It must have been a darned good game ...

     Some quick thoughts on college football ...
     • First, Louisiana Tech at LSU ...
     Confession: I did not watch the game. Too many mixed emotions. As I have said often (and written twice in recent weeks), love both schools, never want either one to lose.
     So I just let them play, and saved myself the agony of watching and not having my heart racing.

LSU could not pile up the score on Louisiana Tech
(Getty Images photo)

     Checked on the score twice -- once right before halftime (LSU, 24-7) and once when I knew the game was done (LSU, 38-21 ... and, obviously, it was much closer than that).     Do not think LSU is the fifth- or sixth-best team in the country right now, not based on its inconsistent play in each of its four games (victories) this season -- play well for one or two quarters, mediocre in one or two quarters.
     The Tigers got some great breaks -- bounces of the ball, missed officiating calls -- against Tech. This I know from reading about the game, talking to a good source about it, and watching highlights on YouTube and the LSU web site.
     Figured the Bulldogs would give them a fight. Tech's program is solid, its teams are fun to watch, and LSU -- more often than not -- plays to the level of its opponent. 
     Yes, the Tigers more than did that in two impressive victories against Miami and Auburn, and although the final score against Southeastern Louisiana was 31-0, it was an extremely tepid second-half showing by LSU.
     Still can't see better than an 8-4 or 9-3 record for LSU -- not on same level with Alabama and Georgia certainly, and a tough SEC West road ahead. 
     Tigers have too many offensive-line issues, and secondary is shaky, especially if the defensive front seven can't get more pressure on the passer than it did against Tech.
     Tech should compete well in Conference USA, but next Saturday's test at North Texas will tell a lot. UNT might be the conference's best team this season.
      Finally, glad Tech made a good showing at LSU. Did not want (or expect) a blowout loss, and that $1.3 million payday softens the effects of a loss. 
      (Oh, and it will be Tech at LSU in men's basketball in a couple of months. That will not be as heart-rendering for me.)
      • Texas much deserved the victory against TCU. But to declare the Longhorns' program "back" among the elite is premature. Let's see (1) how UT does against Oklahoma a few weeks from now and (2) how it fares when it comes to Fort Worth to face TCU next year.
     • I rarely pay attention to the poll rankings, don't even look at preseason predictions and do not think they are important until the sixth or seventh week of the season. And, remember, it is just a bunch of sports media and/or coaches doing the rankings. Everyone has an opinion, and you know what the saying is about opinions.
     That said, this Alabama team is so much better than anyone else in the country, it deserves a battlefield promotion ... to the NFL. 
     • What makes college football so great is the big underdog -- especially, the mid-majors --  beating the "majors." So, giant-killer Troy beating LSU last year and Nebraska this season, Old Dominion knocking off Virginia Tech yesterday, North Texas routing Arkansas, Fresno State routing UCLA,  and this "almost" shocker yesterday -- Army taking Oklahoma to overtime. 
     Maybe in the 1940s, Army beating OU would have been routine. In the 1950s, it would have been a great matchup. Since then, those programs have not been in the same hemisphere. 
     So, again, great for college football. Not so great if you are on the losing end (hello LSU, Arkansas, Nebraska, UCLA).     
     • We have railed often about how overbearing college football head coaches can be, how they are given god-like treatment. Two items -- and two of my favorite targets in this regard, Nick Saban and Gary Patterson -- caught my attention today.
      Saban, closing his media session yesterday after his team's romp past Texas A&M, said "... I would appreciate it if you would sort of look at some of the things we didn't do so well ..."
      That is part of his "rat poison" theme, which he loves to use to keep his players grounded and motivated. Yes, the rest of the country feels so badly for those less-than-perfect Alabama players. 
      Let's see ...  53 points per game, average winning margin 41 points per game. So many things wrong.
      Ridiculous, preacher Saban.
      TCU down 15 points, 2:44 remaining, 4th-and-4 at its 38 ... Patterson had his team punt the football away to Texas.
       Punt? Needing two scores? What were the Frogs' chances after they punted?
     Asked about his "strategy" afterward, Patterson said he had two timeouts remaining and he was hoping for his defense to stop Texas, get the ball back and score quickly, then recover an onside kick.
      "... I don't play to lose," he said. "I don't play to get through it, but I had two [timeouts]. ... I know how to manage games. It wasn't that play that got us beat. I can promise you that. And you had a backup quarterback in the game."
     Excuse me, but that is BS. He waved a white flag, that's all. 
      Yes, he can manage games (162-59 record in 18-plus seasons) and I often have said that Patterson and his staff do as good a job as any school in the country. 
      But, sorry, this was a mistake. Heaven forbid a coach making $4.75 million -- base salary -- a year admit a mistake. Coach P (for paranoia) will not do that.
       • The other side: Louisiana Tech head coach Skip Holtz, about a 4th-and-1 play -- a quarterback sneak -- that did not work late in the game at LSU (the Tigers piled it up and stopped it short).
     "I'm upset with myself on the fourth-down call I made," Holtz said. "Not the decision to go for it, but the call. I should have called a timeout. It was a dumb call. I want to put our players in a position to succeed, and I don't think I gave our guys the best to do that [on that play."
    A dumb call. Got that, Gary Patterson?

