First published August 27, 2024
Updated August 29, 2024 

(Written with the help of cited books, newspaper and magazine articles, conversations with friends, players and others who were there, watching the replays, and hearing the stories for decades while living in Louisiana. Photos courtesy of LSU Sports Information.)

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It was “Rocky” on a football field.

Let history make the case that, 45 years later, the first USC-LSU football game is probably little more than an intriguing deep cut for many USC fans, maybe most. When a No. 1-ranked team and reigning national champion is favored to win, and does, even on the road, it’s hard to argue for putting it on the Greatest Hits album.

For longtime LSU fans, USC’s 17-12 last-minute comeback win in Baton Rouge in 1979 remains a different sort of deep cut, one that still bleeds — that rare loss that belongs on the list of the most unforgettable games LSU has ever played. For decades, uber-talented USC’s players have shared its lasting impression.

“I haven’t been in an event like that at any level of football,” Pro Football Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott, a USC starting safety that night, told The Times-Picayune 30 years later. “Out of all the games I’ve ever played in, I’ve never been in anything like that, and I am including my Super Bowls in that assessment.

“It’s probably the only time in my life I was intimidated by the crowd.”

The game was one of the first ever televised by ESPN, which was 22 days old, but relatively few people saw a tape-delayed telecast that today seems more rumor than fact. Some watched it on an older, Los Angeles-based subscription service. Those who remain from the 78,322 at Tiger Stadium that night say you had to be there.

Bear Bryant once called the LSU football venue the toughest place in the world for a visiting team, adding, “It’s like being inside of a drum.” Longtime college football historian and commentator Beano Cook said, “Dracula and LSU football are at their best after the sun goes down.” One Saturday night in 1979, USC got three hours of Dracula banging a drum that for many — in terms of architecture, scope and vibe — called to mind Rome’s Colosseum.

LSU and USC meet for the third time Sunday in Las Vegas. They face a high bar.

‘But we lost tonight’

John Ed Bradley, LSU’s center in 1979, chronicled USC-LSU I in his 2007 book, “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.” During postgame interviews, he wrote, a veteran reporter said he’d never heard the crowd that loud before.

“But we lost tonight,” Bradley told him. “The other guys won.”

“Tell those people that,” the man said, pointing his pen up at the sound of the fans, still in the stadium, still stomping on the metal seats above them.

The crowd rocked the place on a night that still hums for many, a persistent perma-program running in the background inside the computer of the mind.

“The noise level is always a factor at Tiger Stadium, but that night it exceeded anything I’d ever heard,” Bradley told Marty Mulé in “Game of My Life,” Mulé’s book about the most memorable games in LSU football history.

“The sound was like a physical force. Everything was just a howl. Of course, it was a problem for USC, but it was for us, too. We didn’t call signals in that game. Everyone just watched me and plays were simply run on my snap.”

On paper, it shouldn’t have been close. USC’s backfield had two future Heisman Trophy winners, one blocking for the other. Its roster had 30-plus players who spent time in the NFL, and stars who played in a combined 64 Pro Bowls, 30 by the offensive line alone.

An average LSU team, as Bradley and teammates have described themselves, had a surplus of motivation for what seemed like a college versus pro matchup. Some Tigers thought a victory could reverse a months-old decision that their coach would be let go after the season. They were on a mission.

“Pumped up beyond belief by its raucous fans,” Sports Illustrated’s Douglas Looney wrote after the game, LSU “went out and played the entire game without its feet ever touching the ground. That was the only way the Tigers could’ve stayed with the Trojans, who already have been proclaimed by three football coaches as the best college team ever.”

Context, outcome frozen in time

The story is retold on milestone anniversaries and other relevant occasions. There will be more before Sunday. Each word in each retelling has countless more embedded in it. Fresh insights may pop up, but the basic facts are unchanged.

LSU’s 6-3 lead early in the second quarter was USC’s first deficit of the season. LSU led 12-3 in the fourth quarter. USC didn’t lead until scoring on an 8-yard touchdown pass with 32 seconds left. The Trojans held on to win.

USC was the 1978 national champion in the coaches poll and began 1979 at No. 1, where it remained when it traveled to Louisiana in Week 4. LSU went from unranked to No. 20 after easy wins over Colorado and Rice. Against USC, the Tigers played like they didn’t know they were supposed to lose.

