The one where I leisurely take you down a deep rabbit hole about writing on a tight deadline

Published October 18, 2020

Two things last night sent me down a rabbit hole of memories of writing on deadline. By deadline, I don’t mean “no later than a week from Thursday,” I mean an hour or less after the end of a sporting event or meeting — or as news is breaking.

Or while a national championship game is still being played.

On the night of LSU’s 21-14 victory against Oklahoma in the January 2004 BCS national championship football game, I had three deadlines for my game story. The first: five minutes after the game ended. The second: an hour later. The third: as soon as possible after that. For added drama, the outcome wasn’t certain until a punt rolled dead on a play that began with the ball being snapped with nine seconds left in the game.

With big events like that, there’s the extra pressure of knowing that people will be buying poster-sized reproductions of the newspaper page displaying your adrenaline-fueled writing. I once walked into a restaurant restroom and had a chance to revisit my word choices by scanning the poster on the wall while people around me peed and washed their hands.

Anyway, I was minding my own business last night when I saw this tweet from a friend who covered many more high-profile games than I did.

I started thinking about marquee games I wrote about on deadline. An LSU national championship four years later. The first Super Bowl after 9/11. Championship games at the Final Four. Another baseball playoff game that ended with the Houston Astros losing their shot at going to the World Series. Then something else popped up on my phone that sent me to a specific depth in my Saturday night rabbit hole.

My iPhone was playing music in shuffle mode when Pat Green’s “Wave On Wave” said hello and began taking me back to a Monday night in June 2008. Suddenly, I was on deadline in a press box again, if only in my mind.

It was a baseball “going to the ‘ship” night not unlike last night’s for the Astros and Rays. LSU and UC Irvine were playing the final game of a best-of-three super regional series, with the winner advancing to the College World Series. But that was just part of why the night was so important to the thousands of people who were there and hundreds of thousands more elsewhere.

Whatever the outcome, it would be the final game in LSU’s storied Alex Box Stadium. A new ballpark under construction nearby was to become the baseball team’s new home in time for the start of the 2009 season. This was it.

The photo of old Alex Box Stadium at the top of this blog post is from Oct. 28, 2008, before one of LSU’s fall practices. Months after playing their last game there, the Tigers used the field for practice because the new stadium wasn’t finished. So my BlackBerry 8310 and I got to capture some final images of an LSU baseball team — one that would win the national championship eight months later — on a gorgeous day at The Box.

But back to Monday, June 9, 2008. Game 3, Baton Rouge Super Regional. UC Irvine had defeated LSU in Game 1, so when the visiting Anteaters held a five-run lead after four innings in Game 2 and a three-run lead entering the ninth inning, LSU fans had to come to grips with the possibility that this would be the last game of their season and the last game at the venerable old ballpark. The fans came to life, as did the Tigers’ bats, and a come-from-behind 9-7 victory forced a winner-take-all Game 3.

 

Did I tell you that there were multiple layers to this Monday night sporting event? I was not exaggerating. On a smaller scale, the farewell from a fan base to its stadium was a precursor to what played out a few months later with the final game at Yankee Stadium (the old one). But there was more storyline intrigue at play here.

(Fun side note: Some LSU fans had seen UC Irvine freshman Tyler Hoechlin before. Six years earlier, he’d starred as Michael Sullivan Jr., otherwise known as Tom Hanks’ son in “Road to Perdition.” Another fun fact: UC Irvine sophomore Christian Bergman went on to play for the Colorado Rockies and the Seattle Mariners.)

Anyway, a former co-worker once told me that a columnist can take the reader anywhere they want to, and although a part of me instinctively knew this, I kept his words in mind anytime I was tempted to overthink things as I tried to write the perfect piece. With that in mind, I’m taking my sweet time circling back to the June 2008 baseball game and my on-deadline column after it ended. There’s no deadline for this blog post, which is probably the main reason it’s growing like it is. Sorry! This is a fun rabbit hole for me during this not-so-fun COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2008, LSU fans remembered UC Irvine coach Mike Gillespie from years earlier. In 1990, he was coach of the University of Southern California team that went toe-to-toe with LSU in a regional series that LSU won on a Monday night at The Box after rain set the series back by a day. And although baseball is not football, LSU fans’ blood ran hot anytime USC athletics came to mind. In one of the most infamous losses in LSU football history, the No. 1-ranked Trojans visited Tiger Stadium in September 1979 and escaped with a 17-12 victory that LSU players and fans will still tell you owed to a phantom facemask penalty against the Tigers.

