Arena Football League (2004-2008)

Born: May 13, 2003 – AFL expansion franchise.
Died: October 13, 2008 – The Voodoo cease operations.

Arena: New Orleans Arena (16,021)

Team Colors: Purple, Black & Red

Owner: Tom Benson

The (original) New Orleans Voodoo were a tremendously popular Arena Football League team that played in the city from 2004-2005 and 2007-2008.  The team shut down for the 2006 season in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and saw most of its roster dispersed to the AFL’s Kansas City Brigade expansion team.  But the Voodoo returned to New Orleans Arena in 2007 and were more popular than ever, setting an all-time league record with the reported sale of over 13,000 season tickets.

An earlier Arena Football League entry in the city – the New Orleans Night (1991-1992) – came and went quietly after two seasons in the Superdome.  But the AFL was a small-time curiosity in the early 90′s.  By the turn of the century, the league started to attract investment from NFL owners, including Arthur Blank (Georgia), Pat Bowlen (Colorado) and Jerry Jones (Dallas).  The great strength of the Voodoo was their backing from New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson and his granddaughter Rita Benson LeBlanc.  The LeBlanc’s put the power of the Saints brand, infrastructure and sales machine behind the Voodoo and turned New Orleans into a showcase city for the league.

During their four season’s of play, the Voodoo were never a factor in competition for the Arena Bowl championship.  They made the playoffs in only one season, their debut in 2004.  The team was prone – one might even say cursed? (sorry) – by late season collapses after strong starts.  But the value proposition of the Voodoo was never based on winning.  It derived from the organization’s outstanding game day production, which included the Voodoo Dolls dancing team, mascots Bones and Mojo, and an exploding cemetery set loaded with indoor pyrotechnics for pre-game player intros.  The league chose New Orleans Arena – the “Graveyard” to Voodoo fans – as the neutral site host for its signature annual event, the Arena Bowl, in back-to-back seasons in 2007 and 2008.  The 2008 Arena Bowl would prove to be the last event ever staged by the original Arena Football League.

The Voodoo continued to be one of Arena Football’s best box office draws during their fourth season in 2008.  Announced average attendance of 14,321 ranked fifth in the 17-team league.  Although the league showed the outward trappings of success – big attendance figures, a broadcast television contract and major brands attached as national sponsors – the league was reportedly $24 million in debt and had relied for years on a speculative bubble in expansion fees which was now starting to deflate.  Most teams lost money and the NFL owners, in particular, were growing restive and pushing for big changes in the business model.  In the summer of 2008, reports emerged that the league was in negotiations with Los Angeles private equity firm Platinum Equity for a rumored $100  million buyout that would convert the AFL to a single-entity business model.  What wasn’t clear at first was that some sort of buyout was necessary to keep the league going.

On October 13, 2008, Tom Benson folded the Voodoo franchise.  The bombshell announcement stunned Arena Football fans in New Orleans and elsewhere.  After the Voodoo’s demise, the dominoes fell quickly.  The Platinum Equity deal fell apart the following month, leaving the AFL’s remaining 16 owners the prospect of funding big losses in 2009 on their own, without any infusion of new capital.  In December 2008, 12 of the league 16 clubs voted to cancel the 2009 season, with the big NFL investors leading the charge for the exits.   In August 2009 the league entered bankruptcy and effectively folded for good.

A group of the less wealthy (non-NFL) club owners and owners from the league Arena Football 2  minor league system bought the banktupt league’s name and intellectual property at auction in late 2009 and re-formed the league in 2010.  A minor league club from Bossier-Shreveport, Louisiana relocated to New Orleans Arena in 2011 and took back the Voodoo brand identity.  The Bensons and the Saints have no involvement in this new, much lower-budgeted version of the Voodoo and fan interest has no approach anything close to the original team.

