Published October 20, 2020
This is a post about writing — real writing, like, with a pen and paper! But it’s about much more, including trying to put the unprecedented in perspective, whether its arena is a football field or a ravaged coastline changed forever by death and destruction.
(Quick aside: If I’d known that my few readers would respond so favorably to my writing about things that I wrote years ago, and about the writing process, I’d have launched a series of such pieces before now. So maybe that’s what’s starting to happen here as the pandemic rolls on and I try to stay sharp with less work on my plate. The first such piece, from two days ago, had an LSU sports angle. So does this one.)
It was Sunday, Sept. 11, 2005, the day after the first game of LSU’s football season and Les Miles’ debut as coach of the Tigers. It was 13 days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, rearranging so many things while its casualties mounted. First, LSU’s planned season-opening game, at home against the University of North Texas, was postponed from Sept. 3 to Oct. 29. A home game against Arizona State University on Sept. 10 was moved to Tempe, Arizona, after Katrina transformed LSU’s campus and athletic facilities into a combination of medical triage facility and evacuation staging area.
(There was another hurricane in September, and another schedule change, but let’s stick to the actual season opener for now.)
LSU defeated Arizona State, 35-31, in a game that featured five lead changes, the last coming when JaMarcus Russell threw a highlight-video 39-yard touchdown pass to Early Doucet on fourth down with 1:13 left on the clock. That sentence doesn’t begin to tell the story about what an unusual, memorable night it was at Sun Devil Stadium.
I wrote my game story almost in a daze, like what did I just see? And then I had another good night’s sleep in an air-conditioned hotel room, many miles away from Katrina’s aftermath. The next day, a newspaper colleague and I got on a commercial flight that would take us back to Louisiana. It made sense for me to write my column for Monday’s paper on the plane rather than waiting until we got home.
This would be no ordinary column. I had to try to frame for our readers and for posterity the beginning of the Les Miles era at LSU — and Louisiana’s first major sporting event in a post-Katrina world. And I had to write it all by hand instead of on a computer! Because I am thicc and sit tall in the seat, setting the tray table in the down position created an uncomfortable and awkward logistical problem as I tried to type on my laptop. So I pulled out a pen and a notepad the size of a deck of playing cards and wrote my column.
With my fingers holding a pen and notepad held up against the chairback of the person seated in front of me, I found the writing process quite different. Without my fingers on the keyboard, my brain seemed to function differently. That was probably a good thing, because I had no idea what I was going to write.
SOMEWHERE OVER AMERICA — Flying from Phoenix to Houston to Lafayette, destination Baton Rouge, you cannot help but think of the fourth anniversary of 9/11 and, at times, your precarious position in the sky.
Then you remember today marks two weeks since Hurricane Katrina reshuffled the cards for many of us.
You think about how Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler once described areas south of New Orleans, now washed away, that became home away from home for many Vietnamese refugees decades ago.
Butler wrote of the “uneasy truce” between the land and the sea more than 10 years ago, well before a storm we categorized as a strong 4 turned our favorite fun-filled, crescent-shaped city into the Big Uneasy.
This was one truce we could not sign and enforce like a treaty. The levees broke their word.
These are some of the thoughts that linger as you return from LSU’s season-opening 35-31 victory at Arizona State, one of the most compelling games in our history of playing games.
I then hit the high points of that victory, most notably Russell’s touchdown pass to Doucet.
Russell, who had the equivalent of an entire offense and defense sleeping on beds, couches and floors in his apartment for much of the last two weeks, is from Mobile, Ala., near the eastern edges of Katrina’s most volatile perimeter punches.
Doucet is from St. Martinville, where an oak tree is immortalized in a Longfellow poem that speaks of a different sort of Diaspora than the one we watched in horror as it unfolded during the last two weeks.
LSU’s roster is peppered with players who didn’t know the whereabouts of their parents, friends or other loved ones for days. Some might have to get used to speaking in the past tense about their homes.
They and their teammates won a football game Saturday night. It’s up to them, and to each of us, to assign the proper level of significance to that accomplishment.
