After the New Orleans Saints’ season-ending game on Jan. 7, I gave up the season tickets my family has had since the Saints were founded — 57 years of games, the last 49 of them at the Superdome’s 50-yard-line.
The ticket abandonment isn’t due to finances or to fading loyalty to the Saints (I remain obsessed with their fortunes) or to health or to the time commitment required. Instead, the culprit is a societywide problem that has become unbearable: constant artificial sensory overstimulation. Fans can’t converse with each other without yelling and can’t avoid hours of leftover ear-ringing after the game unless they wear earplugs (which makes it even more difficult to converse). Almost every single minute for more than four hours (including pregame) features bombardments of piped-in sound and flashing lights.
Every time opponents go two plays without gaining 10 yards, the scoreboard erupts with the words “THIRD DOWN” in giant letters as the loudspeaker blares at about 95 decibels that “IT’S … THIRD …DOWN!!!” If one team scores, the speaker plays loud rap music all during the commercial break, not stopping until the kicker’s foot meets ball on the ensuing kickoff. Either that or the audio-video system plays some gaudy “contest” promising free groceries or $20 of free chips for a nearby casino’s slot machines.
No space at all is left for crowd enthusiasm to ebb and flow organically in reaction to action on the field. Yet if the dome is all noise all the time, the home-field advantage of sudden surges in natural excitement levels is lost. What aids home team players isn’t the noise level so much as the growth of it, rising, crescendoing, crashing down on the other team in clutch situations. In today’s world of nonstop superstimulation, the sense of a spontaneously growing drama disappears.
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It’s not as if Saints fans need the stimulation. This is a fan base that literally stopped a game for 21 minutes by booing so loudly the referees couldn’t work. It’s a fan base that went so wild when a half-footed kicker made a 63-yard field goal in 1970 that the noise could be heard more than half a mile away (when the games were outdoors at the old Tulane stadium).
Today, though, every venue thinks every human is so conditioned by sensory input from glowing hand-held boxes that, somehow, we would all shrivel and evaporate without a constant electronic barrage. Enough is enough. This Saints fan is marching out. And, from friends across the country, I hear pledges of similar exoduses from their hometown venues. Stop the noise; we want to get off.
