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The Bonus: Life in the Arena Football League: The VooDoo and a prayer

NEW ORLEANS -- The season is lost. The numbers don't lie: Defeats to teams from Georgia, Oklahoma, Illinois, Arizona, two places in Pennsylvania and three in Florida, one of them twice. Shut out at home, in The Graveyard. Yes, there have been turnovers. Yes, there have been injuries. Yes, there have been transactions. Lord have there been transactions. On the active roster of 24 players, 11 remain from training camp, some of whom joined through open tryouts at City Park, paying $60 for the chance, which was all they were ever promised, a chance, that and a T-shirt. The latest addition is 37 years old. He's a skill player: A defensive back.

Maybe these are just the breaks of Arena Football, the bouncehouse sport of also-rans. Maybe this is just the function of a bankruptcy reorganization designed to concentrate power in the league office. Maybe this is just the fate of an expansion team, even one with a venerable name bought and paid for. These men earn $7,200 for the season -- $3,690 below the federal poverty level -- plus any treatment that counts as sports medicine from Tulane and complimentary lodging at the Magnolia Ridge Apartments between I-10 and the Causeway in Metairie. Their coach, Derek Stingley, still in the game despite what it takes away from his family, or maybe because of what it already has: He rides the sleeper bus too. Their quarterback, Danny Wimprine, the hometown ace out of John Curtis Christian School, a minor folk hero in a town with more of them than it can use; he gets $400 a game too.

But who among us isn't making a last stand? Who isn't doing more with less? Who didn't chase the dream, settle for the dream job and keep on humping when it hardly even qualified as a job anymore? Who isn't leaving the voice mails, demonstrating the functionality, leveraging the deliverables, flying back on the redeye, tweeting the tweets, taking out the trash and praying to God this is as bad as it gets?

"People come see me: 'Oh, hey, Danny, how's football?' That's how they relate to me," Wimprine says, pumping three-and-a-half-dollar unleaded into his white Nissan Titan, the one with the team logo window sticker, as he juggles sales calls for his father-in-law's sanitation business. "I'm not relying on that anymore."

*****

The city was lost. By 2008 the population had stalled, according to the most optimistic count, at 70 percent of what it was before the storm. The murder rate led the country, unless the population figures were wrong. Vacant houses stood waiting for teardown; people were sleeping under the CCC Bridge. The Saints were done in for the year after finishing 7-9.

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The New Orleans Saints

Congressional Record, V. 152, Pt. 15, September 26, 2006 to September 28, 2006

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