ACT I:

In a dimly lit walk-up in New York City’s Theater District – across the street from Sardi’s – Max Bialystock and Lane Kiffin are feverishly digging through unpublished scripts looking for the musical that will burn down the house on opening night, maybe by page four.

“Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach,” Kiffin reports wearily but wistfully, leafing through yet another plot summary.

“It’s too good!” Bialystock replies.

Suddenly, from the bottom of the pile of scripts, Bialystock pulls out his meal ticket.

“What is it! We’ve struck gold. Not fool’s gold, but real gold! The Mother Lode. The Mother of them all! Kiss it, kiss it!”

Kiffin kisses it.

“You found a flop?”

“A flop! That’s putting it mildly. We’ve found a disaster, a catastrophe, an outrage! A guaranteed-to-close-in-one-night beauty. This is freedom from want forever. This is a house in the country. This is a Rolls Royce and a Bentley. This is wine, women, and song ... and women.”

Welcome to “Springtime for the Lane Train: A Guileful Romp With Gasoline and Matches at Berchtesgaden.”

ACT II:

Say what you want about the play’s preview performances over the last seven months in Baton Rouge – and inside select courthouses around the great state of Louisiana – Kiffin and Bialystock have bet the ranch and the Dr. Pepper on one Mel Brooks proposition: “The meek will inherit Gerry DiNardo’s sock drawer.”

In the Fan Duel era of college sports, there is no underselling the enormity of the zero-sum bet LSU has placed on Lane Kiffin: Hundreds of millions of dollars in coaching buyouts, new coaches’ salaries and roster bonuses on kids – and on some 23- and 24-year-olds with receding hairlines – all for the pleasure of holding their collective breath while Scott Starzyk, 5-foot-9, 175 pounds, who just turned 19, lines up to make or miss a 47-yard field goal to beat Clemson.

Or, as Gov. Jeff Landry would tell director Roger De Bris (“Max … he’s wearing a dress!”): “It’s either that or go 7-5 and go broke. How else could we afford to redo our 1950s-era bathrooms in O.K. Allen Hall?”

ACT III:

Bialystock’s accounting genius in Brooks’ smash hit, “The Producers,” went like this: Entice little old ladies with pecks on the cheek and shameless flattery so that they would breathlessly fork over their nest eggs for high-percentage stakes in the can’t-miss production of “Springtime for Hitler.”

To blue-haired Target 1: “You now own 50% of ‘Springtime for Hitler!’”

To yellow-haired Target 2: “You now own 75% of ‘Springtime for Hitler!’”

To orange-haired Target 3: “You now own 90% of ‘Springtime for Hitler!’”

“And how much of ‘Springtime for Hitler’ have we sold?” Bialystock sheepishly asks Kiffin, who pulls a pencil out of his purple-and-gold LSU eyeshade.

“Twenty-five thousand percent.”

If the Broadway show flops in one night, the producers keep the lion’s share of the nest egg.

In the current Ponzi scheme that is the unsustainable state of college football, nothing adds up.

ACT IV:

We’ll probably never know exactly how much LSU is paying Sam Leavitt and Ole Miss is paying Trinidad Chambliss to play quarterback on 12 Saturdays in the fall, but let’s just agree it’s a lot more than the $100 handshakes Archie Manning used to get in 1970 as he trotted to the locker room after a game in Oxford.

That would pay for pizza and beer for the entire Rebels team.

If reports are accurate, Leavitt is pulling down $5 to $6 million this year, while Gov. Landry’s base salary is $130,000. Some circle-the-wagon LSU fans might say that’s perfect calculus.

We don’t know the exact amount of LSU’s 2026 player payroll – estimated to be somewhere north of $40 million ($50 million?) – because the state Legislature, in a rare exercise of bipartisan consensus last spring while Kiffin romped through the edelweiss and marigolds on his Berchtesgaden honeymoon, found the backbone to shield much of those revenue-sharing numbers from the public eye.

After all, hinted one lawmaker, it might be bad for Tiger recruiting if those financial figures were leaked in black and white for Alabama and Texas and Ohio State to see.

In the meantime, LSU has a food pantry on campus that provides free supplemental groceries to needy enrolled students. Hungry undergrads holding down three jobs to pay for tuition need only a valid Tiger Card to access the food.

ACT V:

Where and when will this burn-the-boats cliffhanger end?

We’ve already seen drone shots of the player tryouts at Tiger Stadium during the spring:

“What about this quarterback, Coach Kiff, somebody named Brady?”

“He threw a pick-6 in a Pop Warner game when he was 5. He’s 49 now. … NEXT!”

“What about this kicker, Scott Starzyk? He’s a guy in the transfer portal from Arkansas with a crazy leg.”

With a 30-mph gust in his face, Starzyk nails a 75-yard field goal through the “H” at the north end of the stadium. The ball lands five rows up.

“That’s our KICKER!!!”

ACT VI:

Now the audience turns to the shadowy figure of Franz Liebkind, the helmeted, shellshocked playwright of “Springtime for Hitler.” His plot to blow up the theater from the basement during the second act is motivated by his all-consuming desire to protect the character and reputation of his beloved Führer. (“Baby! Baby! ... Why does he say this “baby”? The Führer has never said “baby.” I did not write, “baby.” What is it with this, “baby”?)

“Gentlemen,” he tells Bialystock and Kiffin, “vee have here a technical problem. Hmm? I do not know if vat vee have here is zee ‘quick-burning’ fuse or zee ‘slow-burning’ fuse. Ja, ja, I must find zis out.”

(He snips the dynamite fuse.)

“Zis is critical.”

(He lights the fuse with a match.)

“Ha ha ha, ja ja, you see zis? You see zis here? Vat I have told you? Yeah, zis is an example of smartness here. I have said that zis is zee ‘quick’ fuse. Huh? And zis IS zee ‘quick’ fuse.”

(Pregnant pause for effect.)

“THE QUICK FUSE!!!”

ACT VI:

Fast-forward. The jury in the trial of the producers has filed back into the courtroom with its verdict. Franz Liebkind is bathed in a klieg light and wrapped in a plaster cast like a stormtrooper mummy. He has a German helmet on his head.

You can see the whites of his eyes. He is seated next to Max and Lane. There’s a bottle of Dr. Pepper on the table, front left.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?” the judge solemnly asks.

The jury foreman stands and says, “We have, your Honor.”

“How does the jury find?”

“We find the defendants incredibly guilty.”

Maybe all of this will end incredibly well.

Maybe not.

pfinney@me.com

Chef Frank Brigtsen and his tightly knit staff at Brigtsen’s restaurant in the Riverbend. Forty years after opening his restaurant with help from Chef Paul Prudhomme, Brigtsen’s cookbook, “Color of Flavor,” is tantalizing tastebuds. (Photos by Romney Caruso)

One late afternoon in the 1980s, Frank Brigtsen was riding shotgun with chef Paul Prudhomme when Louisiana’s foremost culinary celebrity pulled his pickup truck into the garage next to K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen at 416 Chartres St.

The aroma of Prudhomme’s genius filled the air, and the line of patrons that snaked a full block from the front door confirmed the obvious: Just three blocks from St. Louis Cathedral, reverential palates were about to process into a worship space where blackened redfish would become Creole incense.

Brigtsen spotted Sydney “Pork Chop” Hill tapping out one of his famous French Quarter street dances for the captive parishioners.

“That’s when I made a snide comment,” Brigtsen recalled. “I said, ‘Boy, he’s sure making a lot of money off our line,’ and Chef waited a minute, and then he told me, ‘But he’s earning it!’ Oooh! He was telling me, ‘Don’t judge people.’ If you worked hard to better yourself, no matter who you were, Paul would help you along the way.”

In New Orleans’ pass-along, Creole food culture, Brigtsen, 71, has received and bestowed a multitude of gifts graciously slipped to him over many decades by Creole line cooks who toiled anonymously at their sauté and broiler stations in the back of the house.

Brigtsen, a graduate of De La Salle High School, got his first big break when Prudhomme hired him at Commander’s Palace in 1978 following a series of three, one-hour interviews designed to identify whether or not Brigtsen, then 24, had the right ingredients.

“I felt like a kid – you know, like my dad was talking to me,” Brigtsen said. “He asked me, ‘Where do you see yourself in 10 years?’ I said, ‘I think I’d like to have my own restaurant one day. I really kind of made it up – let’s see, what would sound good?”

After Brigtsen passed Prudhomme’s third and final exam, the Commander’s chef gave him a choice. In his fascinating new cookbook, “Frank Brigtsen’s Color of Flavor” – which serves both as an autobiographical love letter to the city he could never leave and as an encyclopedia of his own explosive brilliance in the kitchen – Brigtsen recalls making the right decision.

“He told me I could start on the broiler, be paid good money, and he would expect a lot out of me,” Brigtsen writes. “Or, I could start as an apprentice in the pantry, make little money, but I could expect a lot out of him. I wisely chose the latter and never looked back. In six months I had worked every station in Commander’s kitchen. Chef Paul kept his promise, over and over again. He taught me a valuable lesson: Sometimes you just need a chance.”

Prudhomme not only gave Brigtsen an opportunity at Commander’s and later at K-Paul’s – quietly pushing him to discover his own virtuosity – but he also was there in 1986, carrying the torch to ignite Brigtsen’s crazy, 20-something dream to run his own place. Prudhomme helped negotiate the lease on the small Dante Street house in the Riverbend, introduced him to an attorney and an accountant and even bankrolled him.

Marna and Frank Brigtsen.

Brigtsen’s was born: Fifty seats, which meant two seatings and 100 covers a night. Prudhomme believed in him.

“Everybody knows he’s a great cook and a great chef, but the way he relates to people is the main lesson that I learned from him,” Brigtsen said of Prudhomme, who died in 2015. “It’s treating people as individuals and finding ways to nurture their growth based on their individuality.

“He was extremely observant in the kitchen. He was a quiet leader. He would say just one thing: ‘Don’t serve that. Do it over.’ I think it’s hard to judge myself, but that’s the way our kitchen operates. It’s a quiet kitchen. There’s not a lot of back and forth or ‘I need this right now!’ We design systems and put them in place that eliminate unnecessary conversation and confusion. The reason for that is I want the chefs who are doing the cooking to focus on the food.”

One night at K-Paul’s, the pasta for the Tuesday night special – garlic shrimp and oysters – was done in advance but turned out to have been overcooked.

“That special was selling like crazy,” Brigtsen said. “Paul was on the stove, and I was expediting for him. When he found out about the pasta, he stopped everything and he grabbed every ticket that had the pasta on it. He personally went out to the dining room and talked to every table and said, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have this.’ He wouldn’t serve it. One thing I learned that night was you always have time to do it right.”

Brigtsen never had any formal culinary training. Aside from Prudhomme’s mentorship, he learned skillet-to-skillet through the encouragement and benevolent leadership of exquisite chefs, some of whom were unnoticed.

Armand Jonté, who starred at Commander’s and later at Gautreau’s and then went on to run his own restaurant on the Gulf Coast, was one of his mentors. And then there was Leroy Thomas.

“Leroy taught me so much,” Brigtsen said of the Commander’s cook. “He took the time to come off his station to show me a couple of things. He would say, ‘OK, don’t touch anything. I’ll be right back.’ One of my jobs when I got on sauté at Commander’s was to pan-fry trout for the meunière. I was trying to do too much and flip it too early, and Leroy said, ‘Just let it sit.’ He taught me timing and nuance. He even came over to K-Paul’s and helped me when I needed it. That kind of giving and sharing, I’ll never forget.”

There also were countless Black chefs who had relatives working the stoves at kitchens across town.

“They’re unsung heroes, and that was particularly true prior to 1980,” Brigtsen said. “I had a fellow working with me at Commander’s who was a great example of this genre of Creole chef. His uncle worked at Galatoire’s. His cousin worked at Antoine’s. This interconnectivity is how Creole cuisine was passed down from generation to generation.”

It is curious that someone who had little formal training spent so much of his spare time devoted to the teaching and preservation of Creole cooking. Brigtsen’s love affair with teaching started with an invitation from Judy Jurisich, who had the idea for the New Orleans Cooking Experience, in which an established New Orleans chef would spend one night a week cooking in front of a group of 10 people, often visitors, at a kitchen island in a home.

Every Thursday night for 15 years, Brigtsen, the introvert, was there, finding his voice.

“I would demonstrate the whole menu in front of them, talk them through it, interact and make jokes,” Brigtsen said. “It was so much fun. And then they would go to the dining room and eat. It was a learning experience for me because, for the first time, I really started verbalizing what I was doing and what I knew. I was nervous and awkward at first.”

In 2006, a year after Katrina, Brigtsen began a lengthy teaching position, one day a week, with students at Chef John Folse’s Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux. He wanted to ensure that authentic Creole cooking was passed on, and several of those students have worked for him through the years.

“There were certain things that I felt were important to maintain,” Brigtsen said, explaining his decision to teach what he knew. “It’s our Creole culture, and restaurants are representative of that. I felt a calling to teach young people and preserve and share and protect all the wonderful cultural traditions that we have through food.”

While his Uptown restaurant was spared flood damage in Katrina, Brigtsen and his wife Marna, her two sisters, Rhonda and Sandy, and Brigtsen’s mother Ernie spent several weeks in Shreveport, wondering about their futures and the future of the city.

“Marna and I actually pulled out a road atlas and said, ‘Where else would we live?’” Brigtsen said. “And, I wrote down Lexington, Kentucky. And then I said, ‘Nope, we’re going home.’”

It was mid-October. Brigtsen went to a Shreveport grocery and bought sausage and chicken and filé, intending to make gumbo for the family.

“But we were in a 105-degree heat wave, so I said, ‘Nope,’” Brigtsen said. “When we got home, I drove up to the restaurant and got out my gumbo pot that I had brought from K-Paul’s. It’s like 3 1/2 gallons and well-rounded. It feels good.

“I brought out the pot, and I asked Marna to call every employee who was in town that she could get in touch with and invite them over to our house for gumbo. There were about 12 of us. We laughed, we cried, we hugged, and it was the best gumbo I ever had. Truly, it was gumbo that brought us home.”

He wanted to reopen the restaurant on Saturday, Dec. 31, 2005.

“But I’m smart enough not to open on New Year’s Eve,” Brigtsen said, laughing. “We opened on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and for all three days, this place was filled with all of our friends. You couldn’t find a parking spot because it was all locals, and everybody was saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’”

That first Thursday – reopening night – Uptown was still dark-thirty.

“We were the only business open, and the only lights on at night,” Brigtsen said.

Suddenly, as if in one of his boyhood dreams, Brigtsen began to hear something in the distance.

Down a few streets.

It grew louder.

Could it be?

A brass band?

“So, we go out front, and around the corner comes a second-line parade of about 70 or 80 people, and they’re banging drums, playing horns, and it was my friend Paul Bel, the ‘Mayor of Oak Street,’” Brigtsen said. “It was mostly the Krewe of Oak people, and they stopped in front and serenaded us. Just neighborhood folks – and they welcomed us home.”

Brigtsen invited Bel and his followers into the tiny shotgun restaurant.

“I had Paul come out every night for a month,” Brigtsen said. “They would come in the back door, go through the kitchen and we’d start banging skillets. And the customers would go, ‘What the …?’ And it was joyful.

“Just like that gumbo brought me home, yeah, brass band music brought me home. That’s New Orleans. Marna and I hugged each other tearfully and said, ‘This is why we came home!”

“Frank Brigtsen’s Color of Flavor” cookbook, produced by Blue Runner Foods and published by Creole Press, is available at https://bluerunnerfoods.com/brigtsens-color-of-flavor-cookbook/.

Brigtsen has spent most of the last 18 months using a walker because of a chronically bad back, but that change in routine gave him time to concentrate on passing on his exacting recipes and telling the hidden stories behind his Creole cooking.

“I stopped and started the cookbook several times, but Ricky Thomas of Blue Runner came in one day and said, ‘Frank, you want to do a cookbook?’ and I said, ‘Yes!’

“I’ve always loved to write. This is not just a cookbook. It’s my life. It’s my legacy. That’s the reason I did it. I wanted to put down everything that I know and love into the package for people to enjoy, for people to pass down. Like Blue Runner says, ‘We don’t pass recipes around; we pass them down. And we share them. That’s what food’s about.”

The cookbook is a wonderful tale, beautifully told – but very tough to read on an empty stomach!

pfinney@me.com

The foot wedge: Kicking the ball – in a nonchalant style made famous by Rodney Dangerfield, Lionel Messi and Donald Trump – just a few harmless inches away from a tree root that was not supposed to be there.

The coin flip: Marking your ball on the green by bending down and flipping the marker, tiddly-winks-style, toward the cup. Best practice recommends using a non-reflective penny, struck at the Philadelphia Mint before 1950, to counter the effects of sun glare.

The tee in the rough: My friend Richard Meek recalls playing in a City Park junior golf tournament when a kid in his group improved his lie in the rough not just by rolling the ball but by actually teeing it up. The “tell” came when the pink tee flew 20 yards farther than the ball.

The gimme: Remarking plaintively, “Oh, I would have made that putt if I had been trying.” Or, it’s “in the leather” – aided enormously by Titleist’s new “Mar-a-Lago” putter that has a 45-inch leather grip to measure gimmes. Although the USGA has ruled the putter “non-conforming,” the dispute is mired in the courts, where habeas won’t meet corpus until noon Eastern time on Jan. 20, 2029, unless the 20th Amendment is repealed.

