“WE USED TO LAUGH ABOUT THAT ALL THE TIME,” SAID MIKE DILIBERTO, ONE OF BUDDY’S SONS. “LIKE, SEE WHAT YOU STARTED.” DILIBERTO WOULD LAUGH TOO. HE HATCHED THE BROWN BAG IDEA IN 1980, DECORATED IT WITH HOLIDAY LIGHTS, CUT HOLES FOR THT EYES AND SCRIBBLED “AINTS” ACROSS THE FRONT.
By GREG BISHOP
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Before Buddy Diliberto came along, brown paper bags held groceries, became art projects or covered the Led Zeppelin album “In Through the Out Door.” Diliberto spawned another use: decorative headwear for suffering sports fans, like those who followed his New Orleans Saints.
Diliberto died in 2005, before the Saints made it to the Super Bowl, before thousands of men wore dresses and paraded around New Orleans to honor the promise he once made. As the Saints march toward history, Diliberto remains responsible for a slice of it, for the bag that symbolized the Saints and their long, miserable existence.
“We used to laugh about that all the time,” said Mike Diliberto, one of Buddy’s sons. “Like: See what you started. Fans everywhere are mimicking your silly antics.”
Diliberto would laugh, too, at the funny turns of fate. He hatched the bag idea in 1980, borrowing from the Unknown Comic, who wore a brown paper bag onstage during “The Gong Show.” Diliberto and a bartender buddy designed their version, decorated it with holiday lights, cut holes for the eyes and scribbled ’Aints across the front.
Since the Saints’ inception, Diliberto had covered the team in one fashion or another. He wrote columns for a local newspaper. He served as public-address announcer. Mostly, he analyzed the Saints on radio and television.
He entered the 1980 season with high expectations, spurred by an 8-8 campaign the year before. But as the losses mounted — 1, 2, then 14 straight, the idea festered, and finally, while doing a local broadcast before a Monday night game, Diliberto reached under his chair, grabbed the bag and placed it over his head. (He had removed the lights because they had started sparking.)
This was not the first time the Saints drove Diliberto to antics. A few seasons before the bag gag, he bet a friend the Saints would not win three games, and when they did, he jumped into a hotel pool in the middle of winter, fully clothed.
But the bag thing stuck. Saints fans started wearing bags by the dozens, even hundreds. They painted them black and gold, decorated them, called themselves Bag Heads. Fans of losing teams, in football and other sports, also turned grocery bags into fashion statements.
But few could match the history of Diliberto’s Saints. Before this year, New Orleans compiled nine winning seasons in 42 chances. The Saints won all of four playoff games before this run. From Archie Manning to Earl Campbell to Mike Ditka, the Saints were defined by futility and failure and those brown paper bags.
Bill Becknell was there from the beginning. He served as a ball boy in the inaugural season and later shuttled players to and from the airport, worked in accounting and became the Saints’ general counsel in 1976.
He knew all the characters, guys like Doug Atkins, the 6-foot-8, 275-pound defensive end. Back then, Atkins ranked among the largest players in the league, and he carried a gun, adding to his menacing persona.
Becknell remembered the first time the Saints flew into the local airport after a game in their first season. They traveled all night from Portland, Ore., and when they arrived, thousands of fans lined the nearest ramp. Fans today do exactly the same thing, tradition in both winning and losing seasons, loyalty passed from one generation to the next.
The biggest Saints fan in Becknell’s family is his son, a 22-year-old law student who converted the space over the family’s garage into his Saints room, the one filled with a framed, autographed Reggie Bush jersey and a model of the Superdome.
“To people like me, people who lived it, it’s odd to hear the Saints’ name in connection with the Super Bowl,” said Becknell, who still works as a lawyer near New Orleans. “It doesn’t seem real.”
Several players in this Super Bowl grew up in Louisiana, reared as rabid Saints fans. Reggie Wayne, an Indianapolis Colts receiver and Big Easy native, said he spent Saturday nights praying for breakout games from the former Saints wideout Eric Martin.
Wayne noted this week that deep down, on any other week, he remains a Saints fan. The bonds run that deep between the Saints and the city they call home. Wayne also said he had seen “a lot of brown paper bags” in his life.
So has quarterback Peyton Manning. His father, Archie, played the same position for the 1-15 Saints team that birthed the bag. Peyton once carried out one-on-one football games against his older brother, Cooper, in the Superdome and watched his father sign autographs after losses. Lots and lots of losses.
After each Saints defeat, the uncle of cornerback Randall Gay would retire to his bedroom and lock the door. His family used to joke that the uncle, John Williams, owned stock in the Saints for how seriously he took the outcomes.
Gay said his uncle, who died two years ago, was the most intense Saints fan in a family filled with intense Saints fans. His uncle hated picking up the paper Monday mornings, hated another round of “Saints lose” headlines, hated the mind-set, the mentality, that came from wearing all those bags.
“If he were here to see this, boy, he would be so happy,” Gay said. “This team is banishing the bags.”
Which brings the Saints back to Diliberto, who promised, before he died, to wear a dress through the French Quarter if New Orleans ever made it to the Super Bowl. The former quarterback Bobby Hebert took over for Diliberto on the radio in 2005, and when these Saints defeated the Minnesota Vikings in overtime to advance to the N.F.L. title game, the parade took shape.
Hebert wore a gold muumuu and a blond wig. Some 2,000 others joined him. They dressed in T-shirts and earrings with Diliberto’s picture. They donned lingerie and summer dresses and fashionable evening gowns. Mike Diliberto’s daughter spied one man wearing only a skirt, high heels and the Saints’ symbol shaved into his chest hair.
The day that Diliberto dreamed of had arrived, in both a season filled with beauty and a parade filled with hairy beasts.
“It felt like Buddy D was there,” Mike Diliberto said. “Definitely in spirit.”
Only a handful of fans wore bags at the parade. The original, billed as New Orleans ’Aints Paper Bag Mask, is available on eBay for $5, plus shipping. But these Saints no longer require headwear worn by fans of losing franchises.
Progress is in the dress.
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Friday, February 5th 2010 at 6:30AM
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