In that number

They used to call it "throwing a bone."

Back at the newspaper I used to work for, in the career I used to have. Back in the day when the Men in Ties had money and resources and didn't care how they used them. Back at the old Times-Picayune, when we had a whole lot of sports reporters and everybody had their beats --  Saints. LSU. Tulane. State colleges. Boxing. Baseball. Recreation. Fish. And Preps. (Pretty much in that order, too.)

After I wormed my way from agate clerk to day time clerk, I became the recreation writer. I was the Queen of New Orleans softball for a while. Then I moved to Preps, and to the Arctic Outpost known as the River Parishes Bureau, where I spent 21 years covering high school sports in St. John, St. Charles and St. James parishes -- or, as I like to call them, The Other Saints.

And that's what you did and who you were. The Saints guys went to the Saints games on Sundays. The college guys traveled all over Tarnation covering LSU and Tulane. The Outdoors writer went duck hunting and fishing and got paid for it.

Me? I got to go to tiny burgs like Iota and Famerville and Vacherie, eat all the jambalaya I wanted, freeze my ass off with all species of spiders and bugs, get heckled by disgruntled grandmothers and cover high schools. I also got to interview the likes of Eli and Peyton Manning,  Mike Scifres, Laron and Dawan Landry and Ed Reed before they were millionaires.

But occasionally, one of the six sports editors we had over my 26 years there would "throw a bone" and ask one of the college guys to cover a Saints game, or ask one of us Preps guys to cover a college. Or, the rarity, ask one of the Preps guys to cover the Saints. But never me.

No. Not one of the six Men in Ties who led the Sports Department in my career ever looked past the room and to the Arctic Outpost and said, "Hey Lori! How 'bout you come cover a Saints game on Sunday?"

Super Bowls. New Orleans Bowls, LSU baseball games. Zephyrs baseball games (which I absolutely loved but everybody else kind of hated). Crescent City Classics. The Dick Vitale Sound-Alike Contest. Beach Volleyball. Soccer.  Yes. But never the Saints.

So last week when a sports editor buddy of mine in another city -- and I don't know if he wears a tie or not -- asked me to string for him and go cover last Sunday's season opener, I said --- "Are you kidding me?"

I didn't exactly jump at the chance. It's not that I was afraid of the work. I know I can write a story about anything. On deadline.  Hell, two weeks ago I wrote about wood pellets for the Louisiana Forestry Department. It's not that I've never been to the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. I've been there plenty of times and I know my way to the press box.

It was just, well, intimidating. I haven't been to a Saints game since about 1992, back when they weren't very good and tickets were cheap and easy.

But after mulling it over for a few days, I decided -- Oh, why the hell not? I've never done it. I don't know how many chances I'll get. This was the Saints vs. the Falcons, the biggest rivalry in the NFL. The season-opener.

And, well, did I mention that I AM unemployed?

So after swallowing butterflies for days, I was up and early on Sunday morning to await the arrival of a fellow sports writer -- a veteran -- who was bringing me my press pass and agreed to let me ride with him to the Dome. Two hours after his announced arrival time, he did, giving us about an hour to fight New Orleans traffic and get to the Dome before kickoff.

Yeah. We kind of made it.

At one point along the way, my companion handed me my pass and I busied myself  attaching it to my self-made freelancer's ID lanyard and watching outside my window as the sea of black and gold Who Dats made their way to the Dome. And watched the clock.

At about 11:55, we finally got into the parking garage where my companion promptly didn't find his spot but one with some of the numbers on his parking pass. Close enough. So we got out and ran to the media gate, me in heels; him not.  I kept running, even after I hit a hole in the chipped concrete and rolled an ankle. The workers at the gate were very accomodating, recognizing that we were very late. So they wanded us quickly and checked our bags. (Yes, reporters are exempt from that stupid clear plastic baggie rule.)

Then we had to get past the press gate, where they checked our passes. My companion went ahead and breezed through. Me? Not so much. The security guard scanned my pass and said, "It's expired."

"Excuse me?"

Turns out, my companion had handed me a pass from an already-played pre-season game against the Kansas City Chiefs, not today's game against the Atlanta Falcons.

Yeah.

My companion then busied himself taking the blame for the mistake and urging the security folks to replace the old pass with the right one which, he explained, was in his car. (He didn't tell them it was parked in the wrong spot, however.) They did.

Meanwhile, Saints Coach Sean Payton was leading the traditional Who Dat pre-game chant with beloved former Saint Steve Gleason, who is living his life with ALS and teaching us all how to stop bitching about ours. It was very, very loud.