The book on LSU's No. 20: Billy Cannon

     Finally, after a delay of three years or 10 months (take your pick), I read the book on Billy Cannon ... and I enjoyed it; I would recommend it to longtime LSU fans.
     As Jerry Byrd Sr. would have said: What took you so long?
     OK, I had two other lengthy reads I wanted to finish -- The Right Stuff (by Thomas Wolfe) and The Best and The Brightest (by David Halberstam), plus my other writing/research projects, a major move in our lives, and just everyday things to do.
     How is that for an explanation/escuses?
     Knew I would like reading about Billy Cannon because -- like most anyone who jumped on the LSU football bandwagon in 1958 -- he was a hero beyond compare.
     A Facebook friend from Shreveport -- Richard Thompson (Fair Park High 1967 graduate) -- sent me the book, and I thank him. I am grateful.
     Not long after the book was published, in 2015, I looked for it here (in Fort Worth bookstores). No luck. Billy Cannon is not a hero in Texas. 
     Never had a chance to look for it, or neglected to do so,  on visits to Shreveport. My bad.
      Anyway, Richard Thompson to the rescue. The book came in the mail ... and sat here for 10 months. Meanwhile, Billy Cannon left us (died May 20 at age 80).

The LSU sports information web site cover page in late May 2018.

      Many know the gist of Cannon's life: high school superstar at Istrouma (Baton Rouge), state champion running back in football, and in the 100-yard dash and shot put, and -- yes -- reputation as "a thug," LSU All-American and Heisman Trophy winner, the legendary 89-yard punt return on Halloween Night 1959 against Ole Miss, 10-year pro football career, then a career in dentistry (first as an  orthodonist, especially for children), the ill-fated counterfeiting involvement, conviction and prison term, and then the long rehabilitation, the two decades as dentist at the Angola State Prison, and the reunion with the LSU community and re-establishment as the state's biggest football star of all time.
      What a life. What a story. 
      And before I read the book came Cannon's death and the many, many tributes to him. 
      So last week was my time to read the book, and it took only 3-4 days (some 225 pages). I was that interested.
      Appropriate that Richard be the one to send it. He is more responsible than anyone for the book being written, except for Cannon himself and the author (Charles N. deGravelles).
      Here is why (excerpts from the book's prologue):
      In spite of Cannon's well-known reticence, one man refused to give up on the idea of a Billy Cannon biography. Richard Thompson remembers how, after LSU's 1958 national championship season, Cannon visited his middle school in Shreveport. For Thompson and his fellow students, Cannon was a celebrity of the caliber of Elvis. Thompson got to shake the hand of his hero. He never forgot the moment.
     Thompson spent much of his career in Louisiana government, including as an undersecretary in the Department of Corrections and Public Safety. He worked closely with Burl Cain. For years, he and Cain approached Cannon about a book -- and met rejection -- again and again. Last year, in 2014, Thompson's persistence was finally rewarded when Cannon agreed to a book -- with one stipulation. The biography had to include the innovative improvements Warden Cain had instituted at the Angola Prison -- changes that Billy Cannon had personally witnessed and of which he was a part. ...
     Thompson mentioned a little-known writer who was differerent from others; in addition to experience as a journalist and writer, he had been a volunteer chaplain at Louisiana State Penitentiary, generally known as Angola, for 25 years, three of those as a spiritual advisor for a death-row inmate.
---               
     So that is how deGravelles was picked as the writer, and the book's acknowledgments begin with, "Thanks to Richard Thompson for initiating and putting the pieces of this project together and for support along the way." 
     My opinion: deGravelles did a fine job of research, and of putting the words, the story, together.
     The book does not hide from the flawed character that Cannon was, from his early days and his family's poor, hardscrabble existence in rural Mississippi, to his emergence in athletics and a sometimes prima donna, hard-to-handle attitude, his off-the-field gang-like status, his college recruiting tales, pro football adventures and, well, his money-making schemes.
     Billy often was not one to play by the rules.
     Easy to perceive that the several references to Cannon's selling of LSU football game tickets he collected came from Billy himself. Let's say, it was a quite lucrative venture for him, from his high school days through his LSU career.
     And obviously, he also did quite well financially in the summer jobs provided for him by LSU boosters. 
