Oh When the Saints

January 19, 2010

Oh When the Saints

I pull for the Saints only for the city’s sake. I don’t like football and don’t like to watch it; the emotional strain is overpowering and the brute physicality of the game numbs. I’m a baseball man. I like the long, slow, subtle poetry of the season.

Kurt Warner, in one play, was covered by Saints’ defenders ‘like a pack of wolves’. The winners willed themselves to victory by sheer straining effort — so unlike baseball, where all is restraint, calm, alert observation. The Cardinals had a fine, lithe runner, Hightower, who scooted to a touchdown on the very first play, plunging the Dome into tombal silence; they had a wonderful receiver who made his presence known, too late, in the second half. Yet generally the Cardinals impressed me as light, ethereal, quick but not thunderous, like the Saints. They didn’t have a chance.

It is true, Reggie Bush was thrilling. The touchdown run in the first half, when he found himself for a moment surrounded by defenders, and whirled two or three times like a dancer, and then just about literally disappeared from the scene for a score. Like Roadrunner. It was superb entertainment.

The flea-flicker, too, is a joy to behold — when it works, as it did Saturday.
The Saints, toward the end, refrained from smashing Warner to the ground, instead, supporting him when he was caught. A gallant gesture. So too, was Warner gallant, when he went after the Saint who had intercepted his pass — and, in the process, Warner was just about killed. He could have suffered a serious head injury, not a “shoulder injury,” which would have put me in the hospital for two weeks, while Warner returned to play the second half. He himself admitted he was concerned. “I will have to think about playing another year or not.” I’d say he’ll have to think. Don’t do it, man.

What’s going to happen next Sunday? The Saints have waited so long for this. Let’s hope Favre doesn’t carve us up for dinner. Kill ‘em, Saints! Hammer them! We can beat those Vikes! Who does Favre think he is, the old bastard, coming back at his age? Hammer him down, boys.


gmc