When it was over, I raised a fist and beat the ground until Big Ed [OT Stanton] put his arms around me and helped me to my feet. I could've kept punching the turf all night, but it wasn't going to change anything. Back in high school, Coach Guidry had told me never to walk off a football field unless I was physically unable to run, so I buckled my chinstrap and started for the locker room, jogging in the weary way of a man who didn't have a play left in him. As I passed under the goalpost, a group of kids began yelling at me from the seats at field level. I removed an elbow pad and tossed it to them, adding the other one and my hand pads when more kids showed up to beg for souvenirs. I'd have given them everything and walked into the locker room naked, but the equipment manager, I knew, wouldn't have taken kindly to my largesse. At the metal door that led to the chute, I stopped and spoke to a student trainer about my chest. There was blood on my jersey and he wanted to know how I'd made out. "I did fine," I lied. Then I turned and had another look at Tiger Stadium.
Thousands of fans were still in their seats, beating their heels against the aluminum bleachers and cheering us on, even though our game with top-ranked USC had ended. We'd lost 17-12 when the Trojans scored with only 32 seconds left on the clock, ruining our dream of pulling off the biggest upset in school history. Somebody needed to tell the fans that the wrong team had won and it was time to put away their whiskey flasks and go home. ...
Maybe I imagined it, but no sooner had I asked the question than the crowd erupted with more noise. You like to make the home folks happy, but you typically don't do that unless you win. Going back to my days as QB of the Opelousas Junior High Cavaliers, I couldn't recall any fan who ever stood and cheered for me when I left the field a loser. Tonight had changed my understanding of what it meant to win.
In the days leading up to the game, even local oddsmakers had predicted that USC would beat us by twelve points. The Trojans, widely advertised as the finest collection of football talent ever assembled on a college team, had All-Americans and future pro stars on both sides of the ball. In fact, the 1979 Trojans had twelve future NFL first-round draft choices and 31 overall picks.
Charles White and Marcus Allen were the team's running backs; they each would win the Heisman Trophy before graduating to the NFL. T Anthony Munoz would become an eleven-time Pro Bowl selection with the Cincinnati Bengals and a member, in 1998, of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. G Brad Budde would win the Lombardi Award and play for the Kansas City Chiefs. Dennis Johnson, a future Minnesota Viking, was the Trojans' best LB, and Dennis Smith and Ronnie Lott played in the secondary. Smith was a ferocious hitter, but Lott, a junior, was the most physical DB the college game had ever seen. He'd spend 14 seasons in the NFL, most of them with the San Francisco 49ers, where he would play on four winning Super Bowl teams and become famous for punishing licks that forced fumbles and knocked out lights.
By contrast, no one had heard of our guys outside of Louisiana towns like Plaquemine, Baker, Bossier City, and Ville Platte. So how could we have played USC so close? I had no trouble with that one: We had Mac.
LSU had been fielding football teams since 1893 and playing games at Tiger Stadium since the first phase of construction was completed in 1924. Fans for the home team had witnessed Billy Cannon's Halloween night punt return for 89y and a TD against Ole Miss in 1959, and they'd watched as Bert Jones passed to Brad Davis in the EZ with time expired to beat the Rebels in 1972. They'd seen Tiger greats like Steve Van Buren and Y.A. Tittle, Jimmy Taylor and Tommy Casanova. Now they had the USC game to remember.
The game hinged on a face-mask penalty against Benjy Thibodeaux, one of our DTs who, from my vantage point on the sideline, looked wholly innocent of the crime. [Editor's note: The video of the game shows he was guilty.] We were leading 12-10 with about two minutes left to play, and USC's final drive to the EZ would've ended if not for the call. Schooled since infancy on the consequences of displaying "unsportsmanlike conduct," I was never one to blame losses on the officiating, but tonight I felt ripped off.
I left the field and went inside the stadium, where everything was quiet but for the clatter of shoulder pads dropped into open lockers and the occasional profanity shouted by a teammate who'd wanted things to end differently. I stood at my own locker and undressed, all the while resisting an impulse to run out on the field again and yell for the other side to come back for more. "Let's play a fifth quarter and see who wins this time," I wanted to say. "Come on, damn you. Show us what you're made of."
I wrapped my middle with a towel, walked back to the chute, and stood on a scale. I was down to 222 pounds, 21 lighter than when I'd suited up. That was nearly a tenth of my body weight, lost in the time it took to watch a couple of movies. It was also 60 lbs lighter than one of the USC nose guards.
I pulled on a T-shirt that said LSU FOOTBALL and stepped into a pair of gym trunks and flip-flops, and then I reported to the weight room where reporters were interviewing players and coaches. "I've been going to ballgames since I was in school here," one of the older newspapermen told me, "and it ranks up there with the greatest ever played in Tiger Stadium. It surely was the loudest. They'll never forget this one." ...
I waited until he was finished writing in his notebook. "But we lost tonight," I said. "The other guys won."
"Tell those people that." And now he pointed a pen upward, indicating the fans still beating their feet against the metal seats above us in the stadium.
More than anything, we'd wanted to win it for Coach Mac. Refusing to acknowledge the many other factors that had led to his ouster, we'd had it in our heads that a victory over the country's most celebrated team might be enough to prompt the Board of Supervisors to extend his contract another five years, or at least until he reached a more suitable retirement age. If we could humble the Trojans, I'd told the guys at practice that week, how could the school let him go? Now, with the loss, I felt as if we'd let him down.
"I guess it wasn't meant to be," Big Ed said later in the dorm.
"I guess God wanted something else for us," I answered, even as I lay on my bunk and wondered if God really played a role in the outcome of football games, including those as big as ours with USC.
Unable to sleep, I staggered out in the hall and waited with some of my teammates for curfew check. They were sitting on the carpeted floor in a loose arrangement on their knees and shoulders, others wrapped in bandages. A few had deep, open cuts on their arms and abrasions decorating their chins and foreheads. Like me, they'd been unable to get their bodies to shut down, and they knew that to sleep meant to wake up tomorrow with the game result freshly printed in the newspaper, thus making it irreversible. At this moment it still seemed that if we held on to the night, we held on to the possiblity that our fate could be overturned. Benjy wouldn't get the call, the Trojans wouldn't punch it in, Coach Mac wouldn't lose his job after 27 years. If there was any fairness in the world, we'd get what we earned rather than what was dealt.
At half past two, a dorm monitor came by and announced that Mac had suspended curfew for thenight, as a gift to us. I hopped to my feet and walked from room to room, knocking on doors and shouting "No curfew, no curfew tonight." Only a couple of players took me at my word. They came out, pulling on their jeans and shoes and stumbling toward the exits. The rest told me to go away.
Toward dawn I found myself seated in the grass on the levee with a girl I knew. ... As the sun came up, I got to my feet and started down the grade to the Impala parked on a River Road turnaround. The girl, following close behind, stopped about halfway down and slapped her legs. "Mosquitoes 'bout to eat me alive," she said.
Somehow I knew I'd never recover.