GRAND FORKS, N.D. (AP) - Grand Forks, North Dakota, may be 500 miles from Minneapolis, but it’s still deep in Vikings country.
So some folks are surprised when Alan King swings open the door to his basement New Orleans Saints shrine, a workout room wallpapered from floor to ceiling with black and gold memorabilia.
“My friends get a kick out of it,” the die-hard Houma-born Saints fan said. “But they call me crazy, of course.”
If King was really crazy, he’d probably be the first to know it, because he’s a professor of psychology at the University of North Dakota. He said he wore a Saints cap and Steve Gleason jersey for his university website photo.
“I wear Saints stuff, but it’s not appreciated,” he said.
It’s not surprising that King, 63, is a Saints fan. He earned his degrees at LSU and interned at the Veterans Administration hospital in New Orleans. When he took the job in Grand Forks in 1987, he immediately invested in a satellite dish to follow the home team.
His wife, Kathy, who hails from New Jersey, understands his lifelong passion, though she doesn’t quite share his football obsession. However, his four grown kids, especially the two youngest boys, seem to have inherited the Who Dat gene.
In 2009, as the Saints marched toward their first Super Bowl victory, King said he was facing a personal health crisis.
Overweight and suffering from kidney stones, King knew he had to slim down and reclaim his strength. The Saints’ impossible season set King on the right path, he said. If the long-suffering team could triumph, he reasoned, so could he.
“It was a miraculous thing,” he said, “they inspired me.”
King bought an elliptical stepping machine and placed it in an unused basement room. As he embarked on his exercise regime, he also began collecting Saints mementos: jerseys, newspaper front pages that celebrated the team and hundreds of fan photographs.
A friend purchased a football online that had been signed by several members of the New Orleans team and gave it to King as a gift. He also has a prized photo of himself with coach Sean Payton and the Super Bowl trophy, taken on one of his annual trips to New Orleans.
And he has a set of small NFL helmets representing the Saints opposition, which he turns upside down when the teams are defeated.
Surrounded by symbols of his heroes, with music blaring from six speakers, King stepped and stepped and stepped for 10 solid years, eventually losing 30 pounds and feeling fit enough to come in off the sidelines in a crucial game if the coach needs him.
That’s part of the psychology of fandom, he said. “As Saints fans, we think we might be called up at any time.”
King, his brother and his oldest son were in the front row in 2006 when Steve Gleason rallied all of New Orleans by blocking a punt against the rival Atlanta Falcons in the team’s return to the Superdome after a 20-month exile caused by Hurricane Katrina damage.
All fans say to themselves, “maybe I can block a punt someday,” King said.
Being an expatriate Who Dat “is about identity,” King said. “It’s about who you want to be associated with. I see Saints fans when I travel, and it’s like we’re part of the same family. It’s about fellowship. It is a nation. It is.”
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