New Orleans Saints ice sculptures for Who Dats
Who Dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints! Ok, maybe the refs can. Or Roger Goodell 😉 But who else?!
Ok, fine! A lot of teams 🙁 The Saints got beat way more than we wanted this past season (2025). Thankfully, there were those time we could sing the Who Dat song at least 😬 (That’s what’s known as selective memory!)
But back to why we’re here. This is a bunch of the bestest New Orleans Saints ice sculptures we ever did. And we just added a bunch of recent ones that we did for the games! (But we don’t say much about them, so far.) Hoping that the Shough and Moore show will soon take us back to NFC South relevance!
Also, if you wandered in here by accident and now wonder what “Who Dat” means, this will help. Or if you just want to get out of here, you can check or more New Orleans-themed ice sculptures ⚜️
the story of Lombardi Gras and the best Saints ice sculpture ever!
Ok, my website designer is sleeping off a bender from a wild Tuesday night 🤦♂️ So I’m going to step in and tell you the story of Lombardi Gras (at least from my limited point of view). And if you already know all about this, just remember that not everybody does 😉
K, if you don’t know, Lombardi Gras was the post-Super Bowl victory parade for the Saints after they won Super Bowl XLIV in 2010. And it was HUGE! In a city that’s known for big parades, this was likely the biggest parade ever! Even crazier, it was held and put together in the midst of Mardi Gras, just a week before Fat Tuesday and only 2 days after the Saints victory! 😮
Gallier Hall on St. Charles Avenue is where a lot of the “official” parties happen in the city and it’s where the King of Mardi Gras does his toast every year. So that’s where the Lombardi Gras party was going to be and the parade was going to go right by it.
I’d done a Saints ice sculpture for the NFC Championship victory dinner a couple weeks earlier, so not surprisingly, I was asked to make a Super Bowl victory sculpture. But this was all happening VERY fast and the excitement was at a fever pitch! I can’t even remember if I charged anything for the sculpture and I don’t think I even cared, lol 😂
sculpting it was the easy part
Making the sculpture was kinda hectic. But with the short timeline, the design couldn’t be anything too crazy, so I got it done. And actually, it turned out that just getting the sculpture to the party was the tough part.
In 2005, Katrina nearly broke New Orleans. When the Saints had their first game back in the Dome against the Falcons, it felt like the city was slowly getting back up on it’s feet. But when the Saints finally won the Super Bowl after a mostly dismal history spanning more than four decades, it felt like New Orleans was finally back for real!
In the wake of Katrina, many tens of thousands of New Orleanians had left the area. And many never returned to live in the city. But they were still Saints fans! And while not everybody could be in the Dome for the emotional return of Saints football years before, or make it to Miami for the Super Bowl, a lot more COULD make it back to the streets of Nola to be there for Lombardi Gras! And it seemed like they were ALL coming back to see this very special parade.
Just a week before Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras was in full swing and the city already had a lot of visitors in town. Plus, add all the Saints fans coming into town for the parade, and the city was close to bursting with extra people. I didn’t live in the city either then, so I had to somehow get my ice sculpture into the heart of it all.
Thanks to a minor miracle or two, we managed to make it into the CBD. (It is weird how you can get through roadblocks sometimes by explaining that you have to deliver an ice sculpture 🤷♂️) And then, not even a ridiculous distance from Gallier Hall, we even found a sort of parking space. I only hit that tree a little bit while I was backing into it, so that was ok 😬
the lettering could have been a little straighter and cleaner, the design could have been more elaborate…as an artist you always think of what you could have done better. But short of it collapsing in the middle of the party, ANY Saints ice sculpture at the Lombardi Gras Super Bowl Victory Party is going to be the greatest Saints ice sculpture that EVER was! Nothing else can ever be that singular work of ice, celebrating that very special moment for Nola 😊😊😊
everything worked out and it really was the best Saints ice sculpture
As you can see, since I’ve included a pic of the sculpture, we finally made it into Gallier Hall and got the sculpture set up in time. So, happy ending! And even better, we got to hang around in Gallier Hall while the largest, craziest parade in the history of New Orleans went right by! It’s all kind of a blur now. But somewhere, I might even have a pic of Drew Brees going by on his float and stopping to talk and toast, just like the King of Mardi Gras would a week later. (Brees was the REAL King of Mardi Gras that year!)
And while it certainly wasn’t the “highest quality” Saints ice sculpture that I’ve ever done, I think that most would agree that, given the overall circumstances, this was the best Saints ice sculpture that ever was! Who Dat! 🤣
P.S., Another pic I probably have somewhere is of myself and my significant other at the time, standing by my sculpture along with Mayor Ray Nagin. Also, you’ll never see it, since I wasn’t really excited about that photo op. (But I think she insisted!) You see, despite showing a lot of early promise, by this time, Nagin had gotten himself in trouble. Later, after his term was over, he even went to jail 😱 In hindsight, I’d say that when even the ice sculptor doesn’t want to take a picture with you, that’s a bad sign 😜