36 hours in Tiger country

Florida fan and college football blogger extraordinaire Orson Swindle, of Every Day Should Be Saturday fame, went to LSU's Tiger Stadium, a.k.a. "Death Valley," for the first time ever Saturday, and he wrote a great blog post about the experience. Money quote:

That voodoo’s real. When the “Four Corners Salute” gets cranking, it’s like listening to a 747 made entirely of fired clay crashing into a field of shattered glass. Getting a snap off effectively is in itself a game ball-worthy achievement. Combined with the orgy going on outside the stadium for five miles in any direction, it’s the gold standard for any other college gameday experience. Any of them. It is peerless in terms of demonstrated intensity, lunacy, commitment, flair, and menace. At several points in the day, we were convinced we were going to be killed, injected with creole butter, and thrown in a deep fryer…but only in the most festive and accommodating of ways, of course.

Heh.

Comments

[B. Minich]

I like the lines about the tiger (his name is Mike, btw):

"The tiger is real. You know that there’s a live tiger on campus at LSU. And that they parade it around before games. And that you’re going to see it. But seeing it registers the lunacy of the whole event at a level that only the visual can really deliver: it’s a live goddamn tiger in its own bizarre cage/car, staring out at all the fresh meat it could possibly ever want from behind mesh and generally looking very, very unimpressed with the whole affair. The crowd loses all sense when it arrives, bringing LSU pregame out of the realm of mere “pep” and into a conflation of sport and primitive totem worship."

I agree. I mean . . . its a frickin' TIGER!! A real one! Even though I've never been there, I have a friend who is an LSU fan who tells me about Mike. Apparently, they just had to acquire Mike VI or something, because the former Mike died, and they didn't parade him around a game or two ago because it was having trouble getting used to the heat. Just all around weird.

[Mike's brother Matt]

Yeah, the Florida game was the first of Mike VI. He was supposed to be there two weeks earlier, but he was getting used to the heat and the game was evily moved to daytime, so it was pushed back to the Florida. As if we needed to get any more fired up.

[I R A Darth Aggie]

we were convinced we were going to be killed

Yeah, that's pretty much true if you're not wearing something, anything that identifies you as a LSOOser.

Brendan, if Notre Dame (or U$C, for that matter) ever schedules a home and home with LSU, a word of advice: skip the roadtrip to Red Stick. Or if you're dead set on going, take out as much life insurance as you can.

Preferably payable to me, but Becky and Little Loy will be acceptable, too.