Adding insult to injury, LSU fans felt that their team’s BCS championship to cap the 2003 football season was to some extent spoiled by USC’s claim — and The Associated Press’ validation — that USC had earned a national championship on the field that season. (One of the loudest cheers in Tiger Stadium on a 2007 night when No. 1-ranked LSU defeated Tim Tebow and Florida came when stadium announcer Dan Borne read off that night’s USC score: Stanford had upset USC, 24-23, spoiling the latter’s bid for the No. 1 ranking.)

So it was with all of that and more as context that Mike Gillespie walked into Alex Box Stadium in 2008 with USC stink on him, as far as LSU fans were concerned, and any remaining hard feelings generated during that drama-filled 1990 regional series at The Box and another one four years later. Oh, and did I mention that a Gillespie-coached USC team played LSU three times during the 1998 College World Series, with USC winning the last two on its way to the national championship, denying LSU a three-peat?

Things heated up even before the 2008 super regional began when the Los Angeles Times quoted Gillespie, whose wife had reportedly been heckled during a regional in Baton Rouge, as seemingly praising University of Nebraska baseball fans in comparison to LSU fans.

“They’re not on you, and they’re not rude and they’re not vicious and they know the Civil War is over and they know how to act. Now, I don’t mean to suggest [that is the case at LSU] I really don’t.”

The backtracking at the end didn’t prevent LSU fans from using the quote to stoke their passion before the three-game series. Gillespie apologized, but that didn’t stop an LSU fan from wandering through the bleachers early in Game 3 carrying a sign that lamented that the Civil War had not been a best-of-three series.

Early in Game 3 is also when Game 3 was essentially over.

LSU hit back-to-back-to-back home runs in the first inning, then led UC Irvine by eight runs after three innings and salted the victory away with a seven-run fifth inning in a 21-7 blowout of the Anteaters. The Tigers hit seven home runs, setting a record at the old Box that would never be broken.

(It would be a nice footnote to tell you that New York Yankees infielder D.J. LeMahieu, then an LSU freshman, hit one of those home runs. He did not, although he was an integral part of that team’s run to the College World Series and its 23-game winning streak that UC Irvine ended in Game 1 of the super regional. He was even more successful a year later when LSU won its sixth national championship. His biggest claim to fame, though, is being the only player in Major League Baseball’s modern era to win batting titles in both leagues.)

Someone could write a book about LSU baseball history and use that last game in old Alex Box Stadium as a storytelling device. Box, a former LSU baseball and football player, died in battle in North Africa during World War II, and the ballpark he once played in was named after him. In 2006, I interviewed his nephew (and namesake) and his brother, Sam, for a story that would run when The Box was set to be retired. When delays in constructing the new stadium extended the life of the old stadium by another year, I went back to Sam’s nursing home in Mobile, Alabama, for another visit before writing the story in 2008.

LSU fans walked into the stadium that night with a lot of memories and a lot of emotion about saying goodbye, hopefully by sending the team back to another College World Series.

They did just that, and now it was up to me to write a column of predetermined length on deadline to capture the moment. Rather than, as Lisa Olson says in the tweet above, “overthink it or search for the perfect word,” I just started writing, thinking about how I’d tell the story in person to a reader who knew LSU’s baseball history up to that point — but no further.

That’s how you would have scripted it, I typed, starting the hardest part of every column: the beginning. And then I just began adding one piece at a time, one-sentence paragraph after one-sentence paragraph, as it occurred to me. Next one:

A record crowd of 8,173.

That was true, and someday when you have even more time on your hands than you do now, I might tell you about my grumpy relationship with baseball “attendance” figures.

A six-run LSU first inning to let the other team know it’s not going to be their night.

