For Saints fans, the no-call lives in infamy
Even as a new NFL season dawns, New Orleans is still seething over that dark day in January.
NEW ORLEANS – Tony Le Mon’s season tickets came in the mail two weeks ago, just as they have for nearly two decades. Given the powerful forces he’s disturbed over the past several months, he wasn’t convinced they would show up. Given the state of his still broken heart, he’s unsure he’s ready to use them.
Like pretty much every member of the so-called “Who Dat Nation,” outrage and grief hit the 60-year-old evening on Jan. 20 when the most infamous no-call in NFL history played a pivotal role in preventing his beloved Saints from advancing to Super Bowl LIII.
In the days that followed the NFC Championship Game, the outcome of which would almost certainly have been different if officials had flagged Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman for a clear pass interference infraction with 1:45 left with the score tied, Saints fans expressed themselves in a variety of ways that were pure New Orleans.
Some bought billboards around Atlanta during Super Bowl week, while others threw yellow penalty flags off floats at Mardi Gras. Thousands more even went to a traditional jazz funeral procession down Magazine Street to try to bury their anger at the NFL.
“It rocked this city,” said Kristian Garic, who co-hosts an afternoon sports talk show and the Saints’ radio postgame with ex-quarterback Bobby Hebert. “People were in a haze. There was a visible, shook look on people’s faces like, ‘What the hell just happened?’ ”
Le Mon, who runs a small suburban law practice on the other side of Lake Ponchatrain from downtown New Orleans, watched NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s news conference during Super Bowl week in which he essentially chalked the missed call up to human error and seethed.
For Le Mon, whose uncle got him hooked on watching the Saints in 1968, it didn’t like a run-of-the-mill missed call. Even though he knew the result of the game wasn’t going to be overturned, he felt like there was more to be said and done, and Goodell wasn’t saying or doing it. So Le Mon called a longtime friend, Sue Boudreaux, and two others who have seats near him at the Superdome and started the process of suing the NFL on their behalf, a lawsuit that is still working its way through Louisiana courts and seeks to depose Goodell and the officials who missed the call.
“The problem we’ve got is New Orleans is intertwined with the Saints,” said Le Mon, whose collection of Saints memorabilia fills a small upstairs room at his home in Mandeville, including nearly 100 jerseys, glass cases full of player figurines and a one-of-a-kind pewter chess set depicting the Saints versus the Falcons. “If you think of New Orleans as a big quilt, so many threads of that quilt are the Saints: The way we laugh, the way we love, the way we have fun in our community. Having this happen and not seeing any corrective measure, no investigation, no disciplinary action, it makes you wonder should we be intertwining ourselves this much with the NFL if they’re going to let this conduct go?”
In a more ordinary city with a less stimulating heartbeat – New Orleans, after all, is nothing if not a place defined by its passions and excesses – the conversation would have long since moved on from a football game that took place more than seven months ago.
But even on the brink of a new NFL season, one that should again see the Saints contend for the Super Bowl, the mourning has not ended and the anger, particularly toward Goodell, still burns.
“You still feel like the commissioner’s being a jerk,” life-long fan Kim Kovesdi said as she sat in the stands at a Saints open practice while Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” blared in the background. “That’s the most polite word I can come up with. He is a jerk. That whole fiasco was just a kick in the gut to all fans – not just Saints fans but all fans in the league because that could happen to any team. I feel so let down by the NFL itself because they’re making the league out to be dirty. I won’t miss a Saints game, but to watch any other team? I’m not doing it because of Roger Goodell.”
Grieving in different ways
It’s possible that once the season begins and the weekly rhythm of discussing wins and losses starts to take over that the no-call will fade into the background. But for now, it still dominates the mood of the Saints’ fan base in weird and surprising ways.
Lauren Haydel, a New Orleans native whose “Fleurty Girl” brand has grown into six retail stores specializing in locally made and inspired apparel, has turned the anger into a business boom selling, among other things, a vanillaorange scented bath bomb of a voodoo doll dressed like a referee, V-neck shirts with referee stripes and matching penalty flag earrings and a T-shirt that says “Some fans are still salty. It’s me. I’m some fan.” They’re flying off the shelves.
“Even though the team has said, ‘Let’s move on,’ we are just not over and we’re not going to be anytime soon,” Haydel said. “I think everyone grieves in different ways, and I kind of let fans air their grievances in the form of fashion. Game-day fashion echoes what the fans are feeling, and I think it’s one of those things where there was so much on the line for that no-call and it’s not solvable and that’s why it’s lingering. We’re just pissed off and we want the NFL to know we haven’t forgotten.”
New Orleans filmmaker Steve Scaffidi, who often tackles serious subjects like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the death penalty, knew what his latest documentary project would be about 30 minutes after the NFC Championship Game ended.