The sandbagger: Where posting one fantastic round in the USGA’s handicap computer – let’s say a 65 from the tips on a par-72 course with a 140-slope rating – can easily be erased by batch-loading a bunch of 90s, 95s and 99s to maintain your “official” handicap as a monetized weapon. (Only your last 20 scores count in configuring your active handicap.)

Cheating as an art form came – well – to the fore last week with news out of St. Louis. If you haven’t heard this one, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, comes close to what Zach Holland, a former NAIA-college-golfer-turned-hustler, did at a member-member tournament at WingHaven Country Club.

Holland holds a USGA handicap of “plus-2” – which means he is better than even a “scratch” golfer. In a very broad sense, his expected score on a regulation golf course would be 2-under-par. He’s a very good golfer.

Holland, 34, and three other members of his team in the best-ball tournament were first off the tee at WingHaven, but Holland had warned them that he might be a little distracted. His grandmother, after all, was terminally ill, and he was expecting a phone call at any moment that Granny’s time was up.

Essentially, Granny was on the clock.

The round began without incident. Holland’s group played the first three holes together, but somewhere around the third green, Holland told his teammates that his phone buzzed and it was likely that Granny was preparing to depart for the big clubhouse in the sky.

So that he wouldn’t slow down the pace of play, Holland told his partners that he’d rush ahead to the fourth tee – a par-3 – tee off and then take the call. His teammates could catch up with him a few minutes later.

As Holland drove his cart up to the fourth green, he told his partners that he had hit a thin screamer – kind of like a line drive – that was headed toward the green, but he didn’t see where the ball had ended up.

When, surprise, surprise, the group found the ball in the cup and assumed Holland had made an ace, euphoria commenced. There was even a “hole-in-one-pot” – funded by all the players in the tournament – as a special prize.

Holland’s story began unraveling at the clubhouse – my guess is Granny was still kicking and holding her own in a sudden-death playoff – when word leaked out that the other three members of the foursome had not actually seen Holland hit his tee shot.

Inquiring minds wanted a little more proof. It turns out the club’s maintenance shed – home to thousands of dollars of grass-cutting equipment – was outfitted with a security camera that included the fourth green in its line of sight.

The security video showed Holland, in the pre-dawn darkness, parking his car near the maintenance building an hour before his tee time. He walked up to the fourth green, pressed a ball into the tight grass to create a “ball mark” – he had REALLY, REALLY thought this out! – placed the ball in the hole and then drove back to the main parking lot.

Presented after the round with indisputable evidence of his larceny, Holland admitted to the cheating and then resigned, under pressure, from the club.

We don’t know how Granny is faring.

Holland publicly confessed to his crime during an interview on 101 ESPN in St. Louis.

“You do something as dumb as I did, there are consequences for that,” Holland said. “There’s no excuse for what I did, and I was completely in the wrong. There’s really no motivation. Just complete stupidity. And we were giving two shots back to the field, and that’s not an excuse. There’s no excuse for what happened.”

Holland maintained he was “not a cheater on the golf course.” (“Do you believe me or your lying eyes?”)

“I made a bad decision, and I have to suffer the consequences,” Holland said. “I’m trying to move forward as best I can, and it’s been rough.”

Holland admitted the incident has resulted in shame and embarrassment for his wife and two children.

“I made a terrible mistake,” he said. “The lack of moral character – I can take the banter and the chatter and the heat because I deserve that from a golf perspective.

“What I am most worried about is my family. … It’s not fair to them for me to put them in that situation where when they walk through a room, there is a stigma there that your dad is a (cheater). So questions that they may get asked or be getting asked down the road, that’s the worst part. The golf is secondary.”

Holland’s escapades brought to mind my early days at hardscrabble City Park, home to the “11 o’clock group” of gamblers who got together daily for matches. This group reportedly kept the shenanigans down to a dull roar. After all, if balls deemed lost in the weeds and lagoons suddenly and mysteriously reappeared on tightly mown green grass, word would get around quickly.

“The famous City Park 11 o’clock game had very little cheating going on,” one park regular said.

Why?

“Someone always had a gun,” he said.

“When folks who had the reputation of being a little rules-squirrely were in a big-money game at the park, they not only played everything down (by not touching the ball), but they also played Texas rules,” the pro said. “You’d play the ball down, no gimmes, no drops of any kind, including standing water and cart paths. But most of the other money games they played ‘up,’ where you could roll it. Of course, some people were better at ‘rolling it’ than others!”

Mike Rodrigue, the owner of Acme Oyster House who played hundreds of rounds at the park, once lost a tournament by shooting a 74 (net 72) to someone who carded a net 56. There was no one else between Rodrigue, who finished second, and “Mr. 56.”

“First prize was a set of clubs, about $2,500, and it was a handicap event in March,” Rodrigue said. “It was cold and windy. There was no way he could have shot 56 in those conditions. It was impossible.”

The impossible happened.

One of the cautionary tales that City Park and Audubon Park pro Stan Stopa used to tell his up-and-coming assistants was to “never turn in your ‘good’ scorecard until everyone else did.”

“Otherwise,” Stopa warned, “they will always beat you!”

Another tactic of making sure all bets were paid off at City Park was to have the competing teams put their cash in a cigar box in golf pro Henry Thomas’ shop. Those were called the “box games.”

“I saw a guy lose $5,000 when you could buy a decent car for that money,” the City Park pro said. “They got bigger than that.”

The big money seemed to attract a crowd. An out-of-stater named Robin Byrd showed up one day, looking for action. First, he set the hook by fanning a 180-yard, pop-up slice on the first hole of the East course and shooting in the 90s.

But Byrd kept coming back for more, still losing but seeming to lower his score every day by a couple of shots until he was regularly shooting in the low 70s – and then easily breaking 70. He had a long putter that could make anything – but only when he needed to.

It turns out, Byrd, a lefty, turned pro in 1984 and played on a variety of international circuits, including the European Tour, Nike Tour and Champions Tour. He amassed nearly 40 wins worldwide.

“He averaged 82-85 the first few weeks he was in town,” the City Park regular said. “But he always ‘accidentally’ birdied a key hole every round. He had the best putting stroke ever.”

Rodrigue, the former head of the Bayou District Foundation that remade City Park golf after Katrina, says Holland’s “hole-in-one” story beats them all. At least a felon or a murderer might have a chance to redeem his name after serving his sentence, Rodrigue said.

“But you cannot outlive that story,” Rodrigue said. “He’s branded for life. To do something that egregious and planned, you can never step on a golf course again! I hope he can play tennis!”

If not, maybe Granny left him some cookies in her will.

pfinney@me.com

OK, so let’s get to the really important stuff.

Just minutes after Drew Brees received the most prestigious honor of his professional career – induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio – Fox 8 WVUE gave voice Saturday to what all “Drew Dat” fans, even ones wearing coke-bottle glasses, were seeing as they compared, side by side, their flesh-and-blood savior to his bronzed facsimile:

With a bit of creative larceny, Fox 8 stoked the fire of black-and-gold sculpture critics everywhere. The station’s Facebook question went viral: “Drew Brees’ Pro Football Hall of Fame bust has finally been unveiled. Tell us your thoughts. Did the artist nail it?”

Within seconds, the trigger fingers of Saints’ fans everywhere devolved into brutal honesty and conspiracy theories.

Even those suffering from fleur-de-lis cataracts had to admit that whoever sculpted Brees’ bronze bust for, well, eternity, had to have been sacked too many times in the red zone. Or maybe the sculptor was complicit in NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s carefully cultivated plot to exact his delayed, ultimate revenge on the Who Dat Nation.

To say the post touched a nerve among Saints’ fans is like saying Steve Gleason blocked a punt one Monday night on Poydras Street.

Here are some of my favorite replies to a cockeyed art project gone wild:

Jonathan Hill: “WHO DAT? .....no.... seriously, who dat??”

Cary Byrd: “Who Drew That!!??”

Sammy Gomez: “Did dat man wrong!!!”

Darrell Driskell: “Next time just use AI or 3D image scanning first.

Actually, Dee Ann Daigle tried it: “Chat GPT did it much better!” (Take a look below at the ChatGPT version, and she’s right!)

Ve Ferry: “Drew be thinking ‘Who dis???’”

Ryan Dozar: “That looks like Rip Van Winkle after he shaved his beard off!”

Louis Bourgeois: “Who Drew this?”

Toby Stelly: “Looks like the dude that fixed our copy machine last week”

Philip Benoit: “Why does he look like Hugh Hefner?”

Nidal HW: “They ordered it from Temu?”

Matt DeGrand: “What’s up with the nose? Looks like they made him look like he ran into a wall.”

Andrew Whitehead: “Must have been falcon fan”

Larry Mowery: “The only thing that the artist nailed was a 12 pack before starting the bust.”

Marco Ramos: “How can I apply to do the next one? I have no experience.”

Kay Reeder Ross: “I have no idea who this is but it is definitely NOT Drew Brees.”

Rebecca M. Blouin: “That Drew’s birthmark, but that ain’t Drew. LOL”

Glenda McMillan: “He did NOT understand the assignment!!”

Joy Selina Soublet: “Baaaabeee who was in charge of that? They need 10 pack glasses cuz he must be like 65 75 years old what the hell”

Jessica Pennison Walsh: “They paid way too much money for something that doesn’t even look like him…Still happy for Drew!!”

Rachel D. Helmer: “For a million dollars I wouldn’t recognize this as Drew Brees”

Giovanna Wilson: “It’s so bad like they didn’t even try”

Sue Hirsch: “I never think the HOF busts look like the inductees either. They need to get another sculptor”

Debi Schiro: “Y’all need to change artists!! That ain’t Drew Brees!!!!”

Timothy Trahan: “It’s definitely a bust....”

Rachel Swords: “That is as awful as Drew is great.”

The Doppleganger Theory holds that Drew might have a missing twin hiding out somewhere in the universe.

Saints fans tied the bust’s likeness to, variously, Ronald Reagan; Peyton Manning; Peyton Manning “with a mix of Sean Payton”; George W. Bush; Jack Nicklaus; Cooper Manning; Rip Van Winkle “after he shaved his beard off”; Ben Roethlisberger “if he lost 25 lbs”; a “young” Michael Douglas; Roger Goodell “with a scar”; Lane Kiffin; a “young” Spencer Tracy; Julius Caesar; Phil Hartman; Popeye; a “young” Don Shula; a “drunk Tony Romo”; Jimmy Johnson “with flat hair”; Peter Boyle, the grandfather named Frank Barone on “Everybody Loves Raymond”; and Drew Carey (of “The Price Is Right.”)

My thoughts? Did the artist nail it?

Ummm, no!

It might be time for the Pro Football Hall of Fame to check the artist (or the artist’s apprentice) for carpal tunnel syndrome. They could simply say, “Thank you for your past work, but we’re planning to move in a different direction. You can turn in your chisels at the door, and your email access has been disabled.”

At least some Saints’ art critics were kind enough to offer a backhanded compliment that Brees’ bust isn’t as big of a failure as the statue that made former Miami Heat star Dwyane Wade look as though he were being beamed up in the Rapture.

I agree.

But for the Who Dat Nation, my take on art goes something like this: “If I can do it, it ain’t art.”

The scary thing is, when I look at Drew’s bust, I might have been able to do DAT.

pfinney@me.com

Joe Delery is a lifelong Catholic and has spent a career with the New Orleans Police Department using his 6-foot-3 frame to protect and serve with the best of them, intuitively knowing how to defuse a tense standoff with a disarming gift of gab.

When Joe was a lanky freshman at De La Salle High School in 1972, he went out for the Cavaliers’ JV football team, in part because of a backhanded comment he had received from a teacher at Christian Brothers School, Don Rowan, an old football coach from New Iberia.

“He was one of my greatest teachers, but he made a comment one day like, ‘Delery, you could never play football,’” Joe recalled. “And so when I graduated from Christian Brothers and got to De La Salle, I was like, ‘I’m going out for the football team. I’m going to prove Don Rowan wrong.’”

And?

“Don was right,” Joe laughed. “My heart definitely was not into the game. It was more into hunting and fishing.”

One of the memories seared into Joe’s memory about his foray into football came in the fall of 1972, when he and a few other promising freshmen got battlefield promotions from the JV to the varsity team.

In the midst of “one of the most bizarre seasons ever,” Joe remembers his blooper as if it were captured in 70mm Technicolor by NFL Films.

“I was the worst, but it was not just me – it was me and another guy,” Joe said. “I was an offensive lineman and so was he, and we had the play so confused. We doubled around, and our quarterback got sandwiched in between the two of us. I tackled my own quarterback. The other team was looking at us like, ‘We don’t even have to get on the field. These guys are taking care of things by themselves.’ That was the worst football season ever.”

For many years, Joe has attended the daily 7 a.m. Mass at St. Rita Church in New Orleans, usually getting there just after the church is opened for prayer. It’s his quiet time.

“I get there typically about a half-hour before Mass and watch everybody come in, and also to tell everybody ‘good morning,’” Joe said. “I’ve kind of thought that that was my job, my ministry, like the school teacher opening up the school for the kids. It’s also my way of actually starting my day on a really great high note, telling everyone ‘good morning.’ No matter how bad the day before was, it was a really great way to start the day.”

Imagine Joe’s surprise several years ago when he saw a young adult – probably in his early 30s, he guessed, according to his NOPD-honed observation powers – dressed casually in shorts and sneakers, coming into the church just about every morning. The man always arrived around 6:30 a.m., walked through the front door and took his seat in the back pew, just to the right of the main aisle.

The man usually left about five minutes before the 7 a.m. Mass started.

Being someone who has never met a stranger, Joe opened the door for the man one day and did a double take as he was leaving.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t realize who he was when I saw him the first time, because I had only seen him in football gear, and this was a little guy,” Joe said. “But what gave him away was the birthmark on his face.”

Mystery solved.

“Every day, he would come in very unassuming, very quietly, and kneel all the way in the back on the right side, in the same spot,” Joe said. “You could tell he was extremely focused, extremely intense, from the standpoint of having his mind set on what he was going to do, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of that.”

“It was his time with God. He was spending time with God in prayer, and then when he finished, he would walk out and just go his way.”

Joe is not what people would consider bashful, so one day as Brees left the church, the cop in him couldn’t resist.

“Drew, can I ask you a question?” Joe asked. “Are you Catholic?”

“No, why?’”

“I was going to get you for the Knights of Columbus. We’d have the best council ever!”

Brees looked at Joe and gave him “a crooked grin.”

After word began to spread internally that Brees was a St. Rita regular, parishioners were careful to respect his privacy and his prayer time.

“People were excited about seeing him, but they left him alone,” Joe said. “One man who is the biggest Saints fan in the world wanted to go over and say something, but he said, ‘No, he’s praying. I’m going to leave him alone.’”

With Brees contemplating retirement after 20 NFL seasons, Joe didn’t know then if the quarterback’s St. Rita prayer sessions had ended, but he will remain forever impressed.

“There’s something more to him than just football,” Joe said. “We all believe that we’re kind of the masters of our own destiny, that we don’t owe anything to anybody, including the higher power. To see this guy – who I can’t tell you how much money he makes – come in and have that quiet time before practice was very inspirational. He did it not for any fanfare. Nobody knew he was doing it. It wasn’t broadcast. He wasn’t doing it to be seen, that’s for sure.”

Joe has an idea that hasn’t yet been sanctioned by the St. Rita Pastoral Council.

“I’ve got a brass plaque that I have to have put on that back pew: ‘Drew Brees used to kneel here,’” Joe said.

Well, Brees did perform a few miracles in New Orleans, and some would consider the back pew a third-class relic.

“I guess the best way to describe it would be when Jonas Salk found the cure for polio, that’s the way I’m going to look at Drew Brees,” Joe said. “Because when we needed something to elevate us after Katrina, he came in and got us to the Super Bowl. That was like the greatest shot in the arm for this city and for the people.

“What Drew did for the city of New Orleans was like Andrew Jackson coming down and helping us win the war.”

Amen.

pfinney@me.com

The yellow-brick road in a sea of emerald: The Saints in Super Bowl XLIV.

The black-and-gold vision hit me, finally, at Super Bowl XLIV media day in February 2010 at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.

As a cradle Who Dat, born, reared and eventually resettled in New Orleans, I scarcely could believe the work of collective folk art emerging from the green grass.

There, in the north end zone, an NFL paint crew using spray guns drew the improbable vision for me in black capital letters, 20 feet tall: “SAINTS.”

After finishing the black letters, the artists then worked on filling in the negative space with gold paint.

To me, the spray paint could have been 24-karat gold.

The Technicolor picture – 10-by-53 1/3 yards – had a surreal, Dorothy-from-Kansas quality. The yellow-brick road on the way to Oz never looked any better – especially in light of the Saints’ mesmerizing and cathartic 31-17 victory over the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV.

He believed, and it happened.

Anyone from New Orleans can tell you Super Bowl XLIV was never exclusively about football. Reflecting on those days in 2005 when a great American city went wet and dark, I can bring only two words to mind: horrors and heroes.

Katrina exposed to America’s eyes the searing poverty and human need that existed but had remained hidden in New Orleans for decades. Truth be told, every major American city has those disparities, but New Orleans has the location and the topography that allowed Katrina to blow open the lock to Pandora’s box.

Among the best two hours I spent immediately after the storm came at a seminar presented by experts on traumatic stress. They predicted, with uncanny accuracy, the roller coaster of emotions that would hit everyone over the next few days, months and years.

“You will lose track of time, your decision-making will be jumbled, you will have difficulty remembering things,” one psychologist said. “You are not going crazy. This is a normal coping mechanism. You could have these up-and-down feelings for two to five years or longer.”