The next few minutes were spent taking the sloooooooow elevator ride up the press box and finding out where I was supposed to sit -- Auxiliary Press Box. I was lucky to be seated next to my sports buddy Chris who works for my hometown paper and is my Facebook and Twitter friend.  Then I tried to catch my breath, stop sweating (I thought everybody said it was cold up there), rolled my ankle to make sure it wasn't broken and get my bearings. Whew. I was there. Here.

If you lean forward, it's just like being there. Really.

I looked around and saw a bunch of folks I knew --  the press box crew I know so well from my 22 years of covering high school championship games in the Dome, local media folks, former co-workers, the PA announcer who tells all the press what's going on because nobody's watching the game, fellow members of the Louisiana Sports Writers Association and a few people that sports diehards would consider famous. I spent most of halftime hugging and kissing old friends, many of whom knew it was my first Saints game as a reporter thanks to a Facebook status that got 94 likes.

I watched the game, I took some notes, I watched the big screens as the Who Dats danced and acted silly,  I thanked the stats guys as they handed me updates after each quarter, I stood in line at the one ladies room, and I tried to get my stupid iPhone to work, but both my Twitter and Facebook apps were frozen. I did take a few photos and chat with Chris.  We talked about how, the Friday night before, I had covered one football game for three different outlets -- two newspapers and a web site. I do that just about every Friday night.

"You're a beast," he said. And it was a great compliment.

Everybody else had their laptops open. Some of them were working, but from my vantage point on the top row, it looked like most of them were watching their fantasy football teams. I texted my husband, who asked if I was having fun.

"It's just like high school but more of them and they're better dressed," I replied.

Then I realized that half of the people up there probably could not do what guys like Chris and I do on a Friday night -- carry our own equipment up to Row Z in the stadium, fight the spiders and the bugs and the TV and radio people who like to spread out, keep their own stats and play-by-play while live-tweeting, Facebooking and blogging, get their own post-game quotes, add it all up and knock out a story from inside their car on deadline with sweat dripping in your eyes. Some of them just have hair and makeup people.

(I know this is getting long, just bear with me. There's more!)


So, the game winds down and I figure out what my little sidebar story will be (Marques Colston) and I see folks rushing toward the elevator. Unlike on Friday nights, I don't really need to rush. But by the time I get to the elevator, there is a line. A long, long line, of men and women (mostly men), famous people and grunts like me, trying to get down to the bowels of the Dome. They let us in about eight at a time (depending on who's in there), but we do get bumped for the Falcons coaches (who do not look very happy), some NFL officials and other people much more important than us.

Eventually, I do make it down to the bottom, following my old editor Ted and my friend Chris to where, I presume, I'm supposed to go.  At one point, everybody takes a right so I do too -- right into the Saints locker room.

Now, I've been doing this 26 years. I've been in locker rooms, mostly empty ones. Interviews with high school kids are done on the field after the game and in the coach's office or the training room before. College players and coaches are brought to the interview room. The Zephyrs used to let me stand outside the locker room in a little cubbyhole we called my office. Everybody was happier.   I don't even go in my husband's locker room. They smell. Like locker rooms. And there are naked men in there. Yes, there were. I really didn't need to see that. I just wanted a few quotes.

So, I extricate myself as delicately as possible with help from the Saints PR guy, who says, "Since you're new, you might want to go to the interview room down the hall."

Yes. Yes I would, thank you. So I did.

An hour or so later, I head back up to the press box armed with a digital recorder full of quotes. An hour or so after that, I'm done with my little story on Marques Colston becoming the Saints all-time leading passer. An hour after that, I am so hungry I could eat a Superdome hotdog without regret as I wait for my companion to finish his second story of the day.

But I take a moment to appreciate the fact that I got to do this at least once, even if it did take 26 years.

It was worth the wait.



You can read my story here: Marques Colston's record breaking catch gets Saints back in the game

Saints

This is a Saint.

In the first few months after The Coach and I adopted our baby girl, we were giddy. It wasn't just that we had this absolutely adorable new baby in our arms and I had no stretch marks to show for it.  It was because after years of trying, years of disappointment, years of infertility treatments and millions of tears, we had gotten the payoff.  A baby. Our baby.

So we had a tendency to shout it from the rooftops for a while; "We adopted! We're so lucky!"

And sometimes, a lot of times actually, people would say, "Y'all are such good people for adopting that baby."

Wait. What? 

No. We're not.