This year, teams will fly from the Pacific to the Central and Eastern time zones, and vice versa, for conference games. USC visited LSU for a somewhat rare intersectional nonconference matchup, rare compared to its games against Notre Dame, an almost annual occurrence interrupted only by war and a pandemic.

In 1979, Saturday night in Tiger Stadium was a new experience for the Trojans. As was gumbo. And hearing thousands yell “Tiger bait! Tiger bait!” at them when they arrived, or had their walk-through, or as they left a movie theater on the eve of the game. They escaped, with a win. Barely.

Brad Budde — a USC offensive lineman and Lombardi Award winner in 1979, who went on to play in the NFL and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame — said Tiger Stadium made Notre Dame look like “Romper Room.” His quote became a mainstay of LSU promotion and lore, long past when a fan could tell it to a puzzled young relative without seeing a blank stare and having to explain that “Romper Room” was a children’s TV show from 1953 to 1994.

Poets, priests and politicians have waxed nostalgic about the game for 45 years, as have parrains, pères, padnas, padres and padrinos, tales told in English, Cajun French, Spanish and the universal languages of hand waving and reenactments. More will hitch a ride on the folklore between now and kickoff Sunday. If this were a Hollywood movie, a fitting platform for a game with so many stars from L.A., stories would unfold at crawfish boils and in duck blinds, at beachfront properties and NFL alumni gatherings, on shrimp boats and oil platforms, on yachts and private jets headed halfway around the world, and message boards and comment sections. Wait, that’s real life.

‘It all makes a body tingle’

In SI, Looney noted the longstanding tradition of LSU’s band causing the home crowd to “go berserk” upon taking the field and beginning the pregame fanfare. “It all makes a body tingle,” he wrote. The roar lasted for hours. Some say they can still hear it.

The SI cover (Oct. 8, 1979), perhaps fittingly, showed heavyweight boxing champion Larry Holmes and Earnie Shavers from their title bout in Las Vegas the night before USC-LSU. One rotation of the planet later, Rocky went the distance against Apollo in Baton Rouge.

Whether anyone said, “Ain’t gonna be no rematch,” there was one. LSU beat USC 23-3 in 1984, the Year of Purple Rain, in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which had put a bow on a Soviet-free, red, white and blue Olympics less than two months earlier. But the conditions surrounding the 1979 game could not be repeated five years later, nor could they ever. To call that ’84 game merely a revenge game might be to oversimplify it and miss so much. You can’t step in the same bayou twice.

If all you knew about the ’79 game was the next day’s LA Times headline — For 59 Minutes USC Isn’t Even No. 1 in Baton Rouge — and that USC scored the winning touchdown in the final minute, it might be enough to understand why LSU old-timers revisit it the way we’re sometimes drawn to the pain of an old wound.

It was the catch you almost made that would have won a state championship, the ball instead glancing off your fingertips. The cruel, perverse losing end of the Bluegrass Miracle or a garden-variety Hail Mary. Every “so close!” you’ve ever had. Every contested ruling still under scrutiny. Every ​coach you left it all on the field for.

​”There are things we never get over, and for me, football is one of them,” Bradley, the LSU center, wrote near the end of his book. His coach, Charles McClendon, is a prominent emotional core in the book and in the context of USC-LSU I.

McClendon coached that game, as he did for all of 1979, knowing he wouldn’t get another season at LSU. A complicated negotiation of an inevitable firing let Cholly Mac coach that year, but that would be it. Players hoped to save his job by surpassing expectations. They played two No. 1 teams, USC and Alabama, keeping them out of the end zone for seven of eight quarters, in close losses.

As he lay dying 22 years later, McClendon reminded a visiting Bradley about a controversial penalty against LSU’s Benjy Thibodeaux that helped USC’s drive for the winning touchdown. What’s obvious when you watch a replay is that two USC linemen on the right side started moving before the snap. The only flag — thrown by a Pac-10 official on a split crew with SEC officials — was on LSU.

“They called face-masking against Benjy,” McClendon whispered from his bed, and as Bradley wrote, he didn’t fuss at his long-ago player for saying the refs “stole it from us.”

Coach Mac died a few days later, Dec. 6, 2001, two days before LSU won its first SEC championship under Nick Saban, whose hiring and success ended a long roller-coaster ride for LSU and its football coaches after McClendon’s dismissal.