Adversity affects everyone differently. The suicide rate in New Orleans skyrocketed in the months immediately after Katrina and remained far above the national average in the struggling years that followed. What Katrina couldn’t take instantly, she took by simply biding her time.

Our children’s pediatrician, his practice under water, committed suicide.

Someone we know lost his house and nearly lost his life when he got into a confrontation with police, backing up his car in their direction in an attempt to run the officers down. He begged the police to pull the trigger. He wanted out of his misery. Only because one of the officers knew him is he still alive.

That was a Katrina miracle.

It’s funny how you remember things. Even without a measuring tape, I now know exactly what 4 1/2 feet is: It is the distance from the ground to my chest. That was the water line in our house near Lake Pontchartrain. Had we lived four blocks closer to the lake – I know that sounds counter-intuitive – we would have been dry. That’s because New Orleans is built like a saucer, with the higher ground located nearest the Mississippi River and the lake.

I remember pulling our piano out of the house. I’m not that strong, but I did it by myself. The wood, under a caustic brew of salt water and God knows what for three weeks, simply pulled apart like cardboard. My wife was so traumatized she could not bring herself to return to the house. She finally was able to come and say her goodbyes the day before we sold it.

She is a survivor, not a statistic.

While the government’s response was abysmal at all levels, the heroes came in droves. There were the church and volunteer groups arriving from across the country with hearts and hands and sweat to resuscitate a city on life support. Incredibly, years after the devastation, they were still coming, performing miracles, one house at a time.

The Saints stayed, survived and thrived. When they made their emotional return to the restored Superdome on Sept. 25, 2006 – 13 months after Katrina – and defeated the Falcons on national television, the transformation of a city’s people from victims to survivors took another major step. The palace of pain – which sheltered 30,000 refugees after the storm and where 12 people died – had become the shining city on a hill.

That night, U2 and Green Day unveiled their pulsating song, “The Saints Are Coming.” And now, the Saints had marched all the way to Super Bowl XLIV and an NFL championship.

Yes, tears flowed like a river.

In his wildest dreams, late Saints owner Tom Benson never could have imagined the impact Drew Brees would have on the city. (Photo courtesy New Orleans Saints)

In 2006, the resurrection season, the Saints won five of their first six games, and Drew Brees was out eating lunch with his wife Brittany at Zea Rotisserie & Brewery in the Clearview Shopping Center. David Thiele, a 23-year-old Zea’s waiter, made sure they had a table as secluded as possible to keep the Who Dat hoi polloi from bothering them while they ate shrimp and grits.

But the diehard fan in Thiele got the best of him.

As Thiele brought the entrees to the table, he boasted to Brees that he was a “die-hard Saints’ fan.”

“I’ve heard that a lot – ‘I’m a die-hard Saints’ fan,’” Brees said, smiling.

“No, check this out,” Thiele replied.

As if on cue, Thiele pulled down his lip, revealing a tattoo of the Saints’ fleur-de-lis logo. But there was more to the story.

Thiele was no fair-weather, tattooed Who Dat.

“I got my lip tattooed four years ago, when Aaron Brooks was the quarterback – when the Saints lost their last three games to miss the playoffs,” Thiele told Brees. “That ought to tell you something.”

That’s when Brees knew this city was very different.

Bobby Hebert said what made the Super Bowl Saints so special was that their roster teemed with castoffs, not unlike the abandoned, eccentric toys in the “Island of Misfit Toys.” Brees fit the mold.

On the Monday morning after Garrett Hartley kicked the Saints into the Super Bowl with a 40-yard field in overtime that gave the Saints a 31-28 victory over the Minnesota Vikings in the NFC Championship Game, New Orleans’ Catholic cemeteries did brisk business.

Long-suffering Who Dats showed up to place flowers and Saints’ memorabilia in front of their loved ones’ tombs.

At St. Louis Cemetery No. 3, Susan Watts of Metairie placed a bouquet of a dozen yellow roses, a helium-filled Saints balloon and a shiny cardboard rendition of a Saints’ helmet in front of her family tomb. Her father, John Benedict, died in 1994, and her mother, June, died in 1997.

“My parents were original Saints’ ticket-holders from Tulane Stadium, and they just loved the Saints,” Watts said. “My mom would never wear a paper bag over her head, not for her Saints. She would have her bags packed and ready to go to Miami. My daughter was at the NFC Championship Game, and when she realized we might have a chance to win, she texted me and said, ‘Momma, if we win, we’re going to the cemetery in the morning.’”

Darrell Coleman, a cemetery caretaker who prepared the tombs for burials at St. Louis No. 3, understood the inseparable connection between the Saints and their fans. Although he had no way of getting tickets to the Super Bowl, Coleman and 15 members of his extended family were planning to drive 863 miles to Miami in a three-vehicle caravan – just to be in the same area code.

I am not trivializing people’s pain when I say the Saints contributed mightily to the region’s collective psychic recovery. In 2006, when thousands were living in FEMA trailers, the Saints sold out every seat in the Superdome. Many fans – living in their front yards, so close and yet so far from home, while they waited on insurance settlements and honest contractors – expressed the feeling that they considered supporting the Saints their civic duty.

Newly arrived coach Sean Payton and Brees, a pair of out-of-towners, gave the Saints passion, purpose and swagger. They lifted hearts. They touched souls.

They painted the end zone.

And then they stepped back and allowed every Who Dat traumatized by water and wind to paint Bourbon Street black and gold.

The resurrection story had just begun.

Four Finneys: Dr. Tim, Peter Sr., Peter III and Peter Jr.

“I have the feeling like it was all meant to be, it was all destined,” Brees, the Super Bowl MVP said while clutching the Vince Lombardi Trophy to his chest. “We knew we had the entire city, maybe the entire country behind us. It doesn’t get any better than that. The celebration is not going to end.”

The Saints’ Super Bowl parade drew more than 1 million Who Dats, many of whom learned that day what “sui generis” means.

On Saturday in Canton, Ohio, when Brees is enshrined as a first-ballot member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the Who Dat Nation – the combined force of the 504s and the Drew Brees Who Dat diaspora – will be in area code 330.

Brees will know we’re out there.

pfinney@me.com

(Chat GPT)

Whenever NFL training camps open in July, it triggers memories of a former life. In the 1980s, I was sentenced on Long Island to seven years of hard labor with no possibility of parole

As a beat reporter covering the New York Jets – a bitterly godforsaken NFL team – I had the rare privilege of feasting daily on the journalistic nectar of the gods – punchlines that fell from the sky and actually wrote themselves.

When Broadway Joe Namath struck gold on Jan. 12, 1969, delivering on his “guarantee” to win Super Bowl III, the Jets for some reason maintained an elevated but psychotic aura of superiority.

The post-Namath Jets actually thought they were good, except, as was evidenced over successive decades of Groundhog Day-ineptitude, they were not.

The best part of covering a team that is consistently bad – particularly in New York where the only two permissible labels are “hero” or “bum” – is that nuance flies out the window. You could write just about anything regarding the Jets’ poor play, and no one could dispute it.

Case in point: There was John Fuoco, a pint-sized, replacement wide receiver from New York Tech who crossed the players’ picket line in 1987 and put on an actual NFL jersey four days later. The Jets’ scabs were practicing that week to beat the Dallas Cowboys’ scabs.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” offered Fuoco, his Bronx bravado overflowing. “We’re going to beat those (bleeping) Cowboys.”

The bleeping Cowboys won, 38-24.

In one game in 1990, with the Jets safely ahead by two scores, safety Erik McMillan intercepted a pass near midfield and for some reason pivoted and tried to lateral to a teammate. The Colts recovered the fumble and went on to win, 17-14.

McMillan’s brain freeze sparked me to write the following lede in my game story: “There are stupid plays, and then there are incredibly stupid plays.”

These examples of stupidity direct my attention to perhaps the most stupidest play in Jets’ history (please excuse my misuse of superlatives, but it really was the most stupidest).

In 1986, the Jets bolted out of the gate to a 10-1 record, and all of New York was flying J-E-T-S high. Then the Jets lost their final five games to finish 10-6. Through the mysterious calculus of the NFL’s wild-card rules, the Jets became the first team in NFL history to lose its final five games and still make the playoffs.

Things got interesting when the Jets beat the Chiefs in the AFC wild-card game, setting up an AFC divisional game at Cleveland.

For 56 minutes, the Jets handled the Browns. They led 20-10, with 3:47 left. On second-and-24 from his own 18-yard line, Cleveland quarterback Bernie Kosar threw an incompletion, which would have set up a third-and-24.

Had the ESPN win-predictor calculator then been in existence, the Jets would have had a 99.199% probability of advancing to the AFC Championship Game.

Not so fast. Jets defensive end Mark Gastineau, a five-time Pro Bowler whose narcissistic “sack dance” was reviled even by his own teammates, plowed into Kosar a good two Mississippis after he had released the ball. The obvious roughing-the-passer penalty gave the Browns new life, and they scored 10 points in the final three minutes to send the game into double overtime, which they won, 23-20.

“It’s just not smart,” Jets defensive coordinator Bud Carson said of Gastineau’s play.

In 1987, Gastineau was the only Jets veteran to immediately cross the picket line during a strike by NFL players. As he drove through the gate of the Jets’ practice facility at Hofstra University, teammates pelted his car with eggs. Gastineau explained that he needed to play in order to pay alimony to his estranged wife Lisa.

“We expected it from Mark,” said punter Dave Jennings. “He’s always put himself in front of the team.”

The sideshow grew when Gastineau met film star Brigitte Nielsen, the estranged wife of Sylvester Stallone, in January 1988 at the Super Bowl in San Diego when the two were working out in a health club.

At the Jets’ minicamp in May, Gastineau, whose jersey number was 99, flaunted a gold chain with a diamond-encrusted “9” around his neck. Brigitte, of course, had the other “9.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever been in love,” Gastineau said, explaining that the super-celebrity couple was planning to wed “as soon as the divorce is final.”

Inside Gastineau’s locker were the 99 long-stem red roses Nielsen had wired to him from Rome, where she was filming a movie called “Domino.” Gastineau said he might get his first supporting role as Nielsen’s love interest.

“Well, I told the producers I couldn’t act, and she said, ‘All you have to do is just act like yourself,’” Gastineau said. “We were in Rome last weekend, eating breakfast. I went out into the square, and there were about 2,000 people out in the middle of the square, and we couldn’t even walk. They had to call 15 police cars to get us out.”

Ah, true love.

In July, Brigitte made her first appearance at Jets training camp, arriving with Gastineau in a cream-colored Rolls-Royce Corniche, which in 1988 had a sticker price of $156,000. In August, Gastineau announced that they were engaged and confirmed that they had each other’s name tattooed on their gluteus maximi.

“A tattoo is for life,” Gastineau said at a bizarre press conference.

(Chat GPT)

When Gastineau was asked why he told beat reporters the event to announce their engagement would begin at 1:30 p.m. near the Jets’ practice facility – when it actually began at noon – he said, “I lied.”

Gastineau said the lie was in response to an article that was highly critical of his personal life.

In the article, Gastineau’s estranged wife likened him to “Joe Isuzu,” the car salesman who made lying an art form.

Bob Wolf, a veteran New York broadcaster with News 12 Long Island, asked Nielsen if she thought her Hollywood-style entrance at Jet scrimmages may have distracted Gastineau’s teammates.

Nielsen took offense.

“I am not a movie actress to him,” she said. “I am his fiancee – his wife-to-be.”

“My girlfriend is my girlfriend,” Gastineau interrupted. “She’ll be that until she marries me, and then she’ll be my wife.”

There were rumors as the 1988 season approached that the 31-year-old Gastineau, coming off a knee injury, would be playing to justify his $825,000 salary and his future. After seven games – with the Jets standing at 3-3-1 – Gastineau led the AFC with seven sacks. On Oct. 20, three days after the Jets lost 37-14 to the Buffalo Bills, Gastineau announced he was retiring, in part because of reports of Nielsen’s illness.

All fairy tales end. By April 1989, the love match that launched the Double-9s and the matching tattoos was over. Gastineau explained that he was bored spending four months in London while Nielsen filmed a movie.

“It was just too much for me,” Gastineau said. “I was in a trailer every day … and, you know, it was too much.”

Gastineau’s sad post-football tale reflects a rudderless life after the echoes of public admiration have faded.

He spent 18 months in jail for failing to complete an anger-management course stemming from a physical confrontation with his second wife Patricia. He also revealed publicly that he had been diagnosed with dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and, in 2019, colon cancer.

The final chapter – after the public curtain has closed and the tattoos have been laser-reversed – remains unwritten. Here’s to hoping Gastineau – the man, not the celebrity – can find peace and purpose.

pfinney@me.com

Former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial speaks to a Louisiana House committee that redrew the state’s congressional maps in May. (Photo courtesy National Urban League Facebook)

Inside his second-floor office at New Orleans City Hall, Mayor Marc Morial held the cards that could scuttle a $770 million deal Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards had struck with Harrah’s to launch a land-based casino in the city, a cash-cow project very simpatico with the governor’s wallet.

Morial knew how much Edwards lusted after the casino.

After all, three years later, the then-private citizen Edwards walked through the San Francisco airport looking like the bloated Michelin Man with $400,000 in bribes from Eddie DeBartolo stuffed inside a cash belt, his payoff for helping the San Francisco 49ers owner secure a lucrative state riverboat casino license.

The Harrah’s deal in 1994 was on the brink of collapse because Morial demanded it include $32 million in payments to the city for casino-related fees for police, sanitation and fire services.

“They were going to open the casino, and they hadn’t negotiated the casino support services agreement,” recalled Morial, New Orleans’ mayor from 1994-2002 who now serves as president of the National Urban League. “I decided to hold up the occupancy permit so they couldn’t open the casino.

“The governor went funny berserk on me. I basically said (to the media), ‘Hey, the governor knows the law, and I have an obligation to make sure the law is followed. And, when the law is followed, the casino will open.’”

A meeting at the governor’s mansion aimed at hashing out their differences turned into a steel-cage, wrestling match.

“I went to the mansion with a couple of people,” Morial recalled. “He got angry and kind of halfway cussed me out. I cussed him back, and then I went back to New Orleans.”

The next day, attorney Bill Broadhurst, Edwards’ personal advisor, called.

“Give me somebody to negotiate with,” Broadhurst told Morial.

“So, I gave him (close friend) Bob Tucker, and three or four or five days later, we had worked something out,” Morial said.

The thing is, Morial said, that casino dispute “was about something very specific.” To his mind, that is so unlike the non-specific, bare-knuckles feud now exploding through social media between Gov. Jeff Landry and New Orleans’ political power structure.

Incoming social media bombs at 79 miles

When Morial looks at the Facebook firebombs being heaved 79 miles in each direction – from the state Capitol to the French Quarter and back – he is at a loss to decipher any winners.

At a time when the state and the city continue to shed population, everyone loses.

Mayor Helena Moreno

The real fireworks started in May when Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill sent letters to New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno, District Attorney Jason Williams and five City Council members, warning they could face removal from office if they continued to resist a new state law that consolidated the city’s civil and criminal clerks’ offices.

A New Orleans grand jury then indicted Murrill on 16 felony counts alleging malfeasance in office and intimidation of the city’s elected officials, but the Louisiana Supreme Court quickly revoked her arrest warrant.

Since then, Landry helped block state approval of a loan the city had planned to take out. No longer, he Facebooked, would he allow New Orleans to treat the state treasury like “an atm on Bourbon Street!”

“New Orleans thinks they’re so special,” Landry said, admonishing the city to get its financial house in order. “That parish is going to operate exactly like the rest of this state, and the people of this state want that.”

Moreno, in office all of six months following the debilitating, eight-year term of LaToya Cantrell, replied that the city was Louisiana’s “largest economic engine” that generates tax dollars for communities across the state.

Landry wasn’t finished.

“Used to be,” Landry said, “the saying was, ‘Where goes New Orleans, where goes the state.’ That has changed. Where goes Louisiana will determine the fate of New Orleans, OK?”

History is replete with New Orleans-Baton Rouge wars, Morial said. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Gov. Earl Long, crossways with New Orleans Mayor Chep Morrison, “waged war on the city and took over the police department, and it led to a revolt by the citizens, which led to the adoption and creation of the home-rule charter.”

There were bitter fights over school desegregation in the 1960s, Morial said.

“But one of the things about the 1960s is that the New Orleans delegation was about a fifth of the Legislature, so the city had a built-in power base when it came to votes the governors needed,” Morial said.

John McKeithen pushed north Louisiana politicians for the construction of the Superdome. Edwin Edwards considered New Orleans “part of his political base,” Morial said.

“David Treen initially was sort of at odds with the city, but my father (Dutch Morial) was mayor at the time, and Treen cut the deal for the convention center and the World’s Fair,” Morial said.

Morial learned in dealing with Gov. Mike Foster, a Democrat turned Republican, how to battle in the sandbox with political adversaries.

“We had a couple of fights early on over affirmative action, but he and I made a peace treaty behind closed doors,” Morial said. “It was simple. It was like, ‘I’m not going to talk about you in public, Mike, if you don’t talk about me in public. So, we won’t talk about each other in public, and if we have an issue, we’ll pick up the phone.’”

That relationship led to the construction of the New Orleans Arena and the acquisition of the NBA Hornets.

“Ultimately, he helped us do the deal that got the team,” Morial recalled. “He helped us do all those film-tax credits.”

Morial has never met Landry, but he is struggling to understand what is driving his animus toward the city. This is not a nuts-and-bolts issue like a casino services contract, he said.

“Jeff Landry is a conservative, performative politician,” Morial said. “I don’t know if there’s an endgame or reason to it, other than just raw, nasty, naked politics. From the outside, it looks silly.

