NEW ORLEANS — So about that time Bobby Hebert wore a dress.
"I had these pigtails," he says. "Like a Viking queen on steroids."
It all started when his predecessor on the radio, a local legend named Buddy Diliberto, promised he would wear a dress if the Saints, the franchise that inspired fans to wear paper bags over their heads, ever made it to the Super Bowl. Diliberto died before that happened, before that magical 2009 season.
The fans, they remembered. They reminded Hebert, the retired Saints quarterback turned omnipresent voice of Louisiana football, for weeks. The night before he fulfilled Diliberto's promise, he underwent a trial run at home. He stuffed an oversized bra and slipped it on. His wife, Joan, placed a blond wig atop his head and applied his makeup.
Hebert settled in front of the mirror, where he faced something of an existential question.
Ruffled slip? Or fringe?
"This one's better," he said as he pointed at the ruffled one.
At the dress parade, Hebert's employer, the radio station WWL, expected 5,000 fans to show up. More than 80,000 did. Many wore dresses and pearls and lace gloves, and they clogged the French Quarter. To get from the Superdome to Bourbon Street took five hours.
"All I'm thinking is, 'God, if I had to do this every day, I would just move to the mountains and be a granola girl,' " Hebert said. "I looked like an East German female Olympic champion."
This is what you find out on the road with Bobby Hebert, the Cajun Cannon, Bobby from the bayou. He is not a journalist. He says that all the time. But he is on the radio, and his rants, at once informed and unhinged, dead center in the Venn diagram of crazy and passionate, are delivered daily, at restaurants filled with sports memorabilia and casinos clouded in smoke.
With the Saints to face the Eagles next Monday night, with Louisiana State to host top-ranked Alabama on Saturday, Hebert filled the airwaves this week with his usual blend of Southern hospitality and hostility and charm. Same as he did a few weeks earlier, on the road.
First There Was Birdie
Bobby Hebert reclines in a booth at the Silver Slipper Casino in Bay Saint Louis, Miss., and stabs at some fried catfish. He talks about his grandmothers, one in particular, whom everyone called Birdie.
Birdie loved football. On Sundays, she sat in her house, lights off, palm underneath chin. She did not answer her door. She tolerated visitors only if they stayed silent. When Hebert scored a scholarship to Northwestern State in Louisiana, Birdie bought him a gold Grand Prix. When her other grandchildren complained, she told them, "You ain't done nothing."
This was the same woman who would call underachieving offensive linemen "big for nothing." As in, "What are you? Big for nothing? Big as you are, you should hit somebody! You're wasting your size!"
Birdie would have appreciated the Silver Slipper, which sits on the water, nearby nowhere, the houses close by raised on stilts. The waiters wear football jerseys. The promotions are football-centric. The Red Hot jackpot is at $6,939.80.
On this night, and every other night, Hebert does what Hebert does best. He talks. He talks in a Cajun accent, excitedly and rapidly and angrily on occasion, on all manner of subjects, but mostly the Saints and L.S.U.
"He's got no filter between his mouth and his brain," says Mike Detillier, his co-host, in the most affectionate way possible. "Some people won't stick their neck out. He'll stick the neck, the arms, the feet and any other body part he can out."
Hebert, 52, sits on stage, before rows of empty chairs. He spreads forth his prep work, a series of newspaper articles clipped, highlighted and taped onto paper. Hebert prefers half-inch tape. He uses a blue highlighter for offense, pink for defense and yellow for generic game information.
He can be obsessive-compulsive in this way. His family knows not to misplace certain items around the house, like his hairbrush, remote controls and couch pillows. Definitely not the couch pillows.
"I'll be a homer," Hebert says. "But I'm going to be a realistic homer."
His former neighbor sits in the audience, a man named T-Mel Guidroz from Cut Off, La. He and Hebert and their fathers went to the very first Saints game. He remembered only that they lost.
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