We're a couple who wanted a baby. I am a woman who couldn't have one. So we turned to adoption. And we were fortunate enough to find a wonderful woman who was willing to allow us to have hers. What a miracle that is.

I mean, no one tells regular parents how "good" they are for having a baby, do they?

Do they?

What we are is persistent. And determined. Certainly creative in the way we went about it. And very, very lucky.  Because adoption is hard. It's expensive. It's emotionally draining. But it's so, so worth it in the end. Even when that adorable pink moppet grows up to be a snarky tween who refuses to come out of her room.

But it does not make me a saint.


People tell me that sometimes, though. Now it's because,  for the last eight months I have been the primary caregiver for my 82-year-old mother-in-law, who moved in with us after her assisted living home determined that she needed too much assistance.


Yes, while my husband went of to teach and my daughter went off to learn and the newspaper went from printing seven days a week to three,  I have gotten her out of bed, gotten her to the bathroom, made her breakfast, cut up her pancakes, fixed her oatmeal just the way she likes it, gotten her dressed, put on her bra (but I refuse to cup her boobs. That she has to do herself), washed her hair, given her her pills, fixed her snacks and, three times a week, taken her to and from her dialysis treatments. Sometimes I have had to pick her up off the floor. Sometimes I have had to clean her up.

And people have told me that, because I am doing all of those things and "allowing" my mother-in-law to live with us, I am a saint. Or, at the very least, I am earning my angel's wings and securing my spot in heaven.

I guess I hope that is true. But I am not a saint.

I have not always done the above happily. Or willingly. Or sweetly. Or gently.

I have been angry.  I say the "F" word. A lot. I have yelled. At her. At my daughter. At my husband, who at least had the distraction of baseball to keep him sane. I've got nothing but a 40-minute power walk in the morning.

I have some people thinking I have become an alcoholic. I have developed a taste for Vodka and I have reacquainted myself with Jose Quervo, whom I broke up with after one really bad night in college.

And I have become a shut-in. I don't go places. I don't do things. Sometimes, I feel trapped in my own home.

One day as The Coach walked in, I walked out.

"I have to go somewhere," I said.

"Where?" he asked, truly bewildered.

"Anywhere," I replied.

I went to Big Lots. And cried.

I have resented the hell out of her -- for invading my house, for ruining our family time, for demanding my time, for making me wait on her, for wanting peanut butter instead of the delicious meal I just cooked. Even though I know that none of this is her fault.

So while people are telling me I'm a saint, I'm feeling evil and mean and ashamed of myself for wishing that she wasn't here. That we didn't have to do this.  That I didn't have handrails on my toilet. That I didn't have to listen to her TV instead of the one I am trying to watch in the living room. That I didn't have to hear her in the bathroom because she can't close the door when she goes. That I had never bought that fucking beeper she uses to summon us. That it wouldn't go off  just as my husband and I are about to get busy. Or in the middle of it.  That my husband, my child and I could go do something -- anything -- together as a family, but we can't unless she have a "sitter." That we had one we could count on. That our lives would go back to normal.

And that those who are pinning wings on my back won't think less of me for admitting it.

Because I am not a saint.  But I wish I was.

Who Dat

My black and gold feather boa wreath has been tucked away in a plastic bag in my closet since February, along with several pairs of over sized black and gold Mardi Gras beads, an assortment of Fleur de Lis and a black and gold rendition of the American flag.

I took them down -- reluctantly - after the Saints' humiliating loss to the 49ers in the second round of the playoffs. Like every other loyal Who Dat, I wasn't ready for the season to end just yet. And certainly, not like this -- losing in the final seconds of the game on a play every Who Dat in America could see coming.

I was embarrassed.  We expected more than this. We were better than this.

At the time, I posted to my Facebook friends -- a group that includes a large amount of fellow fans as well as several sports writers and other assorted newspaper folk -- that I felt like a spouse in a really good, strong marriage. I still loved my Saints, I said,  but I was really, really mad at them.

Then came the rumors about "Bountygate." The Saints were being investigated for having a bounty system in which players were paid bonuses for not just hitting opposing players, which they are paid to do and expected to do and do well, but for trying to actually hurt them, cause injuries, have them carted off the field on a stretcher. And the coaches not only knew about this,  but instigated it.


Then, I posted, I felt like the Saints had cheated on me.

Well now I feel like they got her pregnant. With twins.