“No state government attacks its biggest city. Illinois is not attacking Chicago. New York’s not attacking New York City. Even when you have red and blue issues, it’s really nonsensical.”

Poking the bear

Morial admits that observers might view the grand jury indictment of Murrill as the city’s attempt to poke the bear.

“It probably was,” Morial said. “From what I understand, the circumstances (of Murrill’s letter) were highly unusual, and the grand injury itself initiated it.

“It is a little bit of poking the bear, but she sent letters that are clearly unethical. Those letters she sent violate the lawyer’s code of ethics. There’s a specific provision in the code of ethics that she cannot threaten criminal prosecution over a civil dispute. She should be investigated by the bar association and probably be reprimanded. Probably, the proper sanction is to reprimand her and admonish her not to do it again.”

In the end – or is this just the beginning? – “(Murrill) kind of started it, and they responded, and that is what it is. But, you know, cooler heads could certainly prevail,” Morial said.

Stop, can we get off?

So, is there an “off-ramp” where cooler heads could prevail?

“The off-ramp is for these dudes to make peace over a meal or a cup of water or a glass of wine, and for the governor to say, ‘You know what? My legacy will be enhanced if New Orleans thrives,’” Morial said. “There is an off-ramp, if Landry wants an off-ramp.”

Morial views the political breakdown between Landry and Moreno as an unnecessarily lost opportunity.

“I thought he was going to get along with Helena, just on general principles, right, because she’s not LaToya,” Morial said. “And, she’s not spewing negative rhetoric at him or the state Legislature. These kinds of political games make good theater, but they don’t end up accomplishing a thing.

“New Orleans is the driver of Louisiana. New Orleans is a global city known all over the world. New Orleans is the biggest tax producer in income and sales tax in the state, and a smart governor understands that and wants to play that leverage in the right way.”

For those who look at pure politics, Morial said, Landry’s open rejection of meeting face to face with Moreno is imprudent and self-defeating.

“The problem he faces is, ‘How does this help your reelection?’” Morial said. “He’s fighting against a more popular politician, and then he kind of looks like a bullying dude against this young woman. I don’t know if he has the EQ to understand that. You just look like you’re bullying this woman.

“Helena is a cool customer. She’s probably thinking, ‘Good God, what is this all about?’ And I kind of think, what is this about? Are you trying to damage her? But, see, this is the problem. He’s probably not damaging her; he’s probably enhancing her and her standing.

“It’s a distraction when you’re spending all your time doing this instead of focusing on building something sustainable. But this guy just seems to be performative. He put out a letter about Decatur Street being closed because of street repairs. I’m like, ‘Damn, man, you’re building potholes now?’”

Morial believes business leaders and the faith community in southeast Louisiana – so dependent on each other and on New Orleans’ success – have to step up and demand that the intramural fighting stop. That happened plenty of times in the past when business leaders such as Jim Bob Moffett of Freeport-McMoRan and Ed Lupberger of Entergy and Archbishop Philip Hannan could go behind the scenes and talk sense to the nonsensical.

“I think it’s going to take business leaders and faith leaders to do it – leaders who can fill the breach, if they are willing to do so,” Morial said. “The larger question is, do today’s business and faith leaders have the wherewithal to do that? They would have to go to the governor and say, ‘We need to talk. This isn’t working. There needs to be detente.’”

It might cost somebody some money, but it’s 7-to-1 odds the Michelin Man would have a plan.

pfinney@me.com

Ever hear about those projects around the house that never seem to get done?

If there were a Mount Rushmore of thankless jobs – not necessarily because they involve sweat or elbow grease or even a touch of psychological motivation – then cleaning out the junk drawer in the kitchen has to take pride of place as the George Washington bust, in a Marie Kondo kind of way.

Kondo, the Japanese professional organizer and consultant, has made a cool living coaxing hoarders into action by getting the inveterately weak to wrap their arms around inanimate objects, smell the roses and, ultimately, say goodbye.

Kondo’s “King Solomon” decision on whether or not to keep an item in your life rests on this fundamental question: “Does it spark joy?”

If the item does not and no longer serves its purpose, Kondo suggests – and I’m not making this up – that you hold it closely (ideally, when someone else is not looking), recall the emotional and physical thrill it once produced in your life, cordially thank it for its service in fostering that joy before abandoning it to the ash heap of history saying sayonara.

So, if cleaning out the junk drawer is the George Washington on Mount Rushmore’s pantheon of thankless jobs, then, maybe in descending order, there’s cleaning out the grime in the range hood (Thomas Jefferson), weeding the garden in 95-degree heat (Teddy Roosevelt – hey, how did he get in there?) and scraping soap scum off the shower walls (Abraham Lincoln – how is Abe No. 4 after, I don’t know, actually saving a nation?).

The plan

OK, so when I decided to tackle the junk drawer, I developed a plan.

I always have a plan.

First, as I tugged the loaded drawer toward me and nearly pulled the slides off their moorings, I knew I had to do something very tactical. Beneath the pens and pencils and candles and matches and loose batteries and credit card receipts and computer cables and coins (foreign and domestic) and keys with no identifiable markings (but, by God, they must open something!), I decided I really needed a Marie Kondo pep talk.

Instead, I did the next best thing. I clicked on Amazon.

Two days later – I didn’t go for the four-hour, rush shipping – it arrived.

Did you know that the Ontel Battery Daddy Smart, which retails for $14.98 plus $1.50 tax, can “store and protect” up to 150 batteries, which I am announcing to the world that we will use in our lifetime. As lagniappe, the Battery Daddy Smart (what marketing genius in that name!) includes a battery tester. Good thing the other 149 batteries are there when you need them.

I only have 43 batteries “stored and protected” thus far – most of them AAAs – but the blessed assurance of having power at your fingertips when the TV remote goes out is like having 10 terabytes of storage on your computer – just in case.

Most of the drawer-culling, which allowed for the game-changing introduction of the Battery Daddy, was relatively easy. I knew that of the 70 pencils and pens I had stored for 10 years in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, a good 50% of them, within a few seconds, would be taking the Marie Kondo Japanese bullet train into the kitchen garbage can.

I tested a few red, blue and black Sharpies, their caps long since loosened in that cold, lonely, wooden grave, and they brought me no joy. (“Oh, forsooth, but what Hallmark greetings they had once managed to produce!”)

“Thank you! Goodbye. I’ll try not to tell your brother and sister Sharpies about your deadbeat performance. Keep your caps on tightly next time. Good riddance.”

I’ll admit, the loose, anonymous keys are still there, though residing neatly in a much smaller “snack” Ziploc bag, as are the candles, of course. Imagine – please, just let your mind wander – the sheer joy of the lights blazing atop a birthday cake in a darkened dining room.

OK, Marie, the candles stay.

If Marie Kondo doesn’t prompt you to make a decision to foster joy in your life, maybe this will. Ten years of dropping loose change in the junk drawer – for no apparent reason other than to try to keep it out of the washer and dryer – produced a creeping, undetected motherlode not seen since the Gold Rush days of the 49ers in California.

I had already begun dumping coins into a Rex cup and keeping them on a desk, but the coins I threw into the drawer over all these years filled another Mardi Gras cup to the brim.

I knew most banks don’t accept coins any longer unless they are packed in paper wrappers, and I was not going to waste my time doing that. So, I Googled “Coinstar,” and it directed me to the former Winn-Dixie on North Carrollton Avenue (now closed and fenced off).

Plan B was Gulf Coast Bank & Trust on Harrison Avenue, which has a Coinstar machine. Incredibly, the diligence of dropping the widow’s mite into a drawer for 10 years was now sparking big-time, Marie Kondo joy.

As the coins fed onto the conveyor belt and down into the whirring machine, it felt like the stock market exploding. When the Gold Rush ended, there were 182 quarters, 87 dimes, 163 nickels and 543 pennies, for a total of $67.78. Even with a 10% processing fee – hey, they were doing me a favor – the cold cash came to an even $61 (ironically, a nice, cash-friendly number).

Not only that, but in going through the cache of coins before heading to the bank, I also found 8.75 Euro coins sprinkled in. That’s $9.99 of cold, hard USA cash.

Topping that off, hidden inside the drawer were several gift cards to restaurants and Target – long forgotten in the back beneath a sea of batteries – that amounted to another $84.90.

Total haul from cleaning out the junk drawer: $155.89.

Republican U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois once famously remarked about the boxcar numbers included in the upcoming year’s federal budget: “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

So, while you have that fire in your belly, clean out your junk drawer and discover what sparks joy in your life.

Then, give Marie Kondo a hug. No one will be looking.

pfinney@me.com

My daughter Rebecca is not a golfer, but this sign at the first tee of Bethpage Black would have convinced her to remain behind the ropes.

I lived for 12 years in New York – on Long Island, to be specific.

As a transplanted New Orleanian, where Monkey Hill in Audubon Park served as our Mount Everest, I asked a coworker a few months after I arrived if he could suggest a cheap public golf course to play, something with a little character.

“Have you heard of Bethpage?” he asked.

I had not.

One day later on a drive to the middle of Long Island, I learned that God, on his off day, apparently had time to build a golf course outside of Augusta, Georgia.

As I approached the 60-foot elevation of the first tee at Bethpage Black, I spotted the sign on the starter’s shack: “-WARNING- The Black Course Is An Extremely Difficult Course Which We Recommend Only For Highly Skilled Golfers.”

That was just to scare off the faint of heart, I told myself, waggling my driver.

What developed over the next dozen years was sublime appreciation for what God and golf course architect A.W. Tillinghast could do in the 1930s with a piece of property that didn’t require bulldozers to move millions of cubic yards of dirt to create a masterpiece.

The par-5 fourth hole at Bethpage Black carries echoes of Augusta National.

The Black cost $5 to play in 1980. Despite its relatively shabby condition (hey, in my view it was country club-sleek compared to the hardscrabble courses I grew up on at New Orleans’ City Park), it was the gem of Bethpage State Park’s 90-hole golf complex. Because of the Black’s difficulty and its prohibition against the use of motorized carts, however, there usually was no wait for a tee time, so it became my country club. I proudly carried my own bag.

It was 18 holes of pristine, rolling woods without a house in sight and sweeping vistas. That four-hour taste of serenity was nearly impossible to comprehend for a place located three miles from the jaw-rattling of the Long Island Expressway.

The second hole at the Black is a softly bending, right-to-left dogleg.

The Black’s hidden-in-plain-sight status as a championship test of golf was confirmed two decades later when the USGA funded a $2.7 million extreme makeover – not touching Tillinghast’s original design but bringing the turf, bunkers and greens up to U.S. Open standards. And then, the People’s Country Club came to the championship party dressed to the nines, hosting the 2002 and 2009 U.S. Opens and the 2025 Ryder Cup.

The proximity and pedigree of golf courses on Long Island are unmatched. Just 60 miles to the east of Bethpage is Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, which hosted the U.S. Open last week.

The sheer beauty of those courses and the examination they provide to the world’s best golfers are unsurpassed, which is why I reacted with such visceral disgust and sadness when, in those two major events, a few entitled spectators revealed themselves as overserved New York narcissists: jeering and cursing at competitors – both foreign and domestic – before, during and after their shots just because, well, they could.

“You going to stop me? Just try to.”

Image courtesy Chat GPT.

This is not an old-man, “get-off-my-lawn” take. This is a plea – perhaps into a 150 mph headwind – for America to take incremental steps toward reversing the predictable effects of decades of “parenting gone wrong.”

“Our kids say the darndest things, don’t they?”

I went to the Ryder Cup at Bethpage last September as a spectator for two reasons. I had never before in my job as a sportswriter covered golf’s supreme team match-play event, and the trip also would give me a chance to retrace the memories of where my drives at Bethpage Black usually landed – in the fescue, a stone’s throw from the fairway.

The U.S. got out of the gate at the 2025 Ryder Cup as if they were wearing cement cleats, probably leading to a lot of triple bogeys for spectators at the beer tent.

On Saturday – Day 2 of the match – the European team, for some mysterious sartorial reason, wore Sandy Lyle-style, light brown matching shirts and trousers. Rory McIlroy was getting ready to tee off on the 12th hole.

“Hey, Rory, your shirt looks like burned bacon and …”

The rest of the heckling had something to do with cows.

As the crowd laughed – oh, what a New Yawk wit in our midst! – Rory backed out of his stance. The heckler was standing just a few feet away, but not one of the dozen security officials made a move to silence him.

Rory then rifled a drive 330 yards around the dogleg.

But it wasn’t just the occasional heckler. Seeking to drum up support for the American side, which was being waxed by the Europeans, the PGA of America, sponsors of the Ryder Cup, hired comedian Heather McMahan to try to rev up the crowd in the stands behind the first tee.

When a Shakespearean scholar in the bleachers blurted out a nuanced “F— you, Rory!” chant, McMahan repeated it with gusto, like a call-and-response from a gospel tent revival. Rory’s wife got pelted with an off-target cup of beer that had been intended for the golfer himself. Apparently, the thrower had a problem crossing the plane at the top of his backswing.

Look at me!

“I think it’s a New York thing,” said former New York Post and New York Daily News sportswriter Hank Gola, the author of “Ryder Cup Rivals,” (https://bit.ly/4uSbarX) a breezy look at some of the most heated U.S.-Europe matches since the competition began in 1927. “Believe me, there’s been jeering on both sides, but over there, I think there’s a little more class and good humor to the comments. In New York, it’s almost like, ‘Look at how funny I am! Look at me!’ But they’re not funny.”

Gola said the 1991 Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island in South Carolina, won by the U.S. 14 ½ to 13 ½, was a powderkeg, and through the years, American crowds often tried to get rabbit-eared Colin Montgomerie off his game with a few barbs.

But no one had ever seen ugliness at the level of Bethpage.

The vulgar chant and beer-throwing at the Ryder Cup resulted in a few scapegoat ejections, but there were actually enough taunts throughout the course to fill a couple of hundred paddy wagons. That didn’t happen.

That’s why the response of U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley to the unruly crowd behavior was so disappointing. Instead of saying there was no place for aggressive vulgarity in golf, Bradley sheepishly claimed a “few people crossed the line.”

Bradley should have stood tall and said: “We’re not going to accept this rude behavior. We’re better than this.”

He didn’t. Another “parenting gone wrong” moment lost to the ages.

Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray once wrote about offensive lineman Conrad Dobler’s dirty play “crossing the line” of legality: “To say Dobler ‘plays’ football is like saying the Gestapo ‘played’ 20 Questions.”

The Doblers of Bethpage exuded narcissism and a sense of entitlement without consequences.

Just last week at Shinnecock, the pro-Scottie Scheffler crowd was so stacked against Wyndham Clark, who held a six-shot lead going into the final round, that hecklers were yelling for his ball to “get in the bunker!”

“Don’t choke, Wyndham!” they advised, as Clark looked straight ahead and tried to remain placid. Clark held on to win by a shot.

To be clear, Clark’s status as a crowd favorite certainly had cratered after the U.S. Open in 2025 when he destroyed a couple of lockers after missing the cut at Oakmont, but to his credit, he since has admitted he was living in a “dark” place and has been trying to make amends for his bad behavior. He has taken actions to correct it.

But after the classless spectator debacle at Shinnecock, Bradley, who played his collegiate golf at St. John’s University in New York, again seemed to excuse the bad behavior. Bradley said as golf grows in popularity, there is “a different group of people coming to these tournaments.”

“Spoiled” might be one word. A few others come to mind: soulless, vapid, egocentric, vain, conceited.

Narcissism just about covers the waterfront.

“I think that golf is in the process of leaving just the golf world – where people are coming to tournaments that are sports fans – and that’s how, you know, people in New York cheer on the Knicks or the Giants or whatever,” Bradley said.

Comparing golf competition to football and basketball – golfers play the ball where it lies and call penalties on themselves when no one is looking – is a specious argument. Championship golf is replete with examples of grace on display. Look no further than Jack Nicklaus conceding a nerve-wracking putt to Tony Jacklin on the final hole of the 1969 Ryder Cup to guarantee an overall team tie. (The U.S. retained the Ryder Cup in the tie, but Jacklin could have missed the putt, leading to a defeat that would have haunted him the rest of his life. Nicklaus knew that.)

Commentator Eamon Lynch of the Golf Channel saw the adolescent behavior at Shinnecock for what it was.

“Long Island golf fans are a stain on the game of golf,” Lynch said.

Harsh, but the track record backs him up.

“This isn’t a New York problem,” Lynch said. “It doesn’t happen at Winged Foot, doesn’t happen at Baltusrol on the other side of the Hudson River. It happens on Long Island every single time. … It’s the drunk crypto bros who buy a ticket with Daddy’s credit card. (They’ve gone through life) without ever being stopped for something they’ve said.”

With the PGA Championship scheduled to return to Bethpage in 2033, Lynch said the PGA of America leadership should seriously consider changing the venue as a form of class punishment.

“These people do not deserve a major championship,” Lynch said.

While Lynch’s solution of punishing the group for the sins of the (too many) few is unlikely to gain traction, it’s time for the game’s so-called leaders – are you listening, Keegan Bradley? – to declare a zero-tolerance ejection policy for anyone who tries to make himself a five-second, social-media clown.

It would be called consequences for bad behavior. What a concept.

pfinney@me.com

Teenager Bob Massett had a rare connection with future major leaguer – and fellow St. Cecilia CYO member – Rusty Staub.

Long before the “mercy rule” and Little League participation trophies – the logical extension of Dr. Spock and his parenting bible of self-esteem – the St. Cecilia CYO baseball team in the mid-1950s was the New Orleans Catholic church equivalent of the Bronx Bombers.

