Changing a city’s image: What a Super Bowl win could mean for Atlanta
HOUSTON — Did you know Walt Disney was once fired from a newspaper job for not being creative enough?
Or that Thomas Edison’s teachers told him he was too stupid to learn?
Maybe there is hope for Atlanta, after all.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of Falcons fans yearning to breathe free Sunday from a historical sense of impending doom, where an acceptance of defeat on the fields of play for more than 100 years has labeled the capital of Georgia one of the country’s worst sports towns.
Super Bowl LI between the Falcons and Patriots kicks off at 3:30 p.m. PST from NRG Stadium, where New England arrives to its record ninth such game and Atlanta hopes like heck none of its players was arrested for soliciting Saturday night.
You laugh?
Remember only January 1999, the other time Atlanta made a Super Bowl, and team leader and safety Eugene Robinson, just hours after receiving the Athletes In Action/Bart Starr Man of the Year Award, solicited an undercover police officer in Miami.
I’m pretty sure that isn’t what they had in mind with the whole Dirty Birds moniker.
Robinson played the following day, got beat for an 80-yard touchdown and the Falcons lost to Denver 34-19.
Atlanta hopes things are different this time, both for embarrassment sake and on the scoreboard, for a franchise that has built the league’s most explosive and dynamic offense and, perhaps in a larger sense, what a championship would mean to a city that has only a World Series title by the Braves in 1995 to brag about when it comes to throwing a parade and standing atop the stage of major league professional sports.
San Diego. Cleveland. Phoenix. New Orleans. Buffalo. All have taken turns at or near the top of those cities listed that have traditionally fell short of championship hopes.
But in Atlanta, you have one that lost its NHL franchise not once but twice, offers an NBA team that owns the second-longest run of not winning a championship (58 years ago as the St. Louis Hawks), a Braves team that managed just the one title despite winning 14 straight division championships and, yes, the Falcons.
“I’m not sure there is extra pressure on us to win for the city,” linebacker De’Vondre Campbell said. “Of course, we don’t want to lose. We know how much the city wants us to win and how great it would be to bring it a championship. It deserves it.”
Southerners are a unique bunch, most coated in sweet tea and modesty and an immense sense of faith. If you can’t drive a mile in Indiana without seeing a basketball hoop, the same holds true across the South with churches.
The people are really, really nice.
But all that humility has often led to a fear of failure with their teams, believing championship dreams are destined to fall short, mostly because they always have.
That can change Sunday in the country’s biggest and most powerful sport on its grandest and brightest stage. Football is Georgia, assuredly at the college level, but even those Bulldogs down in Athens haven’t won a national championship since 1980.
If there is a justified asterisk to evaluate Atlanta in a fairer light when it comes to ranking sports towns, it’s a religious devotion for college football. And because of it, fans don’t exist minute by minute with the city’s pro teams.
It’s not that Atlanta has lacked for professional sports stars. Hank Aaron. Bobby Jones. Michael Vick. Dominique Wilkins. Chipper Jones.
Brett Favre. Oh, wait. He got traded.
The city also hosted a Summer Olympics in 1996. Oh, wait. A bomb went off.
But there is hope. After all, the Cavaliers won an NBA title last season. The Cubs, for heaven’s sake, won the World Series, beating another Cleveland team in the process.
“I haven’t slept in 15 years,” said Falcons owner Arthur Blank, who purchased the franchise in 2002. “I don’t think this is an end of a journey for us, but an opportunity to raise the bar and continue to stay up there in (the NFL). We’re thrilled to be here for Atlanta. The city is on fire right now — not literally, you know, like back in the Civil War — but it’s on fire.”
If the Falcons win Sunday, it will be a historic moment fans can tell their grandchildren about — how they watched the mighty Patriots fall one night.
Or, well, whatever it was Rhett Butler said.
Contact columnist Ed Graney at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be a heard on “Seat and Ed” on Fox Sports 1340 from 2 to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Follow @edgraney on Twitter.