There's a hole in my genes!

I have a genetic defect that makes me indifferent to sports. It’s like color blindness only a lot more embarrassing, especially if you live in Baton Rouge. People here think the LSU sports program was created by the gods on Olympus, who then bestowed it on mankind as a gift ranking somewhere between fire and sex in value.
About a hundred times a year somebody asks me “Gonna watch the game?” Not only do I not know who the opponent is, I'm not sure what sport they’re referring to. So I just say something like, “I hope so, if my Mom’s funeral gets over in time.” Or “No, I’ve missed my last two chemo treatments and if I don’t make this one it’s all over.” Any adequate excuse for missing a game involves death or some equally serious commitment.
I knew a major sports fan who moved to Baton Rouge for a new job. Any sport, any team, he knew the standings, the players, the team’s strengths and weaknesses. One August morning he came in waving a newspaper with the two-inch headline “Tigers Work Out With Pads!” “I thought I’d been in some football towns,” my friend allowed. “But I’ve never been anyplace where practice is headline news!”

When I was thirteen my parents got season tickets for LSU football. This gave me my first opportunity to observe human beings dissolving in alcohol. There was a row of fans behind us who were amiable conversationalists pre-game, progressed from thick-tongued to unintelligible to unconscious, and if they saw anything at all in the fourth quarter there’s no way they remembered it. Yes, of course alcohol was banned in Tiger stadium ha ha excuse me officer, I can’t quite fit my rolling cooler past between you and that “Alcoholic Beverages Prohibited” sign. Oh, yeah, it does takes up a whole seat but I have a ticket for it. See? One for me, one for my wife and one for the cooler. So long, Officer, have a nice game. Geaux, Tigers!
One night our back row neighbors insisted that my Dad and I take a look through their huge night vision binoculars. I couldn't figure out how to focus them. The view was amber in color and severely distorted. My Dad told me after the game that the binocs were full of whiskey and what they were really doing was offering us a drink.
I still recall the merriness of their cheer, “Hot Boudin! Cold Cous Cous! Come On Tigers, Push Push Push!” For those of you who do not have webs between your toes, boudin is a spicy white pork sausage. Cous cous is a semolina mush used as a base for many kinds of Cajun food, usually deceased. It’s pronounced “coos coos,” meaning of course the tigers have to “poos poos poos.”
This is a marvelous triple entendrez for a team with live feline mascot.

Email me if you can only figure out two entendrez, or if you don't know what entendrez means, and your life is so empty that you care. I figure the odds are better than average since you take time to read my blog. I mean, no offense. I'm just saying, you know?

I recall that some team had an end named James Self. After each pass the stadium announcer would solemnly intone “Pass by So-and-so, complete to Self.” J.C. Politz was the radio announcer. He is considered a great announcer by many but he did commit frequent bloopers. The one I remember is “It’s a long, high pass, way down field, so-and-so jumps for it, going way, way up, now he’s coming down...NO! HE’S NOT! That was the one game I wish I had seen. Imagine an LSU end levitating to the goal line six feet above the turf, with the bad guys grabbing fruitlessly at his ankles.
Politz achieved near immortality on Halloween night of 1958 when Billy Cannon scored with an 89-yard punt return against Ole Miss. The recording of J.C. calling that runback was played endlessly in the week before every Ole Miss game for more than thirty years. The last time I recall hearing it was in 1990. By that time Cannon was in his sixth year of federal prison for counterfeiting. To his credit he had obtained a degree in dentistry, and I guess he figured his skill in crafting dentures could be leveraged into other fields.
Some years later LSU beat Ole Miss while it was quarterbacked by the famous Archie Manning (the first one.) LSU fans were delirious with victory, and for weeks they celebrated stopping the invincible Manning. Never mind that the guy broke his arm the week before and played in a cast. We shut that sucker down, man!
It was known that the winner of that game would go on to play Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. So LSU fans, with their usual graciousness and good sportsmanship, brought bags of oranges to throw on the field. Three or four times the refs had to stop the game to clean up the fruit salad. Ole Miss had just lined up for one play when their center took a huge naval orange right to the side of the helmet. He wasn’t hurt, but it proved that at least one LSU fan had more arms than brain cells.

LSU does not forgive coaches easily. A new one has less than a full season to establish the right mind set among the fans, or he's gone. Just gone. Some of them surface later, coaching for some bush league team. Some who had inconveniently binding contracts were just never heard from again. One guy (I’m not naming any names here because some people know where I live) stayed coach for years and years. His games were mindless, boring, “Hi diddle diddle, straight up the middle” but he won. He became as permanent as the goal posts, only instead of a fresh coat of paint he got another couple of hundred grand every year.
Another guy had been an LSU player, went on to the pros, and came back to LSU as head coach. It was a magical story, with this guy as the rescuing White Knight With Purple and Gold Banner. He was going to be the hero, pick up the wreckage from a predecessor who had failed miserably at recruiting and was passing on a pretty fair high school football team. The White Knight's name was a solid gold magnet and he attracted new blood that became a classic team within a couple of years. But not under him. He lost five games his first season, and never got a second.
The fans were furious when Nick Saban left his job at LSU to coach for Alabama. No such betrayal had taken place in the history of mankind. Compared to him, Judas Iscariot was a saint and Benjamin Arnold was a patriot.
Last weekend LSU played Alabama with Saban as coach. Every fan ate raw meat before the game and drank Bloody Marys made with real blood. Score: 27-21 Alabama and Saban was still breathing. The Sunday paper carried the headline “Bitter Defeat.” Not the sports section, the front page. If you browsed through the rest of the paper you saw the minor stuff like auto companies announcing thousands of layoffs, the financial meltdown providing increased opportunities for terrorists to gain funding, and Obama’s plans to restructure government agencies. One thing about this town, it has the priorities straight!

I don’t know where people find the time to watch all those games. I can’t find time to do my tax returns, cut my grass, or even sleep at night. If I committed three hours in a row every weekend to watching TV, I would already have extended my To Do list into the next reincarnation. Oh, wait – I already have!