Coached by playground legend Firmin Simms, St. Cecilia mostly pounded opponents into submission, but in a very Christian way.

Just one or two runs at a time.

St. Cecilia was crushing yet another overmatched opponent by double digits late in the game one evening when Bob Massett, then a 15-year-old Holy Cross junior, limbered up in the on-deck circle at Stallings Playground. Simms, an Army vet, had never read Dr. Spock, but looking at the score, he tapped Massett on the shoulder.

“Bob,” Simms said, “you don’t mind if Rusty pinch hits for you?”

“No, man, put him in there,” Massett replied.

Rusty, a redhead, was 10 at the time. Rusty – as in Rusty Staub – went on to play 23 seasons in the major leagues and collect 2,716 hits, including 292 home runs.

Footnote in sports history

As Msgr. Bob Massett, the ultimate storyteller, reflects on his 60 years as a priest, he absolutely knows he is the only priest in history that Staub ever pinch-hit for.

“Rusty would hit ’em over the right field fence, which was maybe a good three-quarters of a block,” Msgr. Massett said. “The park backed up to the 5th District police station on Poland and St. Claude. There was a grocery store on Lesseps and St. Claude called Beros. Rusty would hit ’em over the fence and sometimes break a window.”

Msgr. Massett, who will turn 88 in December, officially retired from active ministry in 2016, but, as always, there’s a story. For the last 10 years, he has taken up residence at Metairie Manor, a senior residence formerly run by the archdiocese’s Christopher Homes, where, as “the high priest on the 11th floor,” he offers his homespun version of the Gospel while still celebrating the occasional weekend Mass at St. Mary Magdalen Church, where he served as pastor since 1995.

An accidental fall as he was getting into his car in the parking lot of Metairie Lake Lawn last October – where he had just finished celebrating a Funeral Mass for fellow Holy Cross graduate Huey Weber – left him with a fractured left tibia, which he has been nursing back to health through physical therapy.

“I fell in the bushes, really, and thank God I didn’t hit my head,” Msgr. Massett said. “They kept me off of it for eight weeks. Now, they’re working on my balance. I’ve been saying Mass over here three times a week.”

When he celebrated a funeral Mass for Deacon Angelas Robin shortly before he retired in 2016, Deacon Robin’s daughter delivered the eulogy and referred lovingly to Msgr. Massett as the “soon-to-be pope of Metairie Manor.”

“All I know is Archbishop Aymond pledged me his allegiance,” Msgr. Massett said, laughing.

Msgr. Massett always laughs.

One of the keepsakes Msgr. Massett took from the St. Mary Magdalen rectory when he moved into Metairie Manor was a poster of “The Holy Cross Man,” a statement of life’s purpose for every Holy Cross student.

“The Holy Cross Man,” the school code says, “is a refined gentleman who lives by faith. Devoted to his soul’s welfare, he reflects often on God. His daily actions are sanctified by prayer, the practice of virtue and manly piety. Since sanctity is his goal, he has a deep devotion to Our Lord, to Our Lady and to St. Joseph, patron of his school.”

“If you got punished, you had to write it 10 or 12 times,” Msgr. Massett said. “Most of us remember it by heart.”

A pencil is an amazing thing.

Two ways into a game

Msgr. Massett wasn’t much of an athlete, but he loved sports and played basketball as a senior when the school needed a relatively tall body to fill out the team picture.

“The only time I got into a game was when we couldn’t win or couldn’t lose,” he said of his career as a two-minute closer. “I did have four points one night against Nicholls. That was our neighboring school. My father used to take up tickets at the gym door as a volunteer, and whenever I did get in a game, I just heard one voice: ‘Shoot, son, shoot!’”

Unlike his classmate Jack Regan, who entered the seminary right after high school and went on to become Benedictine Abbot Patrick Regan, Msgr. Massett spent two years at Tulane University studying engineering and not giving the priesthood any deep thought.

“I really wasn’t that mature,” he said. “Then I found out engineering was a deeper mystery than the Blessed Trinity.”

But he could not shake the idea of being a priest. “I finally came to the point where I said, ‘I’ve got to try this. If it’s not for me, then I’ll look somewhere else,’” he said. “But once I got in, everything went pretty smoothly.”

Roiled his dear mother

He was ordained on June 11, 1966, at a time after the Second Vatican Council when some priests were beginning to walk away from their ordained ministry. It was a confusing time, but Msgr. Massett took it in stride and even found a way to comfort his concerned mother.

She told me one day, ‘Boy, I’m listening to all this talk about who’s running around with whom, and I’m getting nervous. If they ever mention your name, I’ll kill you.’”

Msgr. Massett sensed a tailor-made opening: “I said, ‘Mom, if I ever get married, you’ll be the first one to know.’ She threw me out of the house.”

The ‘Marryin’ Priest’

Over the years, because of his affinity for youth and young adult ministry, Msgr. Massett wound up presiding at more than 1,500 weddings, earning him the moniker from Msgr. Earl Gauthreaux as “The Marryin’ Priest.”

He has classic wedding stories. Some can even be printed.

“A couple of times, the groom has kind of passed out at the time of the vows,” Msgr. Massett said. “All the people are aghast because they don’t know what’s going on. I usually say, ‘Well, we all knew Suzy was a knockout.’”

Another time, a reluctant ring bearer started to walk up the aisle before falling prostrate. He would not be budged, either with candy or dynamite.

“The bride and the father stepped right over the kid,” Msgr. Massett said.

He also had a favorite closing piece of advice to the couple before letting them loose on the world.

“I’d tell them, ‘Look, in my marriages, we have no divorces,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of murders, but no divorces.”

Joy-filled spirit

One of his favorite spiritual insights comes from Blessed Columba Mormion, a Benedictine abbot who wrote: “Joy is the echo of God’s love in us.”

“I think I’ve always been a basically happy person, and I was able to identify with that real good,” Msgr. Massett said. “I always try to bring joy and uplifting words and some humor into every situation.”

Even in challenging situations, Msgr. Massett has always found a way to remain cool. He was a temporary administrator at St. Frances Cabrini Church in the early 1990s when the air conditioning went out, yet again, on a blistering Sunday in July. With equal parts spiritual savvy and practical wisdom, he delivered the shortest homily ever to a melting congregation.

“Some of you may think it’s as ‘hot as hell’ in here,” he said. “But it’s NOT!”

The happy priesthood.

“It’s meant everything to me,” he said. “It’s been very fulfilling, and still is. But I always think back to what my brother told me. He said, ‘Bob, you made the right choice. You never could handle a real job.’”

Later this summer, Msgr. Massett will celebrate his 60th anniversary of ordination with a Mass and reception at St. Mary Magdalen Church.

“It’s not going to be a big deal – weenies and chili and draft beer,” Msgr. Massett said. “That’s all you need.”

pfinney@me.com

Bob Breck came to New Orleans in 1978 and became the city’s go-to meteorologist.

The Indiana-born meteorologist who elevated Nash Roberts’ grease-pencil torch by shining as a forecaster when path and intensity matter the most in New Orleans – in the six months between June 1 and Nov. 30 – has been retired for 10 years after nearly four decades of storm-gazing at Fox 8 WVUE.

Proof endures of Breck’s stature as the unquestioned, post-Nash oracle of New Orleans weather, just as surely as it was for Nash when in 1951 he began forecasting a hurricane’s hidden intentions by drawing black lines with a grease pencil on a WDSU blackboard.

“It’s easy to think back when you were watching the weather and everybody would say, ‘Yeah, but what does Nash think?’” Breck, 77, recalled. “And Nash would always tell you something different than what the hurricane center was saying.

“If the hurricane center said the storm was going to Biloxi, Nash would say Pensacola, because more often than not back then, the accuracy wasn’t that good. He knew it wasn’t going to go exactly where they said it was going – it was going to either side. So, he chose which side, and most of the time, he was right. But, not all the time.”

“Not all the time” is the true batting-average metric for New Orleans meteorologists.

Anyone with a Farmer’s Almanac from the 1900s, after all, can predict the agonizingly clockwork weather patterns of a New Orleans summer day.

“Every station says the high is going to be 92, the low 75 and there’s a 40% chance of rain,” Breck says. “So, who’s more accurate?”

Given that all things are somewhat measurable, TV stations use a monitoring service called WeatheRate as evidence that their weather forecasts are more reliable than those of their competitors. Breck even pitched the data-driven resource once to Fox 8 general manager Joe Cook after returning from a meteorology conference.

“Joe said, ‘Why would I want to do that?’” Breck recalled. “You are already the most-trusted weathercaster in town. Our research shows that. I’m not going to pay somebody to tell us that.”

Instead, Cook relied on broader survey metrics that essentially boiled down to this: Did viewers “trust” Bob Breck? It’s called a “Q score,” which is based on a broadcaster’s familiarity and likeability.

“Only one person topped my scores, and it wasn’t a weathercaster,” Breck said. “Who do you think that was?”

Cue the drum roll.

“It was Angela (Hill),” Breck said, referring to the New Orleans TV legend who ruled the WWL airwaves from 1975 to 2013. “I could never top the queen.”

A third-grade weather forecast

When Robert Zabrecky was in the third grade in Hammond, Indiana – his Slovak father was a general laborer until his final job as a clerk in the city water department – he wrote a report on a snowfall that piqued his curiosity and framed his future.

“I always knew what I wanted to do,” he said.

Breck went on to earn a meteorology and oceanography degree from the University of Michigan and then entered the Marine Corps Reserves, where he wound up in Florida breaking down weather conditions for Air Force fighter-pilot trainees. He drew the line at flying into the eye of a hurricane.

“I never flew on a hurricane plane for the same reason I don’t eat peanut butter – previous experience,” Breck says, laughing.

Let’s just say the lone peanut butter sandwich Zabrecky ate as a child created vortex conditions. One of his first airplane flights – for a job interview in Cincinnati – left him feeling as though he were a turkey being dropped from a helicopter in a nightmare WKRP fan promotion.

“That plane bounced, and things were falling out of the compartments, and I thought I was going to die,” Breck said. “I used to work with Ron Swoboda, and he jumped out of an airplane. I’m just saying, ‘Why would anyone want to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft?’ So, I’m kind of like, ‘Why do I want to fly into a hurricane and get bounced around like that?’ They’ll say, ‘Well, we’ve never lost a plane.’ And I say, ‘Well, there’s always a first time.’”

Breck was five years into a six-day-a-week job forecasting the weather for a TV station in Dayton, Ohio – making $18,000 a year – when he was approached for the WVUE job. Roberts had just “retired” from WVUE in November 1977 and had been given a tickertape send-off by news director Alec Gifford.

“Nash left just after the November book – to ‘retire’ to his farm on the Northshore,” Breck recalled. “Poor Alec wanted to send off Nash with great fanfare, so he went up to his farm and showed Nash, not milking the cows, but tending to his farm. It was all very nice. And so what happens? Nash shows up on Channel 4 (four months later), and Alec was devastated. I don’t think Alec ever forgave him for that. I don’t think they ever talked again.”

The Unwelcome Wagon

When Breck’s plane touched down in New Orleans in 1978, he was thrust into the role of the unwelcomed visitor. The gathering storm also included the discomfort of following a legend.

“You had to be alive during that era because you can’t explain it,” Breck said. “I get to town and they’re showing me Buddy Diliberto and Hap Glaudi, and I’m thinking, ‘What are these guys on TV for?’ Because at the stations where I had worked, everybody was slick and good-looking. Here, I’m watching Hap, and nine-tenths of his sportscast was on whatever happened in the eighth race at the Fair Grounds. Buddy was a fun guy. He knew he had a speech impediment that would make it difficult for people to understand him, but he was genuine and down to earth. He knew his sports.,

“As for Nash, even to this day, for the people who have grown up here, Nash was the best. Nash was the only one. That was what I had to face, and the general manager told me, ‘You know, he’s a legend in this market, and you do not replace legends. You’re going to have to create your own.’”

When the ratings book came out two years later showing astonishingly measly results, Bob Olsen, the same general manager who had hired Breck, convened a “come to Jesus” meeting.

“The consultants tell me I should fire you and that you will never make it in this city, but I told them I don’t believe that and I believe in you,” Olsen told Breck. “I know you will turn around the numbers, and I’m not going to fire you.”

Breck, looking like a 1970s hurricane in the eye of the storm, with the late Nancy Parker and John Snell of Fox 8.

Breck had to find inventive ways to overcome WWL’s built-in advantage of deploying the South’s most powerful news team, led by Angela Hill and Garland Robinette. Breck was already taking every charity emcee gig in town to get his name out there, but his secret marketing weapon became offering early-morning weathercasts on four radio shows with wildly divergent demographics.

“I got on with ‘Scoot in the Morning’ on B-97, and I did WYLD, which was the Black station, and WNOE, which was country, and I did an easy-listening station that had an older demographic,” Breck said. “So, I’m doing the weather on all these stations, and all of a sudden, ‘He’s not going to make it in this market?’ Now, everybody starts knowing me.”

Breck was doing weather for B-97 when Walton & Johnson came to New Orleans and revolutionized irreverent morning talk.

“All of a sudden, they said, ‘This is getting so good, we’re going to put a line in your house, hard-wired with a microphone, and it’ll sound like you’re right next to us in the studio,’” Breck said. “So, I’m on one morning and they hear one of my kids saying, ‘Daddy, I want some Cheerios!’ John Walton says, ‘Give him some damn Cheerios!’ Nothing was scripted. It just happened.”

The Katrina early-obit

Breck’s Katrina story remains the tightly written bulletin from the National Weather Service that was the equivalent of a future obituary.

“The government doesn’t usually want to overhype,” Breck said. “Well, in this case, they didn’t overhype. They were very grim, and they said, ‘This is such a powerful storm that neighborhoods will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps months.’ I said at the time that I had never heard language so strong from the National Weather Service. ‘So, you need to get out; you need to get out.’ And, this was before we knew the levees weren’t good.

“I remember going in front of the camera – and people tell me to this day this is why they left. They said when I read that statement, they knew they had to leave. Most people don’t want to leave. They want to delay, delay, delay. But if you delay, you’re going to get stuck in gridlock.”

There are two things all New Orleanians can take comfort in this year, Breck said. First, because of El Niño conditions, Breck agrees with the National Weather Service that there will be fewer named hurricanes – “maybe less than 10.”

Also, he believes the billions of dollars spent in water-protection infrastructure have made the city far less vulnerable because storm surge will have a harder time overtopping the city’s topographic bowl.

“I am totally more confident in the Corps of Engineers,” Breck says. “They were totally embarrassed by Katrina, and it wasn’t their fault. Congress didn’t fund them, so all the walls on the outfall canals were not built right – they were ‘I-walls’ and not ‘T-walls.’ But those wouldn’t have even failed had they blocked off the opening to the canals, as they are now where they have the pumping stations. The water can’t get in those canals, so there won’t be any blowouts. That was what flooded the city.

“Now, you go out to St. Bernard and Lower Ninth, that’s on the other side of the Industrial Canal. That water came from the Mr. Go, and that is now much more protected.”

Current forecasting technology is increasingly accurate, especially when identifying the path, but remains less accurate in predicting a storm’s strength at landfall, Breck said.

“They’re still having trouble picking up on what’s called rapid intensification,” Breck said. “At the recent hurricane conference, they were talking about the new ‘cone of uncertainty.’ I call it the ‘cone of error,’ because that’s what it is – forecast error. In the past, the cone was drawn by putting these circles out, and the circles over time got bigger and bigger. It’s not that way anymore. It’s an ellipse that incorporates the motion of the storm, so it is not as wide a swath. It used to be a three-day forecast, and now it’s going out to five. With the new cone, they’re talking about 90% certainty.”

Any New Orleanians needing reassurance during the anxiety of the next six months would do well to subscribe to Breck’s latest venture – a subscriber-based video podcast service at BobBreck.com in which he will use his outsized expertise to explain the “whys” behind any impending storm.

“My sons had been hollering at me to start a podcast because people were commenting on my blog and saying they wished I was still on TV because of the way I explain things,” Breck said. “People don’t explain things anymore. I want to give them the ‘why’ for why things happen. It costs $2 a month – the same as a Powerball ticket. People used to say, ‘What does Nash think?’ Maybe this time you’ll get, ‘What does Bob think?’”

One thing Breck will never do is insert himself back on the air on Fox 8, because he feels that would do a disservice to the station’s team of experienced meteorologists, led by Bruce Katz, who are working full time.

“I could do it because it’s still in my contract if they wanted me to,” Breck says. “But I always felt bad that when Nash retired and (WWL) would bring him back on for hurricanes and kind of supplant Dave Barnes, who had been the head of the National Weather Service’s local office in Slidell and had a master’s degree in meteorology. I thought it hurt Dave’s credibility, and I know it hurt him personally.”

We now pause for a Nov. 30 forecast

Breck’s personal forecast continues with an extended period of 100% sunshine.

After his first wife, Paula, died in 2002 of a pulmonary embolism at the age of 54 following routine surgery for a broken ankle, Breck began a grief support group to help widows and widowers address their feelings. It’s been therapeutic for those in grief.

“You don’t get the healing without working,” Breck said. “It doesn’t just magically go away. You can have a Ph. D. and read all the books, but if you haven’t lost somebody, you don’t know how to talk to people.”

Breck is saving one of his premium forecasts for Nov. 30. On the final day of hurricane season, he and Valerie Mumphrey Adams, a widow, will pledge their lifelong fidelity, it is to be hoped, not in the eye of a storm.

“We’re going to get married on a cruise – in the middle of the Gulf,” Breck said.