Yesterday the NFL brought the hammer down on our beloved Saints, the team that lifted a region and indeed a whole nation from the mud and the muck left in Katrina's wake. Coach Sean Payton, suspended for a year. General manager Mickey Loomis, suspended for eight games. The team fined $500,000. Our former defensive coordinator, who allegedly organized the whole thing (I'm a crime writer now), banned indefinitely (and that's a good thing).

But it hurts like hell.


Some of my fellow Who Dats are angry, insisting that Commissioner Roger Goodell is picking on "us," making an example of "us," trying to insure that we will NOT  be the first home team to ever host a Super Bowl (Super Bowl XLVII is in New Orleans next February). Really?

Some are insisting that every team is doing it (so it must be OK) and we are being singled out. Or that we did nothing wrong.

Only a handful -- like me -- believe we got what we deserved.

As a sports writer for 23 of my 25 years in this business -- and as a fan for all of my life -- I know that football is a violent sport. Hitting is part of the game. Injuries are part of the game. And hard hits are rewarded, with pats on the butt, slaps on the helmet, stickers, Player of the Week honors, spots on the All-Metro team and championship trophies. But when a player intentionally sets out to injure and or maim another -- even for what we consider to be pocket change -- well, that's crossing the line. And that's what we did.

I am a long-suffering fan. I endured the humiliating losses, the humiliating seasons, the jokes, the 'Aints. I once wrote "Don't laugh," when I was asked to select my favorite team on my Sports Illustrated subscription card.

And the night "we" won the Super Bowl, I took my daughter and danced in the street, celebrating with unprecedented joy the end of our suffering.

But now our halo is crooked and our one shining season is tarnished. People are talking about asterisks next to our name.  We are, once again, a laughingstock. Worse, we are said to be "dirty."

But I still believe.

So I will hang my wreath on my front door in the fall -- heck, maybe even tomorrow.  I will cheer for them this season and next, no matter who coaches them, no matter who quarterbacks them, no matter who runs the ball into the end zone. 


But I am embarrassed. I expect more than this. We are better than that. 

Who Dat.

Dis and Dat

Flags are flying from houses, from car windows. People are installing flag poles just for the occasion.

People are shoe polishing their own car windows.

And grown women are wandering the aisles of Barnes and Noble wearing football jerseys. On a Saturday afternoon. The week before Mardi Gras.

In New Orleans.

There is definitely a phenomenon going on.

It's called Who Dat Fever, and the city of New Orleans certainly has it. So do the suburbs.

On my street alone there is a house with Who Dat spelled out in Christmas lights, there are several "Who Dat Nation" yard signs and a giant plywood Who Dat adorns a front lawn. Then, the local A/C repair company installed a giant flag pole yesterday -- to run up a Saints flag.

I even have my own little Saints shrine in my front window.

Yesterday I saw the gas man in his Saints jersey and he didn't stand out at all. So are all of the shoppers in the grocery store and all the kids at my kid's school.

And every woman in the city owns at least one Fleur de Lis piece of jewelry.

A drive to the city today was like being in a summer all-star parade. Shoe polish doodles spell out "Geaux Saints" and "Who Dat" on every other car window. Those that don't have either a Fleur de Lis decal on the back or black and gold flags flying from the windows.

The New Orleans Saints are in the Super Bowl for the first time ever, and it is an amazing experience.

We are savoring it. Every second of it. Because it took us 43 years just to get here and we know not if we will pass this way again. People we know didn't live to see this. Will we live to see it again? Is this truly an historic event?

It certainly is for the Who Dat Nation. I have friends in Miami for XLIV, co-workers and colleagues who are writing their dream stories for their papers and their blogs and their networks and us fans.

I have friends in Miami who scored dream tickets to the dream game.

I have friends in Miami who are just getting drunk.

And we are spending a sleepless night because we are excited. But we also are a little worried. They are saying we can't win. They are saying we won't win. They are saying there is no way we can beat the son of the most beloved quarterback in our team's history, who is currently considered the best in the game. They are saying we will be crying on Monday.

And we likely will be.

But we've been crying for 43 years, over every loss snatched from the jaws of victory, over every missed field goal, every fumble at the goal line, every Hail Mary pass thrown against us.

But we've been crying for two weeks, ever since that goofy looking little kicker clutched out and kicked the most historic 40-yard field goal in football history, ever since my friend Jim Henderson screamed at the top of his lungs that pigs were flying, ever since we punched our ticket to the big game for the first time EVER.

And we've cried each and every time our brains try to wrap themselves around the thought, "The Saints are in the Super Bowl. OUR Saints."

And win or lose on Sunday, we'll be crying some more.