McMullen: Geaux Saints! — or something like that

So people tell me that there’s this thing called football and they assure me that it is quite interesting. Apparently there’s a whole lot of people who get paid millions of dollars each year to put on silly clothes and smash their bodies into each other in the hopes of possessing a small leather ball.

Most of my family aren’t really the kind of people who watch any kind of sport at all, much less football. (Although my grandmother had an odd affinity for George Brett and the Kansas City Royals for a great long time.)

So I did watch the occasional baseball game with my grandmother but the only time that I was really compelled to watch a game of anything was when the Super Bowl rolled around. It just seemed like something I should watch. It felt like people all over the country would think less of me if I didn’t plop down on the couch and act like I cared about football for one night. The Super Bowl, above all other televised events, has a “you should definitely watch this” aura.

If you were to ask little Travis who his favorite football team was, his answer might seem a little odd.

“The Dallas Cowboys,” I would have told you once upon a time, even though I had only been to Texas once before 2004 and that was just long enough for a layover in Dallas. Now I can’t say for sure why the Cowboys were my team, but it just seemed that they were the team I should pull for.

Maybe I was just a little nonconformist and decided to choose the Cowboys because it was one of the only other teams that I knew about that didn’t happen to be the Kansas City Chiefs.

For the past few years, though, the only part of any given Super Bowl that I actually watched was the halftime show. They usually manage to get at least one musical act that is worth watching, so I always watched something else on Super Bowl night and switched back to it during the commercials to see if the halftime show had started.

No team meant anything more to me than any other team. I just didn’t care about who had beaten who and I couldn’t see why anyone did.

During this season’s NFC Championship game, I was watching a documentary on ESPN called “Muhammad and Larry” (documenting Muhammad Ali’s final boxing match against Larry Holmes) and after that they were showing the footage from the classic “Rumble in the Jungle” match between Ali and George Forman (and I decided to watch that, too, since I never had before and I figured it was something that was culturally significant enough to warrant a viewing). After that, “SportsCenter” came on. At least 75 percent of ESPN programming must be that very show, because I hardy ever see anything else on it.

I learned that the championship game was about to go into overtime and I figured that overtime in a championship would be a little more exciting than normal football so it might be interesting to watch. (And, there was nothing else on.)

And I did watch, I watched the New Orleans Saints beat the Minnesota Vikings even though the collective mood of the broadcast seemed to covey that there was little chance of the Saints winning anything and that the Vikings’ victory was simply a matter of time.

And one day after that, I suddenly realized that I really wanted the Saints to win the Super Bowl. I think it is appropriate to quote something that I wrote on the Internet on Jan. 25.

“I don’t like football and I probably won’t even watch the Super Bowl, but I’ve got some sort of odd, cosmic desire to root for the New Orleans Saints; is this a symptom of any known disease?”

It wasn’t because of all of the “team of destiny” tripe and it wasn’t because I felt that the city of New Orleans “deserved it.” It was just something that seemed right, perhaps the same otherworldly force that drives the American man to watch the Super Bowl and the same force that, at the time, convinced little Travis that Dallas was his team.

On the other hand, I’ve experienced a lot of people, both on the Internet and in person, who wanted nothing more than the Saints to get smashed into the ground by the Colts because of rabid fans and a perceived overuse of catch phrases including “Who Dat” and “Geaux Saints.” You can’t blame a fan base for going a little overboard with their feverish fandom when it is literally the first time that their team has competed in the Super Bowl. Give them a break — you’d be excited, too.

And on the Friday before the Super Bowl, I was sitting in the Parkhurst Commons at State Fair Community College and someone came up to me bearing tickets to the SFCC Super Bowl Party. Now I had heard about it before, I read about it in the bathroom newsletter called the Stall Street Journal, but I didn’t really feel like going all the way over to student services just to get a ticket.

But here was a ticket the easy way. I would go to the SFCC Super Bowl Party, I would root for the Saints and I would write a story about it, but you’ll have to look for Friday’s column on The Sedalia Democrat Web site to hear about it.