Maybe he’ll write the save-the-date cards in grease pencil.

pfinney@me.com

This image, of course, is totally generated by ChatGPT, but it provides a cautionary tale about outsourcing human thinking to AI.

When Dr. Nihar Sreepada, an assistant professor of public relations at the LSU Manship School of Mass Communication, was a millennial growing up in Hyderabad, India – about 450 miles east of Mumbai – he recalls exactly what he and his buddies would do with their free time during the summer.

The iPhone had not yet been invented and artificial intelligence was a distant gleam in Claude’s eye, so Sreepada and his buddies entertained themselves by watching TV shows as a group and playing board and card games and then hitting the playground for pick-up soccer, cricket and basketball games.

“The whole summer break revolved around going outside and being outside – and sometimes even being bored, which I feel is something we have stopped doing,” said Sreepada, 34, reflecting on the impact of the explosive changes in technology and social media that have swept the globe over the last quarter-century.

As a professor who teaches the next generation of students about the possibilities and dangers of AI and its creeping effect on human creativity, thinking and freedom, Sreepada reflects often on the loss of wonder and curiosity he experienced as a child – without the world clutched in his hand.

“I feel like a lot of our creativity, and all the insights we get, stems from boredom,” Sreepada said.

There is nothing boring about what is happening in the way the world now absorbs “reality,” which is a relative term given AI’s infinite ability to blur the line of what is real and what is unreal.

French theorist Jean Baudrillard has termed that hazy confusion “hyperreality,” Sreepada said.

“When we open our phone, we are diving into a world of hyperreality, where the question is not even about ‘real’ and ‘fake,’ even though we ask those questions: ‘Is this fake or is this AI?’” Sreepada said. “In the world we live in, everything has become hyperreal.”

Sreepada shared a common experience: A couple makes plans to fly to Italy for a dream vacation, scouring the internet for suggestions, photos and videos of bucket-list destinations and activities.

“Somebody posts a picture of an ocean or the beach in Italy, and there the beach looks a certain color,” Sreepada said. “They shoot the ocean, and it’s still there, and the beach exists. But when somebody else goes and their experience of the beach is different – because now the colors are different - they’re like, ‘Oh, the beach is not as crystal clear as I thought it would be.’ Even if it’s not AI-generated and it’s a mere filter that makes a picture look more beautiful, that’s the kind of hyperreality we’re living in.

“Or, it’s something as simple as a concert. Previously, we didn’t have those smartphones, so we used to experience the concert with our five senses. Now, since we are on our phone most of the time, 20 days later, we open our phone, look at that video, and it almost feels like an out-of-body experience – ‘Oh, was I actually there!’ AI only exacerbates this process. Now, we are always questioning.”

So is Pope Leo XIV.

On May 25, the pope presented his first encyclical on artificial intelligence, “Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity): On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” Pope Leo had hinted just days after his election in 2025 that AI was of such import that the church needed to engage Silicon Valley leaders in authentic conversations about AI. He mentioned “very troubling voices” warning of AI’s ability to create autonomous weapons systems independent of human oversight.

The pope also expressed concern for algorithms that effectively block access to health care, jobs and security based on data “tainted by prejudice and injustice.”

Sreepada says he is encouraged by Pope Leo’s decision to engage with AI developers rather than simply react to the headlines.

“It’s often days and sometimes months and even years after the developers have created these technologies, and by the time we learn to use these technologies, other new technologies come up,” Sreepada said. “I really like that he touched on the topic of (AI) literacy, educating human beings on how to effectively use the technology.”

One of the biggest challenges – and Sreepada sees it every day in his LSU classes on AI literacy – is that the tool will extinguish the creativity of people to think for themselves.

“We are so bombarded with a plethora of choices that we have stopped thinking, and we have become passive consumers,” Sreepada said. “It’s the whole concept of ‘freedom from thinking.’ That’s now manifesting itself in real life because we can just ask AI. It’s almost like we are using it as a consultant for thinking, not just as a consultant for work.”

Pope Leo called for “disarming” AI, which Sreepada interprets as his plea to preserve and nurture the power of human thought and creativity.

“When he used the word ‘disarmed,’ I interpreted it as giving AI less power over our thinking itself,” Sreepada said. “Our freedom of thought – the magnificent human – keeps us magnificent. It means allowing us to think for ourselves first and use AI as a supplement rather than using it as a consultant for thinking itself.”

The problem, of course, is that when a technology such as artificial intelligence has exponential Wall Street value, market forces usually trump ethical or moral concerns. Sreepada cited the comments of Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah, who joined the pope in unveiling the encyclical.

“Claude and Anthropic in general have always taken this cautious embrace of technology – that we can’t escape from AI and it has become a part of our lives, but it is important that we not lose ourselves in this process,” Sreepada said. “But stakeholder interest – the market – requires companies to keep developing. What (he) didn’t say is that Google and other companies invest in them.”

With the imbalance of resources in various communities, Sreepada worries about the digital divide growing more widely and deeply between urban and rural regions and between those areas with high and low incomes.

“There are areas where people don’t have access to resources or even education to be able to use AI for their benefit,” Sreepada said. “We keep hearing that AI will not replace humans. It will only replace humans who don’t know how to use AI. When people say that, it’s almost the idea that humans have this obligation to learn AI very quickly.”

In his teaching role, experience has convinced Sreepada that he can’t stop students from using AI, but he hopes to make them “literate enough” to know how and when to use it.

“I think all professors are still struggling to find a common way in which we can really teach artificial intelligence and develop AI literacy,” he said. “We have our work cut out for us. But the biggest challenges and concerns have been the outsourcing of thinking itself.”

The media landscape also has drastically changed, Sreepada said, especially in the area of “trust.”

“Trust is probably at an all-time low in many institutions, and as of now, AI is probably making it worse,” Sreepada said.

Sreepada has one go-to tip for media consumers faced with deciphering the “truth” of what they are seeing on their phones: Check around to see if anyone else is “reporting” it.

“That’s one of the better habits that everybody can cultivate,” he said. “If anything they see feels almost out of the norm – or if there is new information or news about, let’s say, the Iran-U.S. war or something happening around the world – it’s always good to see if others are reporting it as well.”

Sreepada also advises media consumers to pay careful attention to those click-bait headlines that have “four or five words” taken out of context to dare you to click through for more information.

“This is where misinformation gets spread faster, especially on social media, because everything is taken out of context, and social media rewards extremism,” Sreepada said. “It can be something as small as ‘Yogurt causes cancer,’ and everybody’s panicking. There’s so much of this on social media. There’s very little space for nuance.”

What will Sreepada be talking about in the classroom 10 years from now, when he’s 44?

“The next big step is agentic AI, for sure, where it’s almost like this being that can do everything by itself,” he said. “The way AI is right now, it’s providing good value for a lot of people, and a lot of people have to become up to date with it, but companies are not stopping. They are rushing and competing with each other.”

The critical issue for Sreepada is protecting the freedom of human thought.

“We are outsourcing so much of our mind to AI, that I feel like in 10 years we’ll be dealing with a lot of people who will have this ‘hybrid’ mind – this combination of human and machine,” Sreepada said. “What are the ramifications of this? We’ve already become more impatient as people. We want things faster. If I’m in the classroom, what kind of students am I going to see? Will my thinking become very outdated? How do I stay up to date with everything that is changing? How will the hybrid mind, which I will see more of, impact the lived experience of everyone?”

Those are things guaranteed to keep the pope up late at night.

pfinney@me.com

I’ve reached a certain point in life where I scare myself. Sometimes, I can even remember what just happened.

Case in point: Have you ever turned your head away from the computer, for a millisecond, only to turn back to the blank screen and wonder what it was that had just been “top of mind”?

I use the word “mind” loosely, because, as my wife can attest, absent-mindedness is a family trait that seems to have been genetically passed on.

My earliest brush with mind games came in August 1967, an episode that, for some reason, I can recall with searing clarity. My younger brother Tim and I were riding with my dad in our family’s blue-and-white VW van as he approached the toll booth on the south end of the Causeway.

We were headed to St. Paul’s School in Covington, where the Saints were finishing up training camp before their inaugural season, and my dad needed some color for his States-Item story on diminutive kicker Charley Durkee.

Everything seemed to be going fine. My dad slowed the VW to a comfortable, 25-mph crawl, but for some unknown reason, he decided to gun past the toll-taker with all the aplomb of a pathological Waymo without a driver or a conscience.

“Dad! Stop!” Tim and I shouted.

That wasn’t the only sound we heard, because the windows were down – no AC in this German-engineered “people’s car.” We could hear the uniformed teller shrieking: “Hey, man, you can’t do that! Stop! Stop!”

Somehow, the barking from 50 feet behind pierced through the reverie in my dad’s brain, and he slammed on the brakes, pushed the stick shift into reverse and rolled slowly back to the cash register.

“Man, I’m sorry,” my dad told the man as he handed over a $1 bill. “I was thinking about my next column.”

My dad’s daydreaming episodes seemed frequently to have revolved around cars. Our VW must have been in the shop one day, so he was driving my Uncle Joe’s unfamiliar Ford when he stopped in front of Angelo Brocato’s on North Carrollton Avenue to pick up some cannoli.

Again, everything seemed to be going just fine, until we left Brocato’s and headed back to the car.

The car was locked.

With the keys in the ignition.

With the engine running.

“That’s OK,” my dad said. “The engine will stop when it runs out of gas.”

This kind of family history – and a story that would make my dad proud – prompted me to think about the difference between memory loss as a part of normal aging and something a little more serious. So, I turned to my neurological specialist. Dr. Chad GPT, for a diagnosis of some of my most recent brushes with clear vs. opaque thinking.

Dr. Chad assured me that the key difference between normal aging and a serious memory issue is “impact on daily life.”

He continued in hushed tones: “Normal forgetfulness causes occasional hiccups (OK, I haven’t hiccuped lately, which is good!) but doesn’t stop you from living independently (Wow, Dr. Chad is actually bringing up independent living? It can’t be that bad yet). Serious memory problems disrupt daily routines, worsen over time and indicate underlying cognitive conditions.”

So, what are some signs of memory loss attributed to “normal” aging?

Occasional lapses: Forgetting where you parked, a friend’s name or missing an occasional appointment (Oh, dear).

Independent functioning: You are still able to complete daily tasks, manage your household and make your own decisions (I did decide what I would have for breakfast yesterday, but what exactly was it?)

Context Recall: Often remembering the context of a forgotten item or event later (such as blanking on a word but remembering it hours later). I can recall going down the list of our four children’s names before hitting on the right one, but I did that in my 30s.

Something More Serious (Uh, oh)

Frequent repetition: Asking the same questions or telling the same stories within the same conversation. (I do like to retell some of my favorite jokes, like when Buddy Diliberto told his WWL radio audience at a Children’s Hospital radio-thon: “It was tough walking down the halls seeing all those kids hooked up to their RVs.” But, that’s a story that never grows old, right? Right?)

Disorientation: Getting lost in familiar neighborhoods or losing track of the current date, season or time passing. (Being able to tell you the current date? That’s Ph.D-level stuff.)

Struggling with familiar tasks: Forgetting how to follow a familiar recipe, manage your medications or use everyday appliances. (Admittedly, I still have trouble finding the six TV remotes that have to be triggered in exact sequence to avoid TDS : Television Derangement Syndrome.)

Misplacing items in odd places: Leaving items in inappropriate spots (e.g., putting car keys in the freezer) and becoming suspicious that others moved or stole them. (I have not become suspicious, yet, so there’s that!)

Personality changes: Becoming unusually confused, suspicious, depressed or withdrawing from normal social activities. (“Unusually” is an adverb with so much wiggle room.)

OK, so here’s my confession.

We have two cars (it’s cars, again!). One is 16 years old, and the other is relatively new with more bells and whistles than a Mississippi River calliope. You can get out of our 2024 Honda Accord hybrid and shut the door, and it will automatically lock when you walk away.

You never have to think about it (um, on Dr. Chad’s cognition scale, that’s a movable feast!).

Let’s talk about our 2010 Camry. My set of keys has long ago lost its ability to remotely lock the car, so I have to remember to do that task manually.

OK, but that’s NOT the issue. Here’s the issue: To open the trunk, I need to actually insert the key (kids, you won’t know what this is) into a little hole and turn it clockwise. After retrieving groceries or lawn chairs or golf clubs from the trunk, you actually have to take the key out of the trunk and put it in your pocket. (Do you sense a doctoral thesis on short-term memory coming?)

Let’s just say when my unsuspecting wife got into old Betsie and drove around town the other day, she could not understand for the life of her why two well-meaning gentlemen were honking their horns, pointing and trying to get her attention. (She made the decision not to make eye contact. You can’t be too careful these days, right?)

Thus, blissfully unaware, she pulled into the grocery store parking lot filled with more than 100 cars. She got out and shopped for 30 minutes, all the while, with the keys to old Betsie and to our family’s mortal existence hanging, longingly, enticingly, from the trunk.

Let’s just say New Orleans is filled with Good Samaritans and even greater saints. When my wife came out of the store, old Betsie was just where she had parked it.

What a story of honesty, chivalry and gratitude!

But when my wife came home and told me to sit down, I knew a story of deeper significance and meaning was about to unfold.

Frankly, I seem to forget the details. (Just kidding, honey!)

pfinney@me.com

Send your favorite memory stories in the comments!

None of his family mem­bers or coworkers can identify the resurrec­tion moment for Ray Watts because his Easter story un­folded largely hidden from their eyes.

For most of his 20s, 30s and 40s, Ray was a drinker and a smoker and a gambler, a man who couldn’t keep a job. His self-destructive habits and inability to remain employed led to a divorce, which placed a monumental burden on his wife to rear three kids alone.

Pat Watts, Ray’s eldest child, remembers him as a shadow father. When Pat was play­ing Babe Ruth baseball and digging in at the batter’s box, he sometimes would glance down the line and there, standing silently behind the right field fence, was the fa­ther he never knew.

“He would come to a lot of my games,” Pat said, recall­ing his father, who died last month at the age of 72. “He just seemed to know when we were playing. He kept his distance. He really wasn’t involved because his nerves were so bad, and he didn’t like being around a lot of kids. Even when I was young he was on prescriptions. Over the years he mellowed out.”

But before Ray did that, he dropped out of his family’s life. Judi, his ex-wife, worked two jobs to keep the children fed, and she attended Our Lady of Holy Cross College to earn a teaching degree that allowed her to teach in the public schools. She got her degree with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average.

“She had an affinity for working with inner-city kids,” Pat said. “She kept a roof over our heads. We had to move a lot when I was young, and I didn’t know why. We had a car that wouldn’t go in reverse, so we had to park on a hill. I don’t have any hard feelings because whatever sit­uation you’re born into, you can always better yourself.”

When Pat was 19, he got a call from his father, who was living at a cheap hotel and didn’t have the money to pay the bill.

“Maybe that’s when reality set in for him – to have his 19-year-old son paying his hotel bill,” Pat said. “Maybe he said to himself, ‘I can’t go through any more of this.’”

Ray was homeless when he was referred to Catholic Charities in New Orleans. He had recently separated from a group pur­porting to raise money on be­half of the homeless. Catholic Charities offered him a place to stay and asked him to do some interior painting at Ciara House, a group home for chronically mentally ill adults, in exchange for his room and board.

Something happened inside Ciara House that transformed a life. After Ray finished the painting job, he stayed on as a paid cook and counselor, and for the last 21 years, he found meaning in his life through helping others and trying to repair the damage he had caused within his own family.

The man who was too ner­vous and too unreliable to be around noisy kids was a rock during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when he and two other staff members shuttled 13 men­tally ill clients to Brandon, Miss., where they stayed for nine weeks in a small house provided by St. Paul Church.

Ray did all the cooking and kept the residents calm. His own “bedroom” was a tiny storage cubicle, just spacious enough if he bent his knees.

“When we evacuated he went out and purchased ev­eryone a little radio – with a little earphone,” said Dorothy McKnight, a coworker at Ciara House. “Those radios seemed to keep all the clients calm at night. They would sleep with it in their ear. Ray didn’t like a lot of noise.”

Even though Ray had recon­nected with his children and grandchildren and often gave them generous birthday and Christmas gifts, his family did not realize the extent to which he was beloved by his colleagues until his funeral.

“I guess stunned is the word,” Pat said. “My sis­ter Polly said Ray had led a double life. We didn’t have a Norman Rockwell existence. Nobody has Norman Rock­well. You can’t change the past. But he was in another dimension over there. My sister was bug-eyed hearing all the stories of what he did. She kept saying, ‘Is this the same Ray?’ I guess so.”

pfinney@me.com

Janice and Jerry Romig fostered 21 children in addition to rearing their five children.

In 1965, as a young, Catholic mother with four children – ages 5, 7, 9 and 11 – Janice Romig was at a pivot point in her life.

Janice and her husband Jerry, a program director at WDSU-TV, were aching to have more children, but tragically, in subsequent years they had lost two baby girls shortly after birth.

One daughter was born with a hole in her heart. The other carried the Rh factor, a mystifying blood complication that in those days often led to death.

“They didn’t have what they have now for Rh,” Janice recalled.

One morning during the week, Jerry called home from the office. He told his wife to turn on “Midday” with Terry Flettrich and Wayne Mack at noon on Channel 6, because the director of the New Orleans Children’s Bureau was going to be interviewed about foster parenting.

“We wanted a big family, and we had lost the two babies, and we loved babies,” Janice said. “And, I was really good with the newborns. So, when we saw this on TV, we said, ‘Let’s try it.’”

Janice and Jerry didn’t just dip their toes into shallow water as foster parents. Over the course of the next two decades, they fostered 21 infants, caring for them in their home for between two and nine months while adoptive parents could be found to provide a permanent home.