Someone else was writing our game story, and they would include quotes from players and coaches, so I had a simple strategy on deadline: hit the highlights and try to frame them in historical context. That was how I saw my job on this night.

Seven LSU home runs. Back-to-back-to-back in the first inning.

So many LSU games in the old stadium had seen the Tigers crush the opposition under the weight of home runs. Even LSU’s dramatic comeback the day before began in earnest when Jared Mitchell began the team’s seven-run rally with a home run to lead off the eighth inning.

Matt Clark and Blake Dean hitting homers in the same game for the 12th time — and in the same inning for the fifth time.

Clark and Dean were LSU’s left-handed-hitting power brokers, and when they cranked it up in that six-run first inning, the handwriting seemed to be on the wall. Dean’s home run hit The Intimidator, the huge billboard that loomed above the right-field fence and displayed the years of each of LSU’s five national championships to that point. So named because of its potential to remind visiting teams of exactly where they dared to tread, The Intimidator is prominent in my photo above of one of the last practices at Alex Box Stadium.

LSU raising its record this season to 22-1-1 when hitting two or more home runs.

I was getting a little too stat-happy at this point. I don’t remember what my deadline was, but it must have afforded me little time to choose my words. I did more reporting than perhaps I should have, even under the circumstances.

A seven-run LSU fifth inning for good measure. Batting around — twice.

Fair, I guess, as it spoke in the microcosm to the many late-innings avalanches and everyone-gets-a-turn carousels that sucked the oxygen out of any chance of a comeback by the opposing team. But still probably a little too factoid-centric. Reading it again 12 years later, I’m urging myself to drop some color and character into the piece, and soon!

A local guy, a program guy, Buzzy Haydel, hitting the last home run at Alex Box Stadium.

OK, Carly. You’re back on track. Haydel, perhaps best known as a high school football quarterback at one point, was not a highly recruited baseball player with a chance to have a long pro career. He was, as I wrote, a program guy, one of those homegrown players who was there because he loved the school and loved its baseball tradition. Guys like him had helped build the program, so it was a fun moment to see him hit the last homer.

A senior, Michael Hollander, ending his college career in his home state and in front of friends and family with the last hit and RBI in the 71 seasons of The Box.

Somewhere between program guy and star, Hollander was one of many Louisiana players on many LSU teams who stayed for four or five years, worked their way into the starting lineup and were glue for the more shiny pieces of the championship machine.

Hollander receiving a standing ovation before his final at-bat.

LSU fans knew all too well what guys like him meant to the program.

The future, freshman right-handed pitcher Anthony Ranaudo, getting the last strikeout and last out.

The future? A year later, Ranaudo was the winning pitcher when LSU defeated the University of Texas in Game 3 of the final round of the College World Series for LSU’s sixth national championship.

Warren Morris, who hit the most dramatic home run in LSU and College World Series history, who was one of the players on the 1996 team that inspired the current bunch, dropping by for nine innings of support.

Warren Morris is a story by himself, but here’s the moment that makes him a household name to LSU fans. LSU was down to its last out in the championship game of the 1996 CWS and needed a run to tie the University of Miami and keep the game going. Morris gave LSU two runs and the victory.

 

Back to that column on deadline in June 2008, 12 years and a day after Morris’ home run:

Sunflower-gold jerseys during pregame warmups, which the NCAA could do nothing about.

What LSU calls gold, much of the world calls yellow. If you say “purple and yellow” to an LSU fan, prepare for the stare, and maybe a spicy correction. Sunflower gold was my description of choice for the jerseys worn by the 1996 team, seen in the practice photo at the top of this post, and in the video from Game 2 of the 2008 super regional with UC Irvine. Because NCAA postseason games are technically “neutral site” games, LSU had to wear white jerseys as the designated home team for Game 1. They also had to wear white for Game 3, thanks to a coin flip that made them the home team again, so they wore sunflower gold during pregame warmups. There was a lot of good history for LSU in those uniforms, which meant wearing them as often as possible once the 2008 team got hotter and hotter.

Going to the College World Series with a 17-game winning streak in those gold jerseys.