Conflict wasn’t done with USC and LSU

Every team and its fans have threads of resentment that span generations. For LSU, entwined strings of USC cardinal and gold are among the most prominent. Think about late in the 2003 season, when the Trojans beat Michigan 28-14 in the Rose Bowl and their coach, Pete Carroll, essentially declared the season over.

“I think we just won the national championship,” Carroll said on the field.

LSU and Oklahoma had yet to play in the BCS national championship game, which the Tigers won three days later 21-14 to earn their trophy. Oklahoma had inspired talk that it might be the best team in college football history. Stacked with individual award nominees (including the eventual Heisman Trophy winner), OU forgot to win the Big 12 conference championship game (losing 35-7 to Kansas State) and was still placed in the BCS title game. That upset USC fans. Carroll and USC upset LSU fans.

And a wound from 1979 began to burn again.

Ah, the 1979 game. If you find it, you can see future San Francisco 49er Lott tackling future New Orleans Saints tailback Hokie Gajan. Future Denver Broncos safety Dennis Smith (USC) tackling future Kansas City Chiefs receiver Carlos Carson (LSU). Future NFL player and head coach Jeff Fisher (USC) picking off a pass from, and also tackling, future Super Bowl starting quarterback David Woodley (LSU).

You can hear, several times, “LSU wasn’t able to move the ball, so we pick up the action with USC’s next series of downs.” The USC defense was formidable. You can hear about the Soul Patrol, LSU’s defensive secondary. Help Mac Pack and Bring Mac Back. Student Body Left and Student Body Right, USC’s vaunted sweep.

#USC picture of the day: Lombardi Award winner Brad Budde leads the way for fullback/Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Allen and tailback/Heisman Trophy winner Charles White pic.twitter.com/lLuHyF4G67

— InsideUSC (@InsideUSC) February 13, 2019

Future Hall of Fame offensive lineman Anthony Muñoz was a USC senior. He returned to Tiger Stadium on Sept. 30, 2000, almost exactly 21 years later, to see his son play for Tennessee. Muñoz said that after experiencing the atmosphere in 1979, he’d wanted to see a game there as a fan. Another Saturday night was suitably electric upon his return in 2000.

LSU’s first overtime game ever ended with a 38-31 win over the Vols, prompting fans to storm the field and pull down both goal posts, which some saw as an indicator of a program in decline. LSU was 2-2 after two straight losses, including a home loss to UAB, before beating 11th-ranked Tennessee. The win pointed Saban’s first season at LSU in the right direction.

Muñoz said the crowd lived up to his memory, but that was helped by a then-record 91,682 in expanded Tiger Stadium, a lot more mouths than when he first visited.

LA and L.A. way back when

In September 1979, wins on Louisiana football fields were reserved for high school and college teams. The Saints were working on their first non-losing season, but that 8-8 record would be followed in 1980 by the 1-15 disaster and paper bags over fans’ heads. But LSU won. LSU was “we” to a large population in the state that never set foot on campus. It still is. Always will be.

In September 1979, Los Angeles had the Rams, who were on a path to the Super Bowl. It had the Dodgers, who played in the two previous World Series. The city had the Lakers, who now had Magic and were on their way to becoming NBA champions and a thing called Showtime. Nearby Anaheim had the Angels, who clinched their first postseason appearance four days before USC-LSU.

And LA had USC. There was talk that USC might be the best team in college football history (the kiss of death?). The Trojans even had Fleetwood Mac along for the ride. A few months before the trip to Baton Rouge, more than 100 members of the USC marching band filmed a video with Fleetwood Mac for its song “Tusk,” which was released two weeks after the LSU game. Enjoy the video. Enjoy Stevie Nicks twirling a baton on the Dodger Stadium infield dirt.

(I’ve always wondered whether the USC band had permission to play “Tusk” at the game, whether it played it, and how haunting that might have been for someone in Tiger Stadium who heard it on the radio for the first time a few weeks later. The song became an anthem of sorts for the marching band.)

The Trojans were coming off a 12-1 season in 1978 and a national championship in the coaches poll. Alabama was AP national champion in 1978 despite an early loss to USC and an 11-1 record, one win short of USC’s total. Beating top-ranked Penn State in the Sugar Bowl helped Alabama finish No. 1 ahead of USC, which had to claw its way back from No. 7 after an October loss at Arizona State.