“We always made sure that the children knew that the babies were here only temporarily, that they would be leaving,” Janice recalled.

Janice and her five children. From left, Mark, Mary Beth, Anne, Ellen and Jay.

There were many miracles, the biggest coming in 1975 when Janice, the full-time mom and foster mom, became pregnant with her youngest daughter Ellen. At the time, the Romigs already were housing two foster babies.

“I had had such problems with my previous two pregnancies that I couldn’t let myself hope,” Janice said. “The kids were all excited about the baby coming, but in view of my medical history, I cautioned them to be aware that this one might not live either. I really didn’t even get anything for her.”

Doctors armed with better medical protocols induced Janice’s labor at eight months, and the result was a healthy Ellen.

“We were able to exchange her blood three times, and she lived, which was a miracle,” Janice said. “In fact, Archbishop (Philip) Hannan baptized Ellen in the living room of our house because she couldn’t go out. We called her heaven-sent, because that is just what we felt she was.”

When Ellen was born, Mary Beth, the Romigs’ youngest child, was a 16-year-old junior at St. Mary’s Dominican High School. Jay, the eldest, was a senior at the University of New Orleans, Mark was a sophomore in UNO’s Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and Anne was a student at the Charity School of Nursing.

With four much older siblings, Ellen, 16 months old in 1977, quickly became the center of attention in the bustling Romig household.

Janice and Jerry decided to take a five-year hiatus as foster parents after Ellen was born. During their first stint as foster parents, Janice made sure to take plenty of pictures of the babies so that she could create an album as a treasured gift to the adoptive parents.

Also, like clockwork, two days before the adoption was to be finalized, Janice would drive downtown to Tippery’s to get an 8-by-10 studio portrait done – one for the new family and one to add to the wall of her home on Marshal Foch Street in St. Dominic Parish.

As the family’s photo gallery grew in Lakeview, young Ellen began showing off the framed photographs to neighborhood friends of her own age.

“Her little friends used to come into the house and ask, ‘Who are these babies?’” Janice said. “And, Ellen would say, ‘Those are my foster brothers and sisters, but I didn’t know them because I wasn’t born.’”

That’s when Janice and Jerry decided to resume fostering – taking in three more children over the next few years.

“We wanted Ellen to have that experience because the other children could carry babies around on their hips – the boys could change diapers, and they knew everything about babies,” Janice said. “The kids always say what good years those were. They realized the babies would be leaving.”

The toughest leave-taking was Michael’s. He stayed for 9 1/2 months, and the Romig kids were there when Michael took his first steps. In fact, you could say they taught him to walk.

“The boys would call for him to come upstairs, and he would crawl up the steps, with one kid in front of him and one behind,” Janice said. “We really wanted to adopt him, but they said we had enough children.”

Janice frequently had to deal with well-meaning questions from her friends about her foster kids: “How can you bear to give them up?”

“But that’s not the point,” Janice said. “Rather, it was seeing them go to an adoptive family, to parents who wanted children and were going to have a child after all these years. It wasn’t giving the children up – it was rather giving them a good and permanent home of their own.”

One of the toughest blows of Janice’s life came after Katrina when she returned to her Lakeview home, with all those cherished photos and photo albums fused by the floodwaters into lumps of indistinguishable papier mâché.

“When you tried to open them up, they all tore apart,” Janice said. “I had some on the walls, but they all washed away.”

Janice knows that some of the pictures she took of her babies are still out there with the adoptive parents, who were always grateful not only for the photos but also for her meticulous instructions on how she had cared for her special children.

A mother’s checklist

“I was a picture person, and I would give them a little album from the time we brought the baby home from the hospital, and then at 2 weeks old, 3 months, 4 months, 6 months,” Janice said. “That way you weren’t just handing them a baby at 5 months old. I also gave them the baby’s schedule. One mother told me, ‘I didn’t know babies came with instructions!’”

Janice is now 94. Her late husband Jerry, who died in 2016, was the public address announcer at Saints’ home games for nearly 50 years and 446 football games (“First down … SAAAINTS!”). They were married for 62 years, and they cried like the babies they had once lovingly cared for when the Saints beat the Colts 31-17 in Super Bowl XLIV in February 2010.

Forty-three years after New Orleans gave birth to NFL football, it was “Let’s Party With the Lombardi” in Super Bowl XLIV.

A fan from New York was sitting just in front of the Romigs as the clock expired, and he glanced back at them and wondered why these Saints fans were bawling.

“Jerry told him, ‘If you had waited as long as we did to get here, you’d be crying, too!’” Janice said.

Forty-three years of labor pains, indeed.

The rosary: Never leave home without it.

Janice said she and her husband agreed that saving their small part of the world, one baby at a time, was a priceless gift not only to those special infants but also to their family.

“Those babies meant everything to me,” Janice said. “I pray every day for them and also for the mothers to realize that they saved a life. … When I married, my life was my husband and my children. When I look back on all of it now, I wonder how I did it all. But then, I would not have not done it either.”

Mark Romig has a Mother’s Day interview with his mom as part of “The Mark Romig Show.” Hear Janice in her own words at the 1:05 mark.

pfinney@me.com

A funny thing happened when we asked ChatGPT to redraw Louisiana’s congressional districts. The AI program made some sense to the untrained eye.

As a reformed sportswriter who once asked ChatGPT to plot out the best road trip for visiting national parks in Utah – and got what appeared to be a suitably Mormon answer in five seconds – I wondered how long would it take for the free AI analytical tool to create a reasonable redistricting plan for Louisiana that would map out six contiguous, right-sized congressional districts for the state’s 4.6 million residents?

In this case, about 3.7 seconds.

But, as with all things Louisiana, where politics is waged as 4D chess, checkmate is not that easy, says Greg Rigamer, one of those rare people with the ability to decipher and accommodate both the unswerving validity of mathematical equations and the relentless warrior mentality of politicians, for whom this take-no-prisoners game of redistricting comes down to: “Find me one more vote.”

Throw in the bitter divide of race, the bane of the United States for 250 years, and finding a voting solution that satisfies the most Louisiana residents becomes an AI hallucination.

Louisiana currently has six congressional districts, four of them largely white and Republican and two that are mostly Black and Democrat. Now, the burning question being debated in the back chambers of the Baton Rouge Capitol and in the Oval Office of the White House is whether that 4-2 tilt in favor of the Republicans will become 5-1 or even 6-0, given President Donald Trump’s desire to extend the Republican runway in Congress.

Louisiana’s current congressional map of six House districts has a 4-2 edge for Republicans. President Donald Trump wants more. The “snake-like” 6th District, which stretches from Baton Rouge to Shreveport, got special attention from the Supreme Court.

“The easy part is to divide 4 1/2 million by six,” said Rigamer, a New Orleans political data consultant whose facility with polling and statistical modeling is legendary in and beyond Louisiana. “It’s absolutely simple. But, dealing with decision-makers is almost impossible because they want their mother-in-law, who lives on this street, in their district, but they don’t want the people on the next street over.”

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling April 29 in Louisiana v. Callais that the state’s current congressional map was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered – the significant legal sticking point was the creation in 2024 of a second majority-Black district that snaked its way from Shreveport to Baton Rouge – I wondered if AI was equipped in a “post-Callais” world to handle this simple task: “Can you develop a new congressional district map for the state of Louisiana using the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Callais decision as guides?”

Faster than former Gov. Bobby Jindal could zip through prices at an Angus livestock auction, ChatGPT came back with assurances that it would not just “draw a map of Louisiana the way a politician might sketch lines (uh-oh, that’s a real problem). It would follow a structured, data-driven pipeline with explicit rules and tradeoffs.”

ChatGPT’s non-negotiable “criteria” would be equal population (“one person, one vote”), compliance with the 1965 Voting Rights Act (where there could be no racial vote dilution) and contiguous districts (“no disconnected pieces”). It would use the most recent census data, parish boundaries, voting-precinct maps and geographic features such as rivers and bayous.

It also claimed it would take into account compactness (“avoid weird, snake-like districts”: Did someone mention Louisiana’s 6th District?), respect community lines, promote fairness and protect minority representation.

“Here’s the catch,” ChatGPT cautioned. “These goals can conflict (umm, yes). Algorithms must balance tradeoffs (e.g., compactness vs. minority representation).”

ChatGPT advised that an AI system likely would “anchor districts around population centers (New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport), ensure at least one or two majority-Black districts to comply with federal law, balance rural vs. urban populations across districts (and) minimize splitting parishes where possible.”

In 3.7 seconds, ChatGPT’s work was done, producing a map that looked, to the unpracticed eye, sleek and coherent. ChatGPT spit out a 5-1 Republican-Democratic map, with the Democratic district centered on New Orleans.

ChatGPT’s District 5 in the New Orleans metropolitan area is the lone majority-Black district created in reshaping the state’s congressional seats.

That was the moment Dorothy returned to Kansas.

For his political clients, Rigamer has used a proprietary data-crunching program that essentially can identify what a person on a certain block had for breakfast last Tuesday morning. He also is a pro with the AI tool Gemini and adept with the data-slicing ability of DavesRedistricting.org, an open-source program with a state-by-state breakdown of voter information and district maps.

Still, Rigamer said Gemini failed the test for meeting his exacting standards.

“I told Gemini, ‘I want six congressional districts in Louisiana,’ and it spit out a map pretty quickly, but it was wrong on so many points,” Rigamer said.

Rigamer told Gemini it was “hallucinating” because some of the districts were not contiguous.

“There was a piece of a district here and a piece of another district here,” Rigamer said. “I think what it was doing was grouping communities of interest, irrespective of geography. It did fix that. Then I told it some of the districts were much smaller than the others. Districts have to be within three-quarters of a percentage point in total population.”

Greg Rigamer knows numbers, and he also know politicians. Sometimes, the two mix. (Photo courtesy of WWL-TV)

Rigamer and other political experts said dispassionate math is one thing. Human maneuvering is another.

“This is not like medicine, where there’s a million different variables,” Rigamer said. “It’s just straight numbers. But where it gets difficult is the people who are drawing the map saying, ‘Well, I’m really popular in this area. This area has got to be in here.’ You get into those kinds of things that are personal judgments. You have all these things that come into play that have nothing to do with math.”

The redrawing of the snake-like 6th District in 2024 was steeped in political intrigue because it turned a Republican-majority district into one that was majority Democratic. It was widely viewed as Gov. Jeff Landry’s payback for Rep. Garret Graves’ endorsing Landry’s 2023 gubernatorial opponent, Stephen Waguespack, and also for Graves’ reluctant support for Steve Scalise for speaker of the U.S. House.

Graves chose not to run in the newly constructed district.

In his behind-the-scenes conversations with several Louisiana lawmakers since the Callais decision – both Republicans and Democrats – Rigamer said the upcoming redistricting battle will be how many of the state’s six congressional districts will maintain a Black voting majority. Currently, there are two. Will that shrink to one – or zero?

“A number of people I’ve been speaking to – and it’s been a whole bunch since Thursday – they’re really OK with 5-1, but out of D.C., I think there’s a real interest in the 6-0,” Rigamer said. “I can guarantee you it ain’t going to be 4-2.”

Rigamer said the Baton Rouge buzz is that Trump, to whom Landry has pledged unswerving loyalty, has made it clear exactly what he wants.

“I’m sure the White House wants six Republican districts,” Rigamer said. “You can do it, but it gets to be very challenging. I think what you would see happen – and I‘m not suggesting this, I’m just saying the math on this is such – is that you would have to put New Orleans with St. Tammany and some of the Northshore parishes where you don’t have any significant minority population.”

“Another reason I say this is because in Louisiana, the vast majority – 95% of African Americans – are Democrats and consistently vote Democrat. So, if you wanted to do a 6-0, you couldn’t really put New Orleans and Jefferson together because Jefferson is a large parish and 30% African American, and you can’t make that work. So, what you would do is grab African Americans from Orleans and put them with St. Tammany and Washington and Tangipahoa, where you have a pretty good population base but not a high number of African Americans.”

The political headwinds against doing anything that would redistribute voters in Jefferson Parish, Rigamer said, would be significant because Scalise has built an impenetrable base there.

“Scalise is very popular, and he wins his elections in a landslide all the time,” Rigamer said. “He’s worked very hard since he was elected in 2008 to really get to know his district and have them know him. He wants to keep that district as close as possible to what he has been working on for the last 18 years. So, now, rather than have it 75% Republican, we’re going to have it 55% because we’re going to dilute Troy Carter’s (Democratic) district? That’s just repeated with every congressman.”

Political consultant Ron Faucheux said the outcome of the upcoming deliberations is simple to predict.

“It gets down to what Landry wants and what (Attorney General) Liz Murrill thinks they can get through,” Faucheux said. “The simplest thing would be to just go back to what they had, in effect, when there was one Black seat. But with all these parties trying to kill the other side – not just picking up a seat here or there but just wiping them out – there’s a lot of talk that Trump and the national Republicans want them to go for it, to wipe out both Democratic seats.”

With all legal jargon aside, Rigamer said his reading of the Callais decision is that it gives the state “a lot of latitude in redistricting.” Even ChatGPT reflected that new landscape, given the recent Callais ruling.

I asked ChatGPT the Trump question: “Would a Louisiana redistricting map that establishes six majority-white congressional districts be fair?”

“In practical terms, states now have far more freedom to draw maps without creating majority-minority districts,” ChatGPT said. “So, would my answer change (from the situation before Callais)? Legally? Yes – dramatically. Before Callais, a 6 majority-white map in Louisiana would almost certainly be illegal under Section 2. After Callais, a 6 majority-white map is much more likely to survive legal challenge. Courts may accept it if the state says it was drawn for partisan, geographic or ‘race-neutral’ reasons.”

“From a fairness/representation standpoint? No,” ChatGPT continued. “Even after Callais, the underlying facts didn’t change. Louisiana is still ~ one-third Black. Voting is still racially polarized in many parts of the state. A 6-0 map would likely result in little or no Black-preferred representation; outcomes that don’t reflect the statewide electorate. So, most political scientists, voting-rights analysts and AI simulations would still flag that map as highly unrepresentative; an extreme outlier compared to neutral districting plans.”

Rigamer is putting his money on the past-performance charts of Louisiana politicians: Lawmakers will always rally down the stretch and find a way to beat AI.

“The practical matter is, I don’t think people are looking for the most artful solution,” Rigamer said. “They’re looking for what they want. AI might give them the better solution, but it’s not what they want.”

pfinney@me.com.

Jesuit Father Richard Thomas was a horse whisperer. And, he could teach teenagers without using words. (Photo courtesy of Jesuit High School)

Ray Rabalais, then a 16-year-old junior at Jesuit High School, didn’t second-guess the request from Jesuit Father Richard Thomas, his religion teacher, to show up at school with a few other classmates on a Saturday morning in the spring of 1964.

“In those days, if a priest told you to show up at school on a Saturday morning, you showed up at school on a Saturday morning,” Rabalais recalled.

Rabalais drove his VW from the West Bank to school that day, and a couple of other students, one of them a photographer for the Blue Jay school newspaper, pulled into the parking lot. There were about eight or 10 students in all, and they squeezed into three cars, headed for the Fair Grounds, which recently had concluded its annual racing season.

Father Thomas had grown up with horses in Tampa, Florida. His Ignatius moment – the incident to which he could tie his future vocation – ironically enough arrived when he was 16 in the summer of 1944, the same age that Ray Rabalais was that day in 1964.

Richard could tame any horse

Young Richard Thomas had fancied himself the ultimate horse whisperer – he could tame any horse within minutes – but with his older brothers away fighting the Second World War, an especially violent horse he had nicknamed “Hitler” was giving him a full frontal assault.

Father Thomas rediscovered a passion for the poor at Our Lady’s Youth Center just across the Rio Grande from the Mexican border city of Juarez.

Taking a break under a hickory tree, Richard heard something. In later years, he couldn’t determine if it was audible, but he heard it nonetheless: “I want you to be a priest.”

The Jesuit kids in 1964 knew nothing of that story, of course. They were still trying to figure out why their religion teacher was taking them to the Fair Grounds, especially since there were no races scheduled and it was Manresa quiet.

“It’s not that I had any brilliant insight,” Rabalais said. “Honestly, we went up there and just enjoyed seeing the track. None of us had ever been to the stables, and we saw these beautiful horses. So, at first, we thought this was just a field trip. He didn’t discourage that feeling. He was perfectly happy to let us ask whatever questions we wanted. There was no script. I was amazed because those horses led a really coddled life. They talked about all the vitamins they gave them and their special diets. I had no idea.”

The life of coddled thoroughbreds

The stables along the backstretch conveyed a message of strength and watchfulness and care. The grooms and trainers were happy to share with the students stories about how much the horses ate each day – slow horses ate as much as the fast ones – how much rest and frolicking time they got and how their manes would shine after being cleaned and brushed out.

“And, then, Father Thomas said, ‘OK, we’re going to go to this address,’” Rabalais remembers.

The three-car, student caravan pulled out of the Fair Grounds and headed to downtown New Orleans.

“I think it was on Carondelet Street, right near the Pontchartrain Expressway,” Rabalais said. “So, we pulled up, and this was a really poor neighborhood. I was a little nervous. I think everybody was a little nervous. It was like going to the other side of the moon.”

An unspoken juxtaposition

Margie’s Playhouse at 1137 Carondelet, a structure dating to the late 1800s, was a first-floor bar with creaky living quarters upstairs. The students walked up the steps, the smell of stale beer and alcohol and God knows what else clouding their senses.

