Londonderry News

Scant days from now modern gladiators will gird for an epic battle for the pinnacle of athletic achievement. Many will enter the arena in hopes of the ultimate glory, but there can be only one winning team, one champion. And soon we will know who that is.

But before then, there’s the Super Bowl.

This year’s warmup to the Winter Olympics pits the Baltimore – oops, I always do that – make that Indianapolis Colts against the New Orleans Saints. The United States Navy has a class of submarines named after cities. They’re called the Los Angeles Class. There’s the Asheville, the Dallas, the Boston, Providence, and Groton, and the City of Corpus Christi. “Corpus Christi” means “Body of Christ.” When they first proposed naming a submarine for Corpus Christi (or Corpus, as the locals tastefully call it), people protested that an instrument of war should not be named for the Christian savior. But putting the words “City Of” on it fixed all that.

I mention that because, if you shouldn’t name a submarine “Corpus Christi,” why should football players be known as “Saints”? After all, their jobs are pretty much the same. The mission of one is to rain hate and destruction upon its enemies and protect its sacred territory. The other one fights wars.

I’m basing this assertion on rumor and innuendo that I checked out on the Internet and didn’t find disproven, so therefore it must be fact. That rumor said the Saints made it to the Super Bowl by intentionally trying to injure quarterbacks Kurt Warner of the Cardinals (named for the birds, not the Princes of the Church) and Brett Favre of the Vikings (named for boat owners on “The Deadliest Catch”), and indicating that they wouldn’t be sorry if the same thing happened to Peyton Manning of the Baltimore Skulk-Out-in-the-Middle-of-the-Nighters.

Not like that’s unique to the Saints, and not like I’m Louis Renault and I’m shocked, shocked that violence takes place in the game. The nationwide parade of broken players on meat wagons re-enacting the “I’m not dead yet” scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” belies the claim that the brutality surprises us and isn’t Part of the Game. The Saints’ big sin is that they admitted it. They should have been more political and just said that mistakes were made and probably would be again.

Which they will, and this time to Peyton Manning.

But let’s talk a little about Peyton. He’s America’s Favorite Quarterback – so popular in New York that they hired his little brother in the hope that Peyton would come visit more, loathed in Dallas because Tony Romo sucks, and resented in New England because he’s better than Tom Brady in the eyes of anyone west of the Connecticut River, give or take Vermont. And that implies he’s probably better than “Who Dat” down in New Orleans.

And let’s talk about New Orleans too. The town has gone nuts over the Saints, in no small part because up until now they were one of the very, very few teams never to play in the Super Bowl who were also in the NFL. (The others are the Cleveland Browns, unless you count the Browns that skulked off to Baltimore as a late replacement for the Colts, but then you’d have to include the Ravens, which would be hard because I saw the Ravens beat the Giants in the Super Bowl on TV, and I don’t think I want to antagonize that guy on TV they call “Goose”; and the Texans, Jaguars, and Lions.)

The town has gone nuts over the Saints, although five years after Hurricane Katrina their city and region is still partly obliterated. The team paid its guys $121,552,424 to play football this season (according to CBS) against $213 million in 2008 revenues (according to Forbes), every cent of which didn’t go to building a city where a city used to be for people who can’t afford season tickets. Their stadium lost part of its roof in Katrina and became an icon of stupidity, devastation, and despair, and the Saints played the rest of that season out of town, but it’s for damn sure the stadium got fixed back up faster than the Lower Ninth Ward, parts of which still haven’t been rebuilt, and now the Saints are going to the Super Bowl to wage jihad and try to inflict mayhem on the Indianapolis Colts, who probably have similar sins in their history (like skulking out on Baltimore), but I guess I just don’t care as much about those. Besides, they’re stuck in Indianapolis, and I’m pretty sure that if I had to live there too, I’d need a Super Bowl win every now and then to make up for the geography.

So it’s prediction time. I’m taking Canada. They have a solid home-field advantage and a lot of motivation that I believe will propel them to a decisive victory in the Olympic medal count. And in the Super Bowl, give me the Colts. I don’t particularly like them better, I just find them less vulgar.

(PS, in the last strike year, they called Chicago’s replacement team the Spares. New Orleans’ was called the Aints.)