The death toll was still rising. The Superdome had a big hole in its roof. There was so much we still didn’t know. There had been questions about how LSU’s players would perform amid all the “distractions,” and at times it was difficult to know for sure if some people understood that the game was a distraction from the hurricane, not the other way around. For those who got it, LSU’s victory had been something of a balm for many throughout the Gulf Coast region hammered by Katrina.
Maybe it lifted you for a few hours.
Maybe you still don’t have cable and heard about it later, giving you something to smile about after the fact.
Maybe you couldn’t get to sleep after the game because you’re worried about LSU’s defense.
I laughed just now re-reading that last part. LSU’s first game with a defense coached by Bo Pelini gave up 560 yards of total offense and 31 points. A few weeks later, in a game moved from the traditional Saturday night in Tiger Stadium to Monday night because of Hurricane Rita, the same defense gave up 30 points, all in the second half, as LSU blew a 21-point halftime lead. I chuckled at the memory just now because it was a reminder that having LSU fans calling for Pelini’s firing early in a football season is nothing new.
On that airplane ride from Phoenix back to the Central time zone after the game at Arizona State, I tried to strike a balance between looking back eastward toward the aftermath of a catastrophe and putting a bow on a thrilling sporting event that happened far, far away.
Surely you wonder where to rank this performance in the pages of LSU sports history, overflowing context and all. Surely you wonder where to rank the Tigers nationally after a fourth quarter featuring five lead changes — and a brush with a sixth.
There are no easy answers.
It’s true that LSU’s defense had to make some plays — not a given in this game! — to keep Arizona State from retaking the lead in the final 73 seconds. The Sun Devils had a first down at LSU’s 28-yard line with about a minute left. A lot of defensive pressure and four incomplete passes later, LSU had its season-opening victory on a field it hadn’t even been scheduled to play on a week earlier.
How do you compare LSU to all the other teams that played a home game away from home because of the greatest natural disaster ever suffered by their people, to all the other teams whose players turned their dorm rooms into shelters for five, 10, 20 people, to all the other teams who opened the season in the stadium of a ranked opponent one week after being unable to open the season and work out the kinks at home against an unranked opponent?
Well, that sentence required a few extra breaths to get through, didn’t it? I wanted to convey something approximating the unrelenting absurdity that was just one small piece of the ongoing absurdity unfolding for everyone in Louisiana who survived Hurricane Katrina.
How do you evaluate all the other coaching staffs who had to try to hold it all together under those circumstances?
How do you rate Les Miles compared to all the other coaches who made their debuts in the swirl and debris of counter-clockwise winds of change?
Of course, it was a short list of coaching staffs that did their jobs under those circumstances. (While we were in the air that Sunday, the New Orleans Saints were playing the Carolina Panthers to start their season, and the Saints left Charlotte with a 23-20 victory.)
We landed in Lafayette, and my teammate drove us back to Baton Rouge while I rode shotgun and typed the column on my laptop, moving my words from the small notepad into a Word document that I would transmit to the office when I got home. We had been away since Friday, the day before the game in the Valley of the Sun. We returned to a city where Tiger Stadium’s nickname, Death Valley, sounded a lot more morbid with a makeshift morgue across the street in the basement of the basketball arena.
Back in Louisiana, we were back in a new reality that for the better part of three days had almost seemed like a bad dream.
Flying west Friday to Arizona, you set your watch back and tried to imagine you could fly far enough in that direction to roll back enough hours to return things to our prior definitions of normalcy.
Flying east on the way home, you realize the airport giveth, and the airport taketh away.
The time you gained on the way out of town is debited upon your return.
You reset your watch.
Time will tell, of course, just what it was we witnessed Saturday night, and just how good this LSU football team is.
Until then, crossing the uneasy truce between the four-year anniversary of 9-11 and the two-week anniversary of Katrina, you decide it is enough for now to say you’ve seen things you will never forget.
That column wrote itself, really, and I’ll always think that having to write it by hand activated some part of my brain that made the words flow in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had I been typing, as usual, on a computer.
I had a therapist long ago who preferred that I do writing assignments by hand rather than with a keyboard. She said the brain works differently, and that we process what we are writing differently. I came to believe that, and writing that column by hand in 2005 cemented that belief.
Photo of person writing by hand on paper by gowithstock/via Shutterstock.