“And then we went into this room, and there were something like nine children,” Rabalais said. “They were sleeping on filthy mattresses on the floor, not even a bedspread or a bedstand. You just knew they were very, very poor – the poorest family I had ever seen.”

Family welcomed students

How Father Thomas had made connections with the family, who greeted the students warmly, Rabalais never found out.

“I mean, he didn’t just barge into the apartment,” Rabalais said. “I’m sure he had asked them if it was OK if he brought some students.”

Father Thomas’ instructions to the students were the same ones he had given them at the Fair Grounds.

“Just ask them whatever questions you want,” he said.

Just see for yourselves

In reviewing that Saturday afternoon of more than 60 years ago, what struck Rabalais was how Father Thomas followed a pastoral model of responding to social issues championed by Pope John XXIII: “Observe, judge and act.”

“There was no attempt on his part to draw any parallels or comparisons or drive students to a conclusion,” Rabalais said. “There was no anger on his part or outrage or anything like that. Again, it was just that everybody was to come to their own conclusions. That’s the thing, in retrospect, that sort of amazes me because as adults, we have a tendency to jump to the conclusion – you know, ‘You’ve seen it; now here’s the point.’ But, of course, teenagers hate to be lectured to.”

An eye-opening experience

The juxtaposition of the level of care provided to horses and to humans became an unspoken parable for Rabalais that, in many ways, directed the course of his life and future professional career. He went on to Princeton University and Harvard University Law School, but his passion for addressing social ills led to a position with the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, where he worked with three other lawyers helping low-income families with housing issues. He later went on to teach law and advocate for decent housing for 47 years at Loyola University New Orleans.

“All of those activities were directly attributable to the experience I had under Father Thomas,” Rabalais said.

Just weeks after their trip to the Fair Grounds in 1964, Father Thomas left Jesuit High School for a new assignment in El Paso, Texas – running Our Lady’s Youth Center just across the Rio Grande from the Mexican border city of Juarez. The church was in such a poor neighborhood that families who crossed the border from Mexico subsisted by combing the dumps for discarded food and scrap metal they could resell.

The “Christmas Day miracle” of 1972 defies logical explanation.

Somehow, the Jesuit students who were entering their senior year gathered the black-and-white slides they had taken at the Fair Grounds and at Margie’s Playhouse and created what essentially was a pre-internet Powerpoint presentation.

Students’ report ruffled high-brow feathers

As a member of the debate team, Rabalais was anointed to be the featured presenter to the Jesuit Parents’ Club, Catholic parishes and Catholic business professionals. Most of the time, the student presenters were greeted with polite encouragement.

Sometimes not.

“The place where I got the greatest hostility was at a luncheon group of businessmen at the Roosevelt Hotel,” Rabalais recalled. “A number of the businessmen were alumni of Jesuit, and they were furious. They were so angry, they said, ‘I went to Jesuit before the communists took over and they started indoctrinating the students.’ They were like, ‘Why don’t they clean up? Why don’t they buy a vacuum cleaner?’ Just completely missing the essence of poverty, that people didn’t have spare money to go out and buy a vacuum cleaner.”

In his more than 40 years in El Paso, Father Thomas, a good friend of Jesuit Father Harold Cohen, served the poor and became involved with the Catholic Charismatic movement and felt the Holy Spirit prompting him to do more for both the poor and the unborn. His ministry was transformed when he found two young boys sleeping in a dumpster outside his rectory in El Paso. He eventually founded a home for boys.

Loaves and fishes

Richard Dunstan, who has written a biography of Father Thomas entitled “A Poor Priest for the Poor,” said no one can fully understand what happened on Christmas Day in 1972 when Father Thomas went out to the city dump to invite people to lunch. He and his parishioners had been literally following Jesus’ mandate to invite to a feast those who could not repay the favor.

“He went out to the people who were dumpster-diving in these rolling hills of garbage,” Dunstan said. “They thought they had enough food for 150 people. As they went out to the dump, there were about 300 people. They figured they would just serve the food until it ran out. But, the food did not run out. When it was over, they donated the leftover food to three orphanages.”

Father Thomas, the student whisperer who silently encouraged teenagers to think about their own humanity and confront their responsibility toward others, died at 78 in 2006. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops overwhelmingly voted last November to advance his sainthood cause. Known as the “Lone Ranger” Jesuit, he is recognized for his radical commitment to serving the poor on the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly through his ministry at the Lord’s Ranch, and for the 1972 Christmas “multiplication of food” miracle.

A teacher’s voice lives on, especially in the whispers.

pfinney@me.com

There’s a reason for that, and, as usual with Underhill, there’s a back story.

In 2020, Underhill made the all-time bet on himself in the midst of COVID-19 by quickly ditching the security of a well-paying job covering the New England Patriots for The Athletic and returning, not unlike the Prodigal Son, to a New Orleans Saints’ fan base that for 12 months had been standing on the Mississippi River levee, peering northeast, waiting for its favorite sports savant to come to his senses.

Underhill had covered the Saints for five years for The New Orleans Advocate before making what looked like a promising career move to return to New England to cover the Patriots in 2019, but he quickly realized the collateral damage of toiling professionally under Bill Belichick, who could suck the life out of any job that was supposed to have at least a measure of fun and who created a recipe for paranoia.

“It’s a very hard place to exist, and that’s not complaining, that’s factual,” Underhill recalled of his abbreviated year in New England, where players were counseled – browbeaten likely is more accurate – to give one-word answers if zero words did not suffice. “It’s very hard to do your job as a journalist around somebody that doesn’t value that. Being in Boston wasn’t making me happy. The catalyst was, ‘If I’m not going to be happy doing this, why am I doing it?’ Honestly, I was in a little bit of a dark place when that was going on. It no longer felt like success to me, the traditional climb-the-ladder thing.”

In hindsight, Underhill says he understands the reason The Patriot Way mostly succeeded under Belichick.

“I don’t disagree with his approach, because your players probably should never say anything,” Underhill said. “These are highly motivated people, and opponents are looking for sources of motivation. I get that totally. But, it was a very unrewarding place to tell stories. When you got a good story, it felt 20 times better. I’m incredibly thankful for that, because I think it made me who I am as a reporter, and if things had been easy, I don’t know that I would have found ways to be self-reliant, and I think that self-reliance has carried me a little bit.”

What Underhill clung to as a possible lifeline was a financially perilous, blue-sky idea to return to New Orleans and create a stand-alone, independent website to cover the Saints, heavy on his proprietary, technology-driven analysis.

Over the last six-plus seasons, Underhill’s subscriber- and advertiser-supported NewOrleans.Football, byte for byte, might be the coolest, most insightful website covering the waterfront of any NFL team.

NewOrleans.Football is heavily sprinkled with apps that a crazed Saints’ junkie can use to discern the tea leaves of the team’s notoriously opaque salary cap (Mickey Loomis, thank God, seems to have finally rappelled down from Mount Insanity).

Another app makes fans GM for the day, selecting players in a “mock” draft and then re-mocking them as if they were buying hundreds of $2 tickets in an NFL Powerball lottery. (For his money, Underhill hopes the Saints’ brain trust will resist their genetic disposition to trade away valuable draft picks to move up and target a “can’t miss” player. That’s one thing Belichick did very well.)

Six years after returning home, Underhill says his haircut could wait because he’s had work to do. The code for his latest draft app was submitted for review by Apple a few days ago and might even be ready for Draft Day on Thursday.

If it’s late, it’s Tim Cook’s fault, not Underhill’s.

“It’s just been around the clock,” Underhill said of his daily schedule since January, which includes 5 a.m. wakeups. “I used to get my hair cut every three weeks, but I’ve just been locked on this thing. It’s just like, if I lose a day, I can’t do that. I’ve got to get it done right now.”

Underhill said in some ways his website is an homage to the work of sports journalist Bob McGinn, who used film study to enrich his reporting of the Green Bay Packers.

“I remember the first time I saw his work, I was like, ‘Wait a minute, you can cover a team like this?’” Underhill said. “I wasn’t going to get a lot from the lockerroom. We weren’t getting a lot from the coach. I had to find a different way to do it.”

Underhill has pushed his video study to the directorial level of George Lucas in “Star Wars.” Without revealing his entire process – “you have to keep finding those ‘differentiators’” – Underhill has the ability to use, almost instantaneously, video clips known as the “All 22.” That footage shows all 22 players on the field at the same time, and Underhill can within seconds on the website explain breakdowns in pass protection or faulty quarterback reads.

Those explanatory videos can be served up to his audience by the time the next beer commercial loses its foam.

“I’m not going to say where I get (the video), but I have a source for it,” Underhill said. “A play that happens – 15 minutes later, it gets loaded into the system and you can watch it as the game is going on. They’ve got crazy stuff now. They have these tracking pads that can give you the diagram of the play as it’s happening, live, in the moment.”

One of Underhill’s seminal achievements was charting all 8,742 passes that Drew Brees threw in his 16 seasons as the Saints’ Hall of Fame quarterback.

“Yeah, that one was intensive,” Underhill said. “That probably took several months. I guess the idea for it was that I grew up a baseball fan, and whenever somebody would get 3,000 hits or whatever, there would be these retrospectives and people would do these really cool stories. I get these ideas in my head, and then not doing it becomes worse than doing it.”

For the study to be complete, Underhill had to track down all types of Brees’ footage, dating back to 2006.

“I had to get a video of every pass, and that doesn’t just exist,” he said. “I had to find a video of every game. I would go on Reddit, just begging people, and people were sending me DVDs, and I was sending them back. I’d get cassettes, and I’d get a VCR. A lot of the passes were already done because in my process of watching a game, I hand-draw every play and keep it in a binder. It was a months-long process.”

It all sounds esoteric and interesting, but Underhill and his wife Su, an accountant, had to eat. There was no way they could have known if a website, which started with a staff of one, would bring in enough cash to survive.

“I think the risk of not going for it became larger than the risk of going for it,” Underhill said. “It was definitely a huge financial risk. I don’t come from money. My wife doesn’t come from money. We had to make a decision to go to like zero (money) to do it. My wife is probably more important to the story than me. She believes in me more than I believe in myself. Every time I think I have a crazy idea, she’s like, ‘No, you should do it,’ and then it works. Without her, a lot of what I’m doing doesn’t happen.”

Since 2020, Underhill has added staff members in strategic areas – photography, videography and social media – and then he brought in decorated sportswriter Mike Triplett to expand the site’s coverage.

“I was going to hire Mike or I wasn’t going to hire anybody,” Underhill said. “I just knew he was the guy.”

One of the tricks of Underhill’s reporting process has always involved developing great relationships with the players who are often forgotten because they work largely in anonymity – offensive linemen.

“Those are the guys who know everything about everything,” Underhill said. “I don’t know what it is about the position. Maybe being a great communicator is part of what makes them successful because they’ve got to work in a group of five and they’ve got to be able to articulate and share their craft and be very technical.

“Terron Armstead has become a dear friend to me, and that was just born out of walking up to his locker and him teaching me about the game. Zach Strief was the same way. If you just went up to him and treated him like he’s the teacher and you’re the student, you can learn so much. Kelvin Banks is another one. He’s 21 years old, but it feels like you’re talking to a 45-year-old man.”

Underhill continues to be amazed by the passion and the support of Saints fans, even when the team failed its on-field tests. Early on, car dealer Matt Bowers staked him with advertising support. Bobby and Debra Guidry, whom Underhill met at Saints training camp at the Greenbriar in 2014, thought enough of his work that they co-signed a $50,000 line of credit with no conditions. Bobby Guidry died in 2025.

“They didn’t want anything back – no ownership, nothing,” Underhill said. “It was just like, ‘We believe in what you’re doing. Go and do it.’ I never had to take $1 out of it. There really were no sleepless nights, just because of the way the community and the city responded to what we were doing.”

As for what’s next, Underhill is trying to enhance his studies of route trees run by wide receivers. Artificial intelligence has made it easier to transfer data from spreadsheets into graphics with different colored arrows that paint a picture of a hidden reality: What are a receiver’s favorite routes?

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to build databases and make them searchable,” Underhill said. “I can take all the routes that Michael Thomas ran and isolate them and overlay them on a field – make the routes where he wasn’t targeted gray, the ones where he caught the ball green and the ones where he didn’t catch it red. Any idea you have you can honestly bring to life – if you’re willing to suffer through it and figure it out.”

Other AI programs help him summarize stories and captions for the website and suggest headlines that have superb “search engine optimization.” Underhill has long since gotten over his stage fright of speaking in front of a microphone, something he cured by buying a camera and “standing in a room, for hours, and just filmming myself.”

“I would keep doing it and doing it and doing it until it was like, ‘OK, this is acceptable,” he said. “I still don’t think I’m very good at it. Sometimes I watch myself and I cringe, but that’s OK.”

For all the home runs of the new technology, Underhill admits there have been just as many strikeouts, if not more.

“I think my biggest mistake early on was not knowing how to be a leader,” he said. “I was probably a very, very poor leader early on, and I figured that out. I was expecting people to be like me. I’m someone who’s never late. I couldn’t get my head around the idea of someone being five minutes late.

“When you’re kind of all in, you’re worried about the bottom falling out. There have been more mistakes than successes, but the successes allow you to have these other mistakes as you figure things out.”

As for the draft, Underhill’s prediction is that Jeremiah Love, Sonny Styles, Caleb Downs and Arvell Reese will be gone when the Saints draft at No. 8.

“I think it probably will be (Arizona State wide receiver) Jordyn Tyson,” Underhill said. “But Wednesday at 5, my answer might change.”

That’s OK. There’s an app for that.

pfinney@me.com

Sometimes, a comforting voice is as sweet as powdered sugar.

The physical limitations of a man who spent five decades crunching numbers as a certified public accountant, managing employees in the commercial cleaning industry and responding to what he perceived as God’s quiet call to serve as a permanent deacon in the Catholic Church have in some ways made him a spectator in life.

On a scale of 1 to 10, his informal pain level is “somewhere between 7 and 8, 24 hours a day.” Deacon “G” takes no pain meds because he says his mind is “foggy enough.”

“But I never say, ‘Lord, why me?’ Not one time,” Deacon G said. “My prayer is, ‘Lord, into your hands I commend my spirit’ and ‘Not my will but your will be done.’”

Deacon G’s bad back has forced him to spend most waking hours these days in the La-Z-Boy in his St. Rose home, and trips to the grocery store that used to be serenely uneventful are now an obstacle course in which he navigates both the known – his pain – and the unknown – his balance.

“When I go to a grocery store, lots of times I can barely make it out because I’m in so much pain,” he said. “I’m holding on to the basket to make sure I can get back to the car to support myself. I never go through a store with just a walking stick because if I do, I’m scared if I have to carry something else.

“I know that lots of people are praying for me. I can’t imagine how bad it would be if I didn’t have the prayers. I always tell my wife (Laura), ‘Don’t worry about the things you can’t control’ because she worries too much. But it’s a good thing she worries about me. She takes care of me.”

Deacon G has been unofficially retired from his diaconate duties at St. Ann Parish in Metairie for the last two years. He’s unable to attend Mass there because sitting for an hour in a wooden chair is impossible, even with the help of a soft cushion.

Just before Palm Sunday this year, Deacon G approached St. Ann’s pastor, Father Billy O’Riordan, with a proposal that had kept coming up in his prayer as he recited the Liturgy of the Hours twice a day in his recliner.

For the previous several months, Deacon G had been offering brief written reflections in the St. Ann bulletin on various spiritual themes, but he was searching and praying for ways to do more.

What would happen, he thought, if he could touch people’s hearts without ever having to leave his recliner?

Thus was born the “Gentle Servant Line,” a 24/7 telephone outreach that people can call for Catholic prayer and support. Deacon G provided the Good Servant Line – (504) 221-4449 – whenever people feel the need for prayer, spiritual guidance or compassion.

“Father Billy was open to it, and he said, ‘Go do it!’” Deacon G said.

The Monday after Palm Sunday, Deacon G got his first phone call, and the phone has been buzzing ever since.

“My first phone call I was probably on the phone for two hours,” Deacon G said.

All calls are confidential, of course, but Deacon G said many of the calls he’s received so far have been from parents or grandparents concerned about the physical or spiritual well-being of their children and grandchildren. Alcohol abuse comes up, a lot.

Deacon G said, especially in that challenging area, he has the difficult memories of his own childhood dealing with the outbursts of a father who drank too much. As the eldest child in an Irish Channel family, Deacon G often had to serve as the emotional anchor for his younger siblings and his mother.

“Someone told me their son was an alcoholic, and I told them, ‘I can understand alcoholism,’ and that puts them at ease because they know I’m talking from experience,” Deacon G says. “I lived through what they are going through, and I’m going to do whatever I can to help them. It’s not going to be just prayers. I think being a surrogate father prepared me to touch other people’s lives. Throughout my life, I’ve been preparing for this moment.”

Deacon G said one of the most fulfilling ministries he enjoyed since his 2012 ordination was serving as a hospice chaplain, bringing families together around the bedside at a time when past hurts often simmer to the surface.

For the dying patient, it is important not to sugarcoat or deflect the imminence of death, he says. For family members, it is the opportunity to open themselves up to the healing of old wounds.

“I just want to touch as many people as I can,” Deacon G said. “That’s it – just continuing to do the work I was called to do as a deacon, to be Christ’s servant.”

Deacon G emphasizes that the “Gentle Servant Line” is open to anyone who needs a listening heart.

For the first month, all of his calls have come during the day and the early evening.

But he’s ready.

When he goes to sleep at night, Deacon G places his cell phone in a spot where he would never miss a call.

“I’ll be able to hear it under my pillow,” he said.

pfinney@me.com