     If I have a quibble, it is that there is a read-between-the-lines element of the "incentives" for a superstar player of his caliber. No doubt, he and the Cannon family were provided "anything you need,"  as promised by the car dealer who sealed Billy's commitment to attend LSU.
      Based on what I have read or heard about the college  recruiting inducements for gifted, prominent North Louisiana athletes in the same era -- John David Crow (Springhill) and Kenneth Beck (Minden) in football, Jackie Moreland (Minden) in basketball -- you can assume Cannon was in that same realm.
---
      There are multiple North Louisiana ties to Cannon mentioned in the book, most prominently eight reference to Tommy Davis.
      Crow, the Heisman Trophy winner (at Texas A&M) two years before Cannon, is on pages 3 and 10. 
      Two Northwestern State athletes, Charley Hennigan (wide receiver from Minden) and Charlie Tolar (running back from Natchitoches), were Cannon's teammates with the Houston Oilers in the brand-new American Football League (1960-63), league champs the first two years and overtime losers in the third year.
      Cannon's final high school game, the 1955 state championship against Fair Park in Shreveport, is covered in a lengthy paragraph on page 76. 
     When he died in May, I posted two clippings from that game. Had about two dozen people tell me they were at State Fair Stadium that night.
      It was a 40-6 Istrouma romp in which Fair Park, like many other teams, hardly could tackle Cannon. He ran 16 times for 169 yards and his third touchdown was an 83-yard pass play (referenced in the book) with which he ran the last 60 yards. And he finished the season with a state-record 229 points.
     Speaking of Fair Park ... back to Tommy Davis.
     He was Cannon's teammate at LSU in 1958, a fullback and, more importantly, the Tigers' superb punter and placekicker, a huge factor in the perfect season.
       Davis was the star player on Fair Park's 1952 team, the only one in school history to win the state championship. My opinion (and that of many others), he was Shreveport's most accomplished football player of the 1950s and early 1960s.
       After two years at LSU and a U.S. Army (and service football) stint, he was back at LSU for a crucial role in the 1958 national championship. He was part of the all-offense Go (short for Gold) team, which alternated with the all-defense Chinese Bandits in that era of platoon substitution.
     But it was his kicking that is remembered by those who know -- two late-game winning kicks (a field goal in a 10-7 victory against Florida, the winning PAT to edge Mississippi State 7-6), and his punting. As book notes, "many considered [him] the best collegiate kicker in the country ..."
     In the mid-1960s, Cannon -- by then a tight end with the Oakland Raiders -- and Davis, a rare pro punter and placekicking specialist for the San Francisco 49ers who twice made the Pro Bowl -- renewed their friendship in the Bay Area. After his decade in the NFL, Davis' career punting average was the second-best ever behind Sammy Baugh.
      One more North Louisiana tie: Murrell "Boots" Garland, who struck up a friendship with Cannon on a track/field trip in 1957 and as the dorm proctor at Broussard Hall, LSU's athletic dorm, where he and Billy spent hours being pals. As  the book notes, he was "garrulous and funny" like Billy, and just as much of a storyteller, upbeat and full of mischief. A character who, for example, played Pistol Pete Maravich's high school coach in a movie. 
      Boots was from Shreveport, a Byrd High and LSU graduate, and early in his long, winding coaching career was George Nattin Jr.'s assistant in basketball at Bossier High (1962-64).
      He would become almost legendary -- Boots would laugh and agree -- as a track and field coach. His 1969 Baton Rouge High team won a state championship; he was head coach at LSU one year, and a longtime assistant there, known primarily as a "speed coach." His speciality was working with athletes in any sport, any level -- high school, college, pros -- to improve their running techniques and maximize their "speed" abilities. 
     Billy Cannon would not have needed help in that department. But of all his buddies, Boots Garland -- as the book makes clear -- was the most involved in his rehab after prison, a frequent visitor to Cannon's dentist office at Angola and eventually the go-between contact for Billy's return to involvement with LSU football. 
     Boots, who died in January 2016, played an important role in Cannon's later life. Good for him. 
---       
     On the book's next-to-last page, there is a paragraph about the (LSU-themed periodical) Tiger Rag's 2010 list of "The Top 150 Most Influential People in LSU Athletics History." No. 1 on that list? Is there any doubt?

