-Bayou. If the burliest structure in New Orleans couldn't stand up to the punishment of Katrina, and couldn't serve as a sanctuary to those Katrina punished, what other hope would New Orleans have?
It's one thing to have a stadium destroyed because you've built a shiny new one next door; it's another to see it turn to ruins in a day. The Colosseum stood up to multiple earthquakes, after all.
St. Bede had one more thing to say about what would happen if the Colosseum fell; not only would Rome fall, but "when Rome falls, so shall the world." Perhaps the world will not fall because the Superdome has. But the Superdome's destruction is a stark reminder that New Orleans' chances of standing again don't look very good.
E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.
