ROUSES_Fall2023_Magazine

The Buddy System By David W. Brown

We didn’t often go to Saints games when I was a kid, but when we did, the Saints usually lost. I don’t think it was our fault, and there was a good stretch there in 1991 where the Dome Patrol and the Cha-Ching guy helped us finish first in the NFC West. (I remember that season as clearly as the year we won the Super Bowl, down to the front pages of The Times-Picayune and the morning issue of The Advocate . Quarterback Bobby Hebert even made the cover of Sports Illustrated that year.) W hat I recall most vividly after a game in those days was sitting with my family for what

to television on WVUE-TV and WDSU-TV, becoming sports director for the latter; and landed finally on radio, with a daily show. Everyone knew Buddy D. He was a Louisiana fixture with a voice that simply defied imitation, or even description. After wading through his almost impenetrable New Orleans accent, you still had to contend with a melodic cadence that seemed always to zig where you thought it might zag. He spoke in a kind of jovial bark that men of his generation had, but sadly no longer do. His voice was to the ears what your grand mother’s kitchen was to your sense of smell; you can recall it immediately and precisely. As Jim Henderson, the former play-by-play announcer on Saints Radio, observed at a roast of Buddy D in 2003: “It was Ralph

to Diliberto’s show to discuss Jim Mora, and the sheer New Orleans nostalgia of it all nearly unraveled the space-time continuum. (If someone had sung the Rosenberg’s Furniture Store address jingle aloud at that moment, we would have been done for.) But hearing that voice again made me 30 years younger, a kid in the back seat of my mom’s car. The genius of Buddy D was that he made it fun to listen to sports talk even when the Saints were routed on the field — which they frequently were in those days, hard as it might be to remember in a post-Brees world. (Although, the 2022 season was a bleak reminder of those Bad Old Days.) During particularly grim stretches, Diliberto called his show “Saints Anonymous,” and callers would begin with such lines as, “Hey Buddy, my name is Carl. I live in Slidell and I am a 20-year Saints fan.” Buddy D was, to put it mildly, a

seemed like hours in Superdome parking lot traffic, while on the car radio on WWL 870 AM, commenting on the spectacle we’d just witnessed, was a nearly unintelligible man named Bernard Diliberto — better known throughout the state as simply Buddy D. “When Buddy came, he just elevated the whole ‘sports talk’ thing,” says De Paul Smith, the director of Saints Radio Sales at WWL Radio. “Back then, talk radio didn’t have those kinds of great big personalities doing sports. But Buddy changed that, and coming from newspapers first, and television second, radio was the best medium for him. He could really elaborate on his opinions and have fun — and man, he was good at it.” For 50 years, Diliberto reported on sports in New Orleans across all media. His opinions were deeply informed by a lifetime of sports reporting — and opinions he had, especially about the New Orleans Saints. He started in print in 1950, at The Times Picayune , ultimately becoming the paper’s daily sports columnist. From there, he moved

Waldo Emerson who once said, ‘To be great is to be misunderstood.’ We haven’t been able to understand Buddy Diliberto for 50 years.” While writing this piece,

fierce and m o c k i n g critic of the way the New Orleans Saints

I found old clips of his show, including one from 1995, when Morgus the Magnificent called in

BUDDY D’S ORIGINAL SMITH CORONA

18 ROUSES FALL 2023