Richard Thompson and wife Blanca at the
recent LSU-Southeastern Louisiana game at
Tiger Stadium (he is an SLU graduate).

      Richard Thompson now lives in Baton Rouge and in Puerto Rico (home of his wife Blanca). "I go back and forth; I have business in both places," he said. And, yes, they were in Puerto Rico a year when it was devastated by Hurricane Maria.
     We'll leave the last word on the book to him because he said he sat in on 40 hours of interviews with Cannon and Charles deGravelles.
     "Billy was a hood, even at our Fair Park standards," Richard wrote me. "It would have been a bad influence on anyone back then.
     "After he served his time [in prison], his fake self-esteem went from 110 to zero. All the bad things he did as a young man, he made up with goodness in his later life. Working on inmates at Angola was not for his paycheck, but it was his redemption."
     If you read the book, you will appreciate that.
     In the end, he was -- as LSU radio announcer J.C. Politz said at the end of the 89-yard punt return on Halloween Night 1959, a legendary and best-ever LSU football memory -- "Billy Cannon. Great All-American." 

Opening Night at Joe Aillet Stadium -- 50 years ago

The first touchdown in the first game at Joe Aillet Stadium, 1968 season, by
Louisiana Tech fullback Buster Herren (31). No. 50 is center John Harper.
 (photo by Ralph Findley)

(Note: The last in the series commemorating the first 50 years of football at Louisiana Tech's Joe Aillet Stadium. This story is about the first game there and the view from the new press box.)

---

By Nico Van Thyn

(Louisiana Tech student sports information assistant, 1965-69)

      The first football game at Louisiana Tech's new stadium -- then just Tech Stadium, renamed Joe Aillet Stadium four years later -- was Sept. 28, 1968, a night game against East Carolina University.

      The most notable player in the game, of course, was Terry Bradshaw -- future Pro Football Hall of Famer, four-time Super Bowl winning quarterback.