==Voodoo Games on Fun While It Lasted==

==YouTube==

The Voodoo host the Orlando Predators at Orlando Arena.  March 9, 2008

==Links==

Arena Football League Media Guides

Arena Football League Programs

New Orleans Voodoo History at ArenaFan.net

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1980-81 New Orleans Pride Yearbook
Women’s Professional Basketball League Programs
32 pages

In the spring of 1979, the city of New Orleans lost their NBA franchise to Salt Lake City, Utah when the Jazz pulled up stakes after five seasons.  One man, a 32-year old stockbroker and basketball junkie named Steve Brown took the news particularly hard.  Five years earlier, Brown entered a Name the Team contest when the NBA expanded to New Orleans and he submitted the winning suggestion of “Jazz”.

Facing a winter without basketball, Brown approached one of his clients, a gynecologist named John Simpson, and proposed purchasing an expansion franchise for New Orleans in the two-year old Women’s Professional Basketball League (WPBL).  Dr. Simpson initially declined, but  his wife & medical office managerClaudette Simpson liked the idea and persuaded her husband to become the major investor, with Brown as the team’s minority partner/General Manager.  The WPBL awarded the New Orleans Pride expansion franchise to Brown and the Simpsons on May 30th, 1979.

Two weeks later, Brown lured former Jazz Head Coach Butch Van Breda Kolff away from the A.D./Head Basketball Coach position at the University of New Orleans to coach the Pride.  It would be the first experience coaching women for the 58-year old, who also served terms as Head Coach of the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, Phoenix Suns and Detroit Pistons.  He joined Larry Costello of the Milwaukee Does as one of two former NBA head men to chase a paycheck in the fledgling WPBL.

The Pride made their home debut at the Louisiana Superdome on November 15, 1979 in front of a crowd of 8,452 – at the time, the largest crowd  ever assembled for professional women’s hoops in the United States.   The crowd was drawn partly by the novelty of women’s basketball and partly by an opening night show that featured the New Orleans Symphony, the San Diego Chicken and a National Anthem performance by Doug “The Ragin’ Cajun” Kershaw.

The Pride finished 2nd in the WPBL’s Eastern Division in the winter of 1979-80, good for second place and a spot in the league playoffs.  The Minnesota Fillies eliminated the Pride in the WPBL quarterfinals in March 1980.

Brown left the team after the first season and Claudette Simpson took over as the team’s General Manager and the face of the franchise.  According to Karra Porter’s definitive chronicle of the WPBL, Mad Seasons, Simpson and the team came in for some questioning from The New Orleans Times-Picayune during the 1980-81 season over the racial composition of the team.  Only four of the Pride’s twelve players were African-American when the 1980-81 season began (see photos below) and two of those players, Betty Booker and Beverly Crusoe were traded away early in the season.  (Brown, Van Breda Kolff and former Pride player Sybil Blalock all told Porter they thought that the paper’s implications were off base.)  According to Porter, racial composition of rosters was just one way that some league officials and investors of the WPBL wrung their hands over the public image of their teams.  Some teams pushed for skimpier uniforms and were perceived to take physical appearance and “femininity” into consideration alongside basketball talent in player personnel matters.   The Pride’s Sybil Blalock recalled to Porter that Pride players were encouraged – but not required – by ownership to apply makeup before games.

For their two seasons of existence, the Pride would split their home games between the cavernous Superdome and the more appropriately scaled field house at the University of New Orleans.  The big crowd of curiosity seekers for opening night in November 1979 turned out to be a fluke.  A February 1981 article by the Associated Press estimated that the Pride averaged around 1,100 fans per game at the two venues during their second and final season.

Other WPBL were in the same situation and the league went silent following its third and final championship series, played in April 1981.  The league still existed on paper, but no schedule was released for the 1981-82 season.  The last anyone heard from the Pride was in late October 1981, when Claudette Simpson told The Associated Press that the league couldn’t return without the largesse of a new major sponsor and that she and her husband were hoping to unload their franchise to new investors.  The league never formally announced a shutdown, but by early 1982, it was clear the WPBL was done for good.

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Pride founder/owner Dr. John Simpson died in a car wreck in 1985.

Butch Van Breda Kolff passed away in 2007 at the age of 84.  New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey published a wonderful obituary, calling Van Breda Kolff “the best college basketball coach I ever saw”.

The women of the 1980-81 New Orleans Pride…

Downloads:

New Orleans Pride Sources