Like many of his fellow fans, Scaffidi’s outrage largely focuses on the fact that four officials who were part of the crew that day live in Southern California, including crew chief Bill Vinovich, down judge Patrick Turner, who was closest to the play, and two others who were in position to help correct the mistake in side judge Gary Cavaletto and back judge Todd Prukop.
His upcoming film, titled “Not in My House!” will essentially encompass Scaffidi’s search for what happened and why, focusing on whether or not implicit bias played a role in the decision not to throw a flag.
“There’s no way the best of the best are going to miss that call from 7, 8, 10 yards away. No way,” Scaffidi said. “Believe it or not, a bunch of my friends have told me I should just move o, but there’s 5 million people in the Who Dat fan base and, according to social media I’ve been doing, 80% are on my side and we can’t move on. Football isn’t just a game, it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry that takes taxpayer money to build stadiums and holds cities hostage to give them stadiums, so why should they not be held responsible just like any other business? If a waitress made the mistake those officials made of that magnitude, it would be like putting arsenic in your food and mistaking it for salt.”
Hebert, who remains a local icon for leading the Saints to their first-ever playoff appearance in 1987 and several more subsequent winning seasons, dismisses the conspiracy theories but agrees that having officials with ties to Los Angeles working an NFC Championship Game involving the Rams creates a perception problem that would be the same for a referee from Thibodaux, Louisiana, working a Saints game.
“It looks shady,” Hebert said, an impulse toward conspiracy multiplied for Saints fans because of the “Bountygate” scandal for which coach Sean Payton was suspended for the entire 2012 season over allegations that defensive coordinator Gregg Williams had been running a scheme to dole out cash bonuses for injuring opposing players.
“The fans hated Goodell before all this, so now it’s just piling on,” Hebert said. “They’re not over it, but that’s fans. They don’t have to be over it.”
Make Goodell squirm
Though Le Mon’s lawsuit alleging that Saints season ticketholders were victims of fraud will not make fans forget the blown call, many wouldn’t mind if Le Mon was able to at least force Goodell into giving a deposition and making him squirm.
That possibility, which would seem far-fetched on the surface, had life breathed into it by a district court judge in Orleans Parish, who ruled in July that Le Mon’s case could continue and Goodell could be questioned in September. That ruling was subsequently upheld by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The NFL is appealing to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which has put the discovery process on hold. The lawsuit, which seeks $75,000 in damages that would go to the ALS-related charitable foundation named for former Saints star Steve Gleason, was constructed by Le Mon in a way that he says will keep it in Louisiana and prevent it from going into the federal court system, where the NFL has a strong track record.
Le Mon has proposed mediation, but until his recent wins in district court that prompted the NFL to turn over a limited amount of discover material, he said he doesn’t believe the NFL has taken him seriously. He’s also been wounded by the fact that the Saints filed an amicus brief in support of their position to throw out the case.
“It hurts to think they’ve taken sides with the NFL to the detriment of their fan base, but I know where their bread is buttered,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt the Saints or distract them from their season, and it’s an important season because (40-year-old quarterback Drew Brees) has a time clock on him as a player, but at the same time we fans have rights and if we abandon this now we’re saying this isn’t important to us and that you can do whatever you want to us as fans.”
Le Mon says he’s been emboldened by one batch of discovery responses from the NFL that came before before the Supreme Court delivered its stay order. In the document, the NFL acknowledged that Robey-Coleman should have been called for both pass interference and unnecessary roughness but that no member of the crew observed the violations in real time and at full speed.
Le Mon says he believes that answer opens the door to his fraud claim because such egregious penalties should have been easily visible to trained referees.
“Was it just a bad call? Prove it to us,” said Boudreaux, one of the plaintiffs. “It looks like a little more than that to me. People tell you all the time, get over it. Well, I am over it, even though I’m still upset. I know it an’t be overturned, but can’t we find out what really happened. If there was some fraud, shouldn’t we know about it? How can you get over it if they haven’t explained it?”
Ultimately, though, the Saints are going to kick off their season on Monday night, and the agonizing offseason will end with a crowd perhaps as raucous and defiant as any New Orleans has ever seen. Though the rest of the world and even the team has moved on, it will be clear this night the city still isn’t in a forgiving mood.
“Every time I pass by the Dome, I have flashbacks,” said Roderick Fulton, a season ticketholder who works at Entergy Tower next door. “When my tickets showed up, I had flashbacks. This is the first year I didn’t go to the draft party. I didn’t go buy a new jersey. I’m finally ready to start watching NFL Network again.
“Maybe by game six, I’ll be over it, hopefully. But I won’t forget it.”