      Fortunately, he was on our team. Louisiana Tech won easily, 35-7, in what was to be a season of revival for Tech football (9-2 record, after dips to 4-4, 1-9 and 3-7 in previous seasons).

      The stadium opening was, as you can imagine, a long-anticipated event after decades in the old Tech Stadium on the main campus.

      The new place was less than a mile away, in an area which had been woods just a few years earlier but was picked out -- and envisioned for development -- by Joe Aillet, the longtime and by then legendary Tech athletic director-head football coach.

      The press box at the old stadium had a certain charm because it was a tight fit -- two levels of seating, maybe 10 to 12 people on each row. So the occupants were in close proximity; it was not cozy.

      The two radio crews, home and away, were near the ends on the top level; it wasn't much of a secret what the announcers were saying.

      Obviously, the new stadium and new press box brought much excitement. We watched it being built over a two- or- three-year period.

      It wasn't a long walk up to the old Tech Stadium press box, not as long as the walk to the new stadium press box. And the first couple of years, it was a walk; the elevator -- maybe for lack of funds -- was no installed then until much later. We got shafted on that.

      So for the press box crew -- Tech's sports information department and the radio and film people -- it meant carrying up equipment up through the stands and back down afterward. A hassle, but Paul Manasseh -- Tech's SID that year before moving to a long tenure as SID at LSU -- never let much rattle him.

      Seating was plentiful in this press box, there was elbow room for everyone, and there was a deck above for film and (when needed) TV crews (this was before the upstairs area was expanded years later).

      But seating downstairs wasn't exactly comfortable, especially at first. Structurally, seats were built too close to the working tables, so people whose bellies were somewhat expanded -- we did have a couple of sportswriters who fit that description -- were unable to get into those seats. Adjustments had to be made quickly.

      Second problem structurally: The area behind the seats on the lower level was too tight -- a tight squeeze just trying to move down the aisle. That never did get much better.

      Third problem the first night: Although the air conditioning system surely had been tested, this was a humid Saturday night. When the air conditioning got cranked up, the windows in the press box looking out on the field fogged up.

      Those of us trying to watch the game and keep statistics had to move around to find non-fogged areas. We even had to go outside the press box for a while to do our work.

      That did get cleared up in a short while.

      As for the football game, the Tech team came in feeling very good, having beaten an SEC opponent in the opening game the week before. Winning at Mississippi State 20-13 was a boost to the program after three mediocre seasons. (True, Mississippi State did not win a game that season, 0-8-2 record, but it was a "major" opponent for Tech).

      Bradshaw, taking over as the permanent QB starter when Phil Robertson -- future "Duck Commander" -- decided not to play after being the starter in the 1966 and 1967 seasons (with Terry as his backup), showed his great promise in the first two games of 1968.

      East Carolina was a new and very interesting opponent for Tech, and a challenging one. For one, it was one of the few college football teams still running the old single-wing offense -- a tricky scheme for the opposing defense. Two, under coach Clarence Stasavich, the Pirates were coming off consecutive season records of 9-1, 9-1, 9-1 and 8-2.

      But Tech's team was up to the physical and mental challenge. And East Carolina could not stop Bradshaw's passing to talented receivers such as Tommy Spinks, Ken Liberto, Robbie Albright and tight end Larry Brewer. 

      Tech's running game balanced the attack, and it was fullback Buster Herren who scored the first touchdown in new Tech Stadium history.

      The new stadium, strangely, did not mean a big boost in home attendance. This was years before official turnstile counts; crowds listed were guestimates by the wise media people in the press box.

      Attendance for the East Carolina game was listed at 10,000 -- the original stadium capacity was 24,000 -- and that was what was listed for a couple of the conference games at the old Tech Stadium the previous season.

      For the remaining three home games in 1968, the listed attendance was 14,000, 10,000 and 5,000 (a cold night game vs. New Mexico State on Thanksgiving). The press-box windows did not fog up that night.