There’s been a lot of talk of losers here in Chicago these days. Currently 29-92, the Chicago White Sox are poised to post one of the worst records of all time.
I’ve always been fascinated by terrible ball clubs of all kinds—especially in the professional ranks. How can one team, drawing exclusively from the elite levels of their sport, manage to collect this many bad ball players? These are players great enough individually to be paid for to play ball, but bad enough collectively not to be able to beat any other gaggles of their peers! It’s a puzzle, kind of.
In 1980, the city of New Orleans fielded a professional football team so bad their fans stopped calling them the Saints and started calling them “the Ain’ts,” and wore bags on their heads.
Last Friday night I sat down with a big glass of bourbon and savored the sadness, watching a late-season game from that ignominious year, in its three-hour-and-twenty-six-minute entirety. (With a little nap in the middle.)
CBS didn’t send their A-team announcers to cover this Toilet Bowl. Jim Kelly and Jim Hill are on the call; no one ever heard of either one of them again.
Kelly opens the broadcast by saying, “We’ve got a dandy for you today! The San Francisco 49ers started out very quickly with three straight wins, and then they lost their next eight games in a row. They won their last two, however. And the New Orleans Saints are winless [in 13 games] but they are regrouping with Coach Dick Stanfill.”
Let’s go down onto the field, and talk to rookie Saints running back Dave Waymer about the season, so far. Says Waymer: “It’s been a hair-raising experience, I’d say, coming from a place like Notre Dame, where we won most of the time—coming here and now we’re oh and thirteen. It’s quite a learning experience …”
As play begins, announcer Kelly notes cheerfully that Saints’ coach Dick Nolan has just been fired, making way for the shellshocked Dick Stanfill to “regroup” one of the worst teams in NFL history.
The excitement of this “dandy” rests on one question: Are the five-and-eight 49ers bad enough to give the utterly hapless Saints a chance to win their first game of this long season?!
This game is even sadder in retrospect than it must have been in person. It seems you can watch the Saints’ quarterback Archie Manning actually, visibly realize he’s never going to win so much as a wildcard playoff game before he is forced by injuries suffered in this weekly physical assault to retire. And he’s taking on Joe Montana, a second-year man who just won a tenuous starting quarterback job on another shite team, but who is bound for Super Bowl glory.
But aging Archie draws first blood, tossing an easy 33-harder for a touchdown. Saints lead, 7-0!
When I started paying attention to professional football—kind of all of a sudden, in a pre-adolescent passion, somewhere between fifth- and sixth-grade—some teams seemed truly exotic. Usually, come to think of it, those were the terrible teams! The teams that were never on TV, and inspired a 1980 suburban-Akron sixth-grader to wonder where “New Orleans” could be … and whether it was close to “San Francisco.” To that kid, still buried deep inside me, watching the 49ers and Saints is like watching Marylin Monroe ride a triceratops, bareback. No wonder this game is sponsored by Lowenbraü. A dandy, indeed.
Now Manning throws a 20-yard touchdown pass and the Saints lead 14-0.
Sez Jim Hill: “And when the score of this ballgame is flashed across the country, there’s a four-letter word we’re gonna say: ‘W. H. A. T.?’ They won’t believe it right now.”
The fans of the 49ers (named after a bunch of desperate 19th century opportunists) clearly don’t anticipate a decade of dominance. They’re booing their asses off as New Orleans goes up 21-0. Montana is 6-7 but for only 20 yards, and now he’s sacked for a big loss. And on second down, sacked again. On third, an incomplete pass. Get this bum out of there!
Jim Kelly praises the nervous-looking new New Orleans Coach Stanfill for puttting “a thousand miles on those Hush Puppies already this afternoon.”
Saints go up, 28-7. How are they going to manage to lose this?! Well, anything’s possible. For instance, the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies lost a bunch in a row. According to a recent piece in The New York Times: “[Phillies Pitcher Art] Mahaffey still rues a home run pitch to Milwaukee’s Joe Adcock in loss No. 20 on Aug. 17. Ordered by [Manager Gene] Mauch to drill Adcock (‘It’ll cost you if you don’t,’ he said Mauch told him) Mahaffey threw one under the slugger’s chin, only for Adcock to bail out, swing wildly—and somehow drive the ball over the fence.”
And now Archie throws another touchdown pass, as the first half ends: 35-7.
[I sleep through third quarter and a hunk of the fourth. Wake up with a start to discover Saints lead by only 35-21. And now the 49ers score halfway through he fourth quarter to make it 35-28!]
The action is interrupted by a Diamond Council commercial, which hasn’t quite found its way to the line, “Diamonds are forever.” It’s the more straightforwardly transactional, “When you give diamonds, you get so much in return.”
Jim Hill announces the juggernaut CBS TV lineup after the game, before lamenting personally, “Those of us that have to get planes to the East Coast will go back to the hotel and get room service or something, and watch ’60 Minutes’ and ‘Archie Bunker’s Place’ and ‘One Day at a Time,’ and all of Mel’s problems in the diner tonight.’”
For the love of the Chicago Cardinals, the 49ers are driving into Saints territory—threatening to score the tying touchdown here at two-minute warning.
35-35.
“It’s been a dandy!” says Jim Kelly.
We go to overtime.
“Thirty-five, thirty-five,” Jim Kelly says, repeating: “It’s been a dandy!”
Now in overtime, the Saints are on the move!
“Jim Hill’s fiancé is here,” Jim Kelly says. “She’ll probably be a bride before this game is over.”
Hill doesn’t get it either. “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
You can tell Joe Montana knows he’s different, that the 49ers are different, from the Saints. And the 49ers know it too. A couple drives later, they find themselves deep in Saints territory again, where they kick a field goal to win.
The Saints did win the next week, beating the also-hapless New York Jets. They went on to finish 1-15, and kept on losing throughout the next couple of decades and into a third.
You know, I think I’ll try to get down to the South Side and catch one of those Sox games in that mostly empty ballpark. You want to get in on the ground floor of a thing like this.
Mu sister-in-law was working in the New Orleans Saints box office deing the era of the Ain’ts. No one buying tickets would admit they were buying them for themselves. It was always “These are for my brother,” or “My father knew I’d be in the area and asked me to pick them up,” or “I’m buying them because a friend wanted to see the game.”
LOL. That’s also kind of a New Orleans thing. Like, in New York/New Jersey, they take perverse pride in showing up for Jets—the lowlier the better. But New Orleans people aren’t that fucking dumb.