As you know by now, Alabama took the BCS National Championship in Division 1 College Football last night in New Orleans by downing LSU in the Superdome, 21-0. It was a titanic defensive game, the kind that might destroy all future interest in the sport if all football games played out like this one, but congratulations remain in order. The Crimson Tide held the “Greaux Tigers” to fewer than a hundred yards rushing on the night and only allowed them to cross the 50-yard line once late in the fourth quarter before pushing them back to stay. LSU QB Jefferson looked like a deer in the headlights most of the evening, leaving many of us to wonder why LSU Coach Les Miles didn’t consider trying the other QB guy, Lee, late in the game – if for no other reason than to see if changing something might help. Leaving things as they were wasn’t working, but Miles decided to stay with the horse that died.
Congratulations to Coach Nick Saban and the Alabama Crimson Tide!
About fifty years, or a working lifetime ago, I lived in New Orleans briefly after my masters degree work at Tulane, staying with the University as a member of the clinical faculty at the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology downtown near the present site of the Superdome. I left New Orleans in 1965, the first year of the Astrodome. The hue and cry was just starting in Louisiana to build a dome in New Orleans that would be bigger and better than the one that just went up in Texas.
Louisiana Governor John McKeithen led the charge, telling citizens that the Pelican States domed venue couldn’t just stop at being a domed stadium. – It had to be a “Superdome” by comparison. The name suggestion and approval for construction came about in 1967 on the heels of the NFL’s adaptation of “Super Bowl” as their preferred title game name. You didn’t need a really sharp pencil to connect the dots between those two new cultural additions to American sports. – Where would you play a Super Bowl Game? – DUH!!! – What about playing it in the Superdome?
Governor McKeithen wasn’t the most eloquent public speaker to ever fly down the pike in Louisiana, but mumbling whole thoughts in Louisiana has always been more important than speaking in clear whole sentences. When McKeithen ran for office, his message was that he could help the people, but that he couldn’t help the people unless they first helped him get elected governor. Each of his television commercials always wrapped with McKeithen mumbling, “Whonchahepme?”
Translation: “Won’t you help me?”
The voters did. They voted him in. He pushed and got the dome built at great public expense. And here we are today. The thing still stands as a restored and viable big events venue and the home of the New Orleans Saints, Tulane football, the Sugar Bowl, and an occasional BCS Championship Game and Super Bowl. Meanwhile, the Astrodome is allowed to rot away in Houston without an active viable plan for its legitimate future use.
My two strongest memories of the Superdome probably are the same ones shared by most of us. The first is of all those horrible pictures that came to us on TV of the people trapped at the Superdome during the 2005 hurricane that struck New Orleans. The second memory is of New Orleans QB Drew Brees leading the Saints through a Super Bowl victorious season of play at the restored Superdome in 2009.
When the Saints finally won the Super Bowl and Brees was hugging and kissing his infant son on the field, the venue was actually in Miami, but it may as well have been the Superdome. That’s where my memory sorter wants to file it.
The Astrodome, Houston, Texas (as it appears today)
And last night, the present and future of the Superdome rolled on through another strong memory. It’s just too bad the grandaddy of them all, the Astrodome, is ending up with no apparent future. After all, it was the Astrodome that served as the great dream model for all this new vision on large stadium construction in the 20th century. Now it remains as a crumbling, expensively, but poorly maintained afterthought.
What are we going to do about it, Houston? Anything?
Tags: Astrodome, BCS Title Game 2012, Superdomw
The Pecan Park Eagle 
January 10, 2012 at 3:28 pm |
Total BEAT DOWN in Nawlins, but LSU is still the SEC Western Division and SEC Regular Season Champ. GEAUX
TIGERS….I posted this because I have the T-Shirts……LOL……SEC…..SEC…..SEC……
January 10, 2012 at 4:03 pm |
With respect to the Astro Dome, and knowing the present mindset of Houston City Hall, they will tear it down and build something else on the property, History has little if any meaning to the younger generations. You would think they at least could wait til all of us old timers were buried before destroying everything. I think my biggest complaint with the City of Houston is putting that useless train on Main street, why Main Street, even in the early 1900’s Main was shared with street cars, when they blocked Main street for this Train it was the ultimate insult.
January 10, 2012 at 4:38 pm |
The Astrodome was built as a baseball-first facility. The Superdome was built as a football-first facility. The NFL found the Astrodome too small to host major championships and the experiments to play baseball in the Superdome failed.
Houston built two new stadiums to replace the Astrodome. New Orleans refurbished the Superdome rather than build something new.
Ultimately, both venues had their greatest moment in 2005 as shelter for Hurricane Katrina victims – one to provide immediate shelter in the storm and the other to provide temporary housing while those victims took the first baby steps toward rebuilding their lives.
Sadly, each year the Astrodome stays dormant, the more money it will take to fix for re-use. The county should have sold it when a few investors wanted to buy it. Now, I suspect it will be torn down for parking.