The name jumped out at you

Pocket schedules — handy little pre-internet search-engine bookmarks — showed LSU would play Alabama and USC, each with a claim as reigning national champion, in 1979. In the sport’s vernacular, they “shared the national championship,” the definite article making it seem as if there was only one. Such phrasing probably comes from our desire for there to be an undisputed championship, but real life is messier. USC didn’t share its coaches poll title with Alabama, and the Crimson Tide didn’t share their AP title with the Trojans.

Was it a “split championship,” one thing divided by two? Maybe it’s semantics, but it came into play again in the 2003 season and is forever part of USC-LSU legend.

In 1979, USC toted national championships from 1972, ’74 and ’78. LSU was accustomed to playing Alabama, which had its own impressive trophy case, but USC was something else, almost mythical. A team from TV, from Hollywood, with Rose Bowls, swords, a white horse and Heisman running backs. The name jumped out at you on the schedule each time you retrieved it from your wallet.

It was looking like USC’s decade, in a photo finish with Alabama, but the close call at LSU was an early sign that there might not be a Hollywood ending.

Saturday night in Death Valley

A live Bengal tiger, as was customary, was stationed before the game near the visitors locker room in a wagon cage that could be towed around the stadium, to the delight of LSU fans and the horror of visiting players. Whiskey in cups and flasks were nothing new at college football games, but full bottles? Fans in your face, so you can smell it on their breath?

The crowd was so loud, USC had trouble communicating, even after working on that in practice. Even after assuming a recent rule change would help them if the noise prevented them from running a play. USC was flagged three times for delay of game and four times for illegal procedure, once on special teams.

The Trojans had protected their preseason No. 1 ranking against Texas Tech, Oregon State and Minnesota before traveling to Baton Rouge. They were loaded. What team is so talented that future first-round draft picks have to settle for being on the scout squad? USC in 1979.

Running back Charles White was early in his Heisman season. Marcus Allen was the blocking back, showing selflessness and versatility two years before his turn to win the Heisman. Budde, Keith Van Horne and Hoby Brenner, a future Saint, anchored the blocking up front, which would have been even more imposing against LSU had Muñoz not torn knee ligaments in the season opener. He didn’t play again until a surprising and stellar return for the Rose Bowl.

Paul McDonald, probably not one of the first names uttered in a roll call of great USC quarterbacks, managed the team well and finished sixth in Heisman voting that year. The SI story called him “the icy-cool, left-handed quarterback,” noting his .690 completion percentage for the season after beating LSU. He was solid.

McDonald directed USC’s game-winning drive (10 plays, 79 yards, 3:44). He was 4-for-5 for 52 yards on the series, wresting the lead from LSU with an 8-yard touchdown pass to Kevin Williams with 32 seconds left.

The play of the game

ESPN’s Jim Simpson set the scene as McDonald took the snap on third-and-9 from the USC 36-yard line to start the most controversial play of the game: “A field goal wins it for Southern California … LSU treading a dangerous path toward the biggest upset of the young football season.”

LSU defensive end Demetri Williams had a chance to sack McDonald but fell to one knee as he brushed past Van Horne. Williams shot back up, but Thibodeaux’s hand touched McDonald’s facemask before Williams did sack McDonald. As the quarterback fell to the ground at his 29, throwing an overhand lateral to a teammate before landing on his back, a flag joined him on the grass.

“When I reached out to grab him,” Thibodeaux said in Mulé’s book, “he moved his head, and my hand grazed his facemask.”

The 15-yard face-mask penalty gave USC a first down at the LSU 49. Seven plays later, USC was in the end zone. LSU reached the USC 30 with eight seconds left but couldn’t connect on two passes into the end zone.

White ran 31 times for 185 yards and a touchdown. His 32nd run was toward the sideline for a postgame handshake with McClendon.

In a sign of a different time, the game lasted 2 hours, 41 minutes.

USC head coach John Robinson went on to coach the Rams, then returned to USC years later. In a twist you couldn’t make up, he later married an LSU graduate, a woman still upset about the 1979 game, and moved to Baton Rouge to help the Tigers win the 2019 national championship.

