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.
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     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.
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      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. 
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     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."