The Pecan Park Eagle

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?