Fear and Birding in the French Quarter
I may never fully recover from Super Bowl LIX. Nor do I want to.
On a recent podcast, Super Bowl champion and Eagles legend, Jason Kelce, responded to the role that fan superstition and excitement play in guiding a team to victory. “All that energy goes somewhere, man,” he said. “It’s energy from you and the millions of other people.”
If fan energy is real, then Markey’s Bar in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans could’ve powered the whole city and then some, including every Superdome floodlight, every French Quarter gas lamp, and all the many speakers and boomboxes and neon signs in between. The bar could’ve even powered the police lights that were used to clear its very own crowd.
As the unofficial Eagles Nest of New Orleans, Markey’s was packed to bursting on Super Bowl Sunday. And boy, let me tell you: I’ve never heard a noise quite as loud as Markey’s during Cooper DeJean’s pick six.
The eruption that occurred when the ball found its way into his hands crescendoed with every step of his 38-yard touchdown return. By the time the football passed the plane into the Chiefs’ end zone, my ears were crackling and whining like a dial-up modem. That’s no writerly exaggeration. My hearing actually turned staticky, as though my brain short-circuited at the noise.
Like I said, Markey’s is New Orleans’ unofficial Eagles bar. The bartenders working on Sunday couldn’t have given less of a shit about the Eagles. So when the Philly patrons got to shouting, each bartender paused what they were doing, tabled their pints mid-pour, and covered their ears for minutes at a time.
During a halftime trip to the sidewalk porta-potty, I had the pleasure of overhearing Markey himself chatting with friends over a giant pot of street jambalaya. Markey’s became an Eagles bar by freak coincidence, and I got the impression that the owner somewhat resented his newfound fame.
“Since Randall Cunningham, no one’s done more for the city of Philadelphia than you,” Markey’s friend joked (omitting, of course, Nick Foles, Cole Hamels, and the rotisserie chicken guy).
In an interview with the Philly Inquirer, Markey shared that he’d worked at the bar for over half a century, after his father before him. And yet, despite all those decades of work, his friends teased him that he’d made enough in one night to retire then and there.
For someone who hated football for most of his life, I’m improbably romantic about my former least favorite sport. My reasons for following the Eagles have less to do with the sport itself and more with the culture of this dedicated fandom—one that could retire a bar owner in a single night.
Throughout Sunday, I received messages from family members I hadn’t seen in years warning me not to climb any light poles. Former professors and grade school teachers alike reached out. Strangers—both on the street and atop neighboring barstools—were eager to ask where I was from, citing their own neighborhoods and comparing the lengths of our various journeys down south.
What part of Philly are you from? Where’d you end up? How’d you get down here?
(The suburbs; Tuscaloosa; by way of my friend’s sedan, which we’d end up sleeping in that very night.)
Together, an intricate cartography was charted, linking us from far-off corners of the country to the stools we now sat on,
Football may be a problematic sport, with its health concerns and its various controversies, but how can you not be romantic about its power to connect us?
Drew, my friend, roommate, and Madden coach, drove me to New Orleans and stayed by my side throughout the game. A Chargers fan with zero connection to the Eagles, he donned his greenest and camped with me beside the Mississippi River to experience this night of a lifetime. When I expected a line around the block to get into Markey’s, Drew joined me outside the bar at 8:45 a.m., coffee in hand.
Imagine our shock when we found ourselves the only ones there: a kelly green jump scare for the bar’s poor owner.
“We got here a little early,” Drew said.
“Brother,” Markey said, “you’ve got a whole hour and a half ‘til open!”
“Do you need any help opening or anything?”
“No, but I appreciate it,” he said, though his thousand-yard stare betrayed him. Looking at us, tailgating his bar’s opening, he’d only just realized the night he had in store.
Drew may not have opened Markey’s, but he did play bartender. As the first to grab stools, the standing-room crowd that filed in behind us needed some Brotherly Love to help secure drinks. Drew happily obliged, translating drink orders to the bartenders and conducting an intricate exchange of bar tabs and fresh rounds. For his trouble, we were gifted many a freebie: 15 cumulative beers by his count.
We also had the good fortune of running into a friend from college, Bailey, a NOLA local who was quick to vouch for Markey’s when we told her we’d be arriving sight-unseen. When the final whistle blew for a Philadelphia victory, she was kind enough to drive us through gridlock to drop us off on Bourbon Street.
Sometimes the universe is just incredible like that—linking old friends and new friends and free beers as one.
Days later, I write this on tired hands, eyes twitching from exhaustion, skin blanketed in mosquito bites. If you took my pulse, you’d hear my heart beat to the rhythm of “Fly, Eagles Fly.”
Yes, it’s the feeling of a multi-day hangover. But it’s also the feeling of a heart brimming over. My throat is sore with the rasp of communal singing. When my palms sting, they recall the dozens of high-fives I shared with strangers: my Eagle flock for an evening. My ears ring not only from the screeching fans, but also from the blaring speakerphone of my parents, defying our thousand-mile distance to celebrate together.
Eagles football might mean pole climbing and drunk screaming and a teensy bit of horseplay, but it also means much more. At its heart, every “Go Birds” is a miniature expression of love. It’s a statement of gratitude for our city’s diaspora, a sentiment that translates across generations and time zones and state lines.
And with all that sweaty, greasy, beer-soaked love in the air, how can you not be the least bit romantic about football?
So I say again, for the last time this season: Go (and I cannot stress this enough, with all the love in my heart, and all my aching bones) birds.
This Elephant Graveyard was written with lethargy over the days following the Super Bowl. I’m proud to say that, by now, I feel (somewhat) better. But the sentiment remains the same. Go Eagles.
Go birds
gobirds!