In America, besides the symbol for anything French, the fleur-de-lis is the usual symbol of the city of New Orleans, nestled between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain in southern Louisiana. Not that you need a geography lesson...
In any case, New Orleans is a beautiful place to visit, as long as you can stomach the small of urine and vomit, which they seem to have used as the liquid binder in their concrete. Nah, that's the Quarter...
New Orleans is in the South, and in the South, football is king. In the North, they like football, but basketball reigns. (I guess I'm talking about the midwest and college, but football really does reign in the south, at both the pro and college levels.)
The pulsating sports heart of New Orleans are the Saints, the Super Bowl winning football team. Their logo is simple enough, a gold and black fleur-de-lis. While it's taken from the identity of the city, it's morphed into something larger, something more important. This is less a logo and more an extension of the city--and region--itself.
Now, New Orleans is a large, cosmopolitan city, and they have other professional teams. The Charlotte Hornets (another incredibly old-school nickname that's been sent away) moved to New Orleans, and they incorporated the old Hornets logo with the de facto New Orleans logo, and came up with:
Not to be outdone, the professional baseball team, a AAA minor-league team, has eschewed the historically more meaningful Pelicans nickname for the Zephyrs, whatever that might be. But, it allowed them to incorporate the fleur-de-lis into their logo's design:
Now, to emphasize how much the fleur-de-lis means to the folks in the Louisiana region can be seen here, in a logo that is associated with the state's motto "A Sportsman's Paradise":
"Sportsman" in the sense of hunting and fishing.
Don't get me started on fleur-de-lis in flags...I mean, wow.
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