See? That had nothing to do with Game 3, really, but it seemed like a detail worth adding.

Winning in NCAA-mandated home whites, the first game in what would be a two-game winning streak in those uniforms if LSU wins in its next game as the home team, this time in Omaha.

Did I let myself get derailed a bit by talking so much about the jerseys? Maybe. But the sunflower gold tops were LSU’s lucky charm, so much so that coach Paul Mainieri talked about them often, and why the team managers stayed busy washing them between games and practices. And since the 23-game winning streak had been broken two days earlier with LSU in all-white uniforms, winning in white was significant to the players and to the fans.

LSU coach Paul Mainieri hearing his last name chanted late in the game. In the style of the “Geaux … Tigers” chant, a “Paul … Mainieri” version a little bit later.

Call-and-response cheers were indeed a thing at LSU games, and always will be.

Leon Landry going hard after a ball, giving himself up for his teammates once more, and being encouraged to come out for a curtain call after returning from an evaluation that determined he had a concussion.

OK, at the risk of overdoing it with the videos, Leon Landry had one heck of a 2008 (and 2009, and 2010) going all out to try to catch a ball. This is but one YouTube video showing his breakneck hustle.

Two nights later, UC Irvine had a tough time getting LSU batters out.

LSU not having a three-up, three-down inning on offense.

Not one in eight innings (the Tigers didn’t bat in the bottom of the ninth). But uh oh, I’m relying too much on stats and notes here. I choose to blame it on the deadline.

The fans reaching down deep and giving UC Irvine nine innings of the Alex Box Stadium experience and having a noticeable effect upon the final game there.

There’s story after story of LSU fans lifting the home team to victory at The Box, ramping up the energy level and swallowing up the visiting team while the Tigers fed off the electricity. This night was an all-time punctuation mark as fans knew this would be the last time in the old stadium.

The loudest “Tiger bait! Tiger bait! Tiger bait!” chants I’ve ever heard in the familiar place that is suddenly no longer your favorite team’s ballpark and no longer my office away from the office.

Know your audience. Writing for the Baton Rouge paper, I was writing for LSU fans. I was not going out on a limb by calling LSU their favorite team. But that paragraph wasn’t entirely accurate; I was back at The Box a few months later, working the beat at fall practice. But the column was the last piece I wrote in that press box. I wrote it for people who weren’t there for that game, to give them a sense of what it was like to be there, and I wrote it for the people who were, giving them a chance to remember what it was like. And maybe to have a little fun putting it into perspective, for the record.

The BCS — and AP — national championship football school, LSU, beating a former USC coach by two touchdowns, 21-7.

Yeah, I went there.

LSU players taking a last victory lap around the ballpark, the warm-up lap for a sendoff to what used to be known around here as Alex Box North — Omaha’s Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium.

LSU had a dramatic walk-off victory in Omaha soon after defeating UC Irvine, but the Tigers didn’t make it to the championship round. A year later, LSU won the championship in its last trip to Rosenblatt Stadium, which had its own farewell in 2010.

Skip Bertman, looking good and happy, with a microphone in his hand and a celebration to MC after the game.

Bertman, the coach for LSU’s first five national championship, was the athletic director in 2008 and had hired Mainieri in 2006 to coach the team. During the regional playoff series a week before the start of the 2008 super regional between LSU and UC Irvine, Bertman was taken to a hospital after having what doctors said were symptoms of a heart attack. I don’t know why I wrote MC instead of emcee, but the copy editor I am today is not pleased.

Bill Franques, in that distinctive baritone, asking fans not to walk way with pieces of the stadium.

Franques, the baseball team’s publicist and stadium announcer for home games, has what more than one person has described as “the voice of God.” Even so, I have memories of seeing a few people leave with Alex Box dirt or grass in their hands. Also: Typo alert! That should be “walk away.” I hope the copy desk caught it!

People hanging around to soak it all in one final time — and perhaps hoping to outlast Franques and stadium security.

Because that’s what you’d do if you thought you could walk away with pieces of the stadium, or if you just wanted to make the moment last as long as possible.

I had room for two more lines.

LSU doing it again, wave on wave, one last time at The Box.”

