Residences, Below Tenth Street Bridge, Minneapolis, 1939, by Syd Fossum (1909-1978). Image courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society. (See here.)
My pal Mills, a native son of Louisiana, has written an eloquent and touching summary of what is at stake in today’s big Vikings-Saints show in New Orleans, using our own excitable pre-game conversations as a starting point. If you’ve not read it, please do so immediately.
He is, as is often the case, correct in most respects (though I strongly disagree with his diagnosis that only 20% of the metro population is invested in this game — I mean, come on, it’s the Midwest; people go totally bat-shit over football up here). But on a personal level, he is experiencing a far different game than I am. I am not a lifelong Vikings supporter, or a lifelong football fan, and I am in fact an exceedingly casual football fan in the best of times. Actually, let’s not mince words: I am a classic bandwagon fan. I like the Vikings when they’re winning, and I don’t really care when they’re not. The terrible truth is I feel much more of an affinity for the Green Bay Packers, who are publicly owned, much older, have sillier (and therefore, better) fan traditions, and have actually appear to have won a few Super Bowls here and there.
So there is little doubt that the people of New Orleans have much more at stake emotionally in this match-up than we do in Minneapolis and St. Paul. As a lifelong supporter of hapless underdogs, from Eugene V. Debs to the 1999 roster of Sympathy for the Record Industry, I am sympathetic to the Saints’ cause.
However, to decry our boys in purple as a “mercenary and geriatric team” devoid of genuine symbolism is patently untrue, and is shot through with the sort of emotionally over-saturated rococo Crescent City hooey usually associated with figures like Huey Long and Master P. I know this much from my personal experiences this season, and I believe there is a weight and a heft to the counter-narrative at work here in the Vikings story.
Favre, right? It all comes back to him. Favre, Favre, Favre. Here I turn the floor over to Herbach, a furiously passionate admirer of the man, writing on mpr.org last year:
I love the guy. I love his openness. I love that he says he’s scared when he’s scared, that he cries at the drop of a hat, that he tackles his teammates after a touchdown.
He’s so different from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady or the Colts’ Peyton Manning, who both travel in this cool, mechanical air. Favre is emotionally engaged. He lets it all hang out.
Yes, Favre is wishy-washy. Yes, he brings the circus to town. Yes, he’s made off-seasons painful due to his shenanigans. But that’s who he is — the best player of a kids’ game around.
Although it hurts, I’m glad I have the opportunity to watch him play again, especially if Vikings fans accept the certain disasters along with the potential successes.
Right? I have enjoyed watching the Favre saga unfold, for these reasons, and for a few more. Basically, Minneapolis is different than St. Paul, or Duluth, or the Dakotas or Wisconsin or anywhere else in the Upper Midwest in one critical way: it is a city of mercenaries. It is a place people come to from elsewhere with the intention of making a better life for themselves. I came from Louisville; Herbach and Steph came from Wisconsin and Iowa.
In your day-to-day experiences in Minneapolis, you don’t meet a lot of native Minneapolitans. You meet a lot of what are called transplants. St. Paul is full of people that grew up in St. Paul and know the neighborhoods, but not so much with Minneapolis proper. Sure, you do meet a few Minneapolis “city kids,” as I like calling them, but mostly, you meet people like Brett Favre, who loved Wisconsin but couldn’t find a way to make it work, lit off for New York, crashed and burned, and then found a home for themselves here in the City of Lakes.
Minneapolis is where the drama queens and burnouts and weirdos and misfits of the Upper Midwest wind up. It’s a city full of people that secretly suspect they don’t belong here, that they’re not Minneapolis enough, because they didn’t go to South High, or because they didn’t go to Oarjokefolkopus or First Avenue when they were teenagers, or because they came from the suburbs, or from outstate. They came from the Iron Range or Fargo-Moorhead or Bloomington or White Bear Lake or Collegeville. Or, farther afield, they came in from Chicago or California or the Pacific Northwest or Mexico or Somalia. But god dammit, we accept each other. We accept each other and Johnny-come-latelies like Favre because that’s who most of us are.
If Brett Favre is not one of us, than none of us are. That’s got to count for something.
(January 24, 2010.)
NOTES: Of course, Mills came out triumphant here: the Vikings were defeated by the Saints 31-28, and the Saints went on to win the Super Bowl two weeks later. I think I called or texted Mills to congratulate him, and I haven’t written a word about football since. But this piece is one of my favorites I’ve ever written about the civic character of Minneapolis, and I’d have never written it if not prompted by this game.