Ah, now we come to Pat Green’s song, which I’d heard for the first time a few years before on the Alex Box Stadium loudspeakers. I came to associate it with LSU baseball, even though it wasn’t one of the most frequently played songs before games or between innings. I’m not even sure it was played that night, the night LSU just kept scoring as UC Irvine just kept trying to stop it. But my column needed an ending, and the song was certainly in the regular rotation at The Box between 2003 and 2008. Also, “wave on wave” seemed like a subliminal nod to the soundtrack of the Alex Box Stadium experience, and a way to remind people that the ballpark was where LSU offenses over the years just kept coming in waves.

Whether anyone knew what I was doing when they read that line, and even if it failed to work any subliminal magic, it felt like the right note to end on.

Besides, I was on deadline. No time to overthink things.

♦

That’s it. That’s the column. Reading it 12 years after writing it, I was a bit underwhelmed. My friend Lisa, who helped send me down this rabbit hole, would have done such a better job!

And then I started to remember what else I was doing that night. From about two hours before game time until closing time, I updated a live blog on the paper’s website. It was my first season doing that, and it grew to be popular among LSU baseball fans.

“I don’t even read your articles in the paper,” one of them told me. “I just read your blog. I love it.”

Talk about having mixed feelings about praise from a reader.

Anyway, I’m not sure maintaining the blog that night kept me from writing a good column, but a phone call I got during the game threatened to derail my brain for the rest of the night. An NCAA representative called me after seeing something objectionable on my blog. An LSU fan had posted a comment stating the name and home address of an umpire whose controversial call in Game 1 had contributed to LSU’s loss. I had not seen the comment. The NCAA rep told me that if I didn’t remove it from the blog, our paper would be denied credentials to cover the College World Series.

Let me say that this is not an ideal way to spend the middle innings of a game you’re writing about. I traded emails with my bosses and ended up on the phone with the executive editor. He agreed that we should delete the comment, but he wanted me to make clear to the NCAA rep that we were doing it because it was the right thing to do, not in response to his threat. It took some time to sort that all out and refocus my attention on the event I was there to cover.

Writing a column live during a game was not the usual gig for me. We had a regular columnist, but at times, because I knew the beat better than anyone else covering the team, I was assigned to do the column. That was the case for this historic moment in the team’s history.

Looking back, I think that blogging during such an important game made it harder for me to write a good column, but the blog had been live since the first weeks of the season. It wouldn’t have been fair to followers to suspend it for that night, even if they were probably watching the game on TV and not paying attention to every blog update.

Early in my newspaper career, someone told me that a good column has a strong opening and a strong finish, and if you’re able to do some good writing and reporting in between, so much the better. I put a lot of pressure on myself that night to live up to the moment.

The column reads dry today, but I remember leaving the ballpark that night thinking that I had mostly succeeded in framing the game in terms of the big picture. Having the luxury of knowing that my teammates would write good stories and sidebars that would anchor our coverage took me somewhat off the hook.

In retrospect, I still like the “wave on wave” finish, and I don’t say that to pat myself on the back. It works for the reader or it doesn’t. But seeing the song pop up on my phone last night while I was thinking about deadline writing, and then listening to it, reminded me of why my brain took me there with only minutes to spare before the column was due. If it landed the way I wanted it to, great. If not, it still gave me an ending, which I needed, and I don’t think it was a groaner.

Institutional knowledge of what you’re writing about goes a long way. It helped me on tight deadline on a number of nights over the years, and there’s no substitute for a reporter. You have it or you don’t. And if your brain has absorbed the very public soundtrack of the way many of your readers have experienced that history, it just might help you out when you’re looking for a phrase to tie it all together.

That column would probably not make it on a list of my favorite 50 columns over the course of my career, and I’d wager there’s not an LSU baseball fan who read it who remembers it. What makes it fun for me, as a lifelong student of how my brain works and as a newspaper copy editor at this stage of my career, is thinking about how sounds and phrases settle in and rise to the surface when the ticking clock leaves no room for trying to craft the perfect sentence.

Oh, and a hat tip and a wave to you, Pat Green. Thanks, buddy.