The first LSU team Robinson got a good look at was not without talent. Woodley split time with Steve Ensminger at quarterback in 1979, three years before starting for the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII. Willie Teal and a handful of other Tigers had solid or modest pro careers. But for the most part, LSU fans could be excused for seeing the matchup as taller, heavier Hollywood stars and gladiators versus their hardworking, good-effort Louisiana sons.

Robinson had his own gripes with the officiating in Tiger Stadium.

“All those delay-of-game penalties came about because the SEC officials mark the ball differently,” the official NCAA game summary and quote sheet has Robinson saying. “We have about five or six seconds less.”

Robinson added that “we couldn’t hear a thing when we got near the LSU student section.” And that crowd-noise rule, which was supposed to allow for a 5-yard penalty against the defense if the offense couldn’t call and hear its signals?

“I also feel that we did not get as much cooperation about the crowd from the ref as I would have liked,” Robinson said that night.

But his team won. Being on the losing side was more frustrating. Heartbreaking, in the way that sports can be, especially after the controversial call on Thibodeaux.

The flag was not what he thought

“When the play began,” McClendon said in “The Fighting Tigers II: LSU Football 1893-1980” by Peter Finney, “I relaxed because I knew Southern Cal would be called for jumping before the snap. That’s what I thought the flag was for.”

A lot can happen in 45 years. Stadiums are replaced, and replaced again. Careers begin and end. The commonplace vanishes. Science fiction becomes just another tech reveal that soon becomes obsolete. Wounds appear and then refuse to disappear.

Every game is personal, with a collective meaning but also deeply individual ones. USC-LSU 1979 has countless interpretations and left countless imprints, a measure of point of view from each person’s place in the world. Who’s to question any of those? As Sylvia Plath once wrote in a letter, “Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” And what was that USC-LSU game if not poetry in motion featuring the controlled violence of collisions between modern-day gladiators?

People will take their takeaways to their grave.

Cholly Mac did. He had said he would. In the ’90s, as LSU was still trying to stabilize its football program after firing him and was on its way to winning five baseball national championships in 10 years — again chasing USC, the all-time leader in baseball national titles — McClendon said so.

During LSU fundraisers and social hours in his time as executive director of the American Football Coaches Association, he said he would take that game and the penalty flags — one thrown, one not — to his grave.

Success is a moving target. Win this one, the next one is the new goal. In Baton Rouge, USC dodged a bullet, a tiger and maybe a few bourbon bottles, and went on to the next game. Then the next. The Trojans then tied with Stanford after leading 21-0 at halftime, opening the door for Alabama to replace them at No. 1. Forty-five years later, that’s probably 1979’s lingering sting for USC fans.

“We liked to say we beat USC, 21-21,” Rod Gilmore, who was on that Stanford team, told The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman in 2020.

Fans who came of age in the era of overtime missed a few one-liners like that.

A different setup in 2024

When USC and LSU meet again Sunday, there won’t be a subtext like the one involving Cholly Mac, even after Ed Orgeron’s stints coaching at both programs and leading his home-state LSU to a more recent national championship than USC has. Even after Robinson helped Orgeron and LSU win their 2019 national title by being an offensive consultant. Even after 2003.

Current LSU coach Brian Kelly got a taste of a fierce rivalry with USC when he coached Notre Dame. By all accounts his 2024 Tigers are not playing to save his job, so if they leave it all on the field, competitive pride is likely the fuel.

McClendon experienced the spectrum of LSU fandom. He coached there for 27 seasons, 18 as head coach. Enough people with the power to remove him thought he had taken the program as far as he could, and he stayed long enough to see and hear “Help Mac Pack” too many times.

His time as head coach featured a 137-59-7 record, wins in seven of his 13 bowl games and one conference championship, but his 2-14 record against Alabama and Bear Bryant, who had coached him at Kentucky, fueled the chants. During the pep rally for the USC game, and even before it, McClendon got to hear rounds of “Bring Mac Back.” Then his players gave their all to try to make that happen.

Bradley told Mulé that he weighed in at 243 pounds before the USC game.

“Afterward I stepped on the scale and I was 221,” Bradley said. “That’s 22 pounds, all of them melted into the grass of Tiger Stadium.”

Mulé’s book features 32 former LSU players talking about the game of their lives. Bradley’s chapter is the only one about a game LSU lost. There’s a reason USC players still talk about it.

“That was a galvanizer for us,” Riki Ellison, a USC sophomore linebacker who went by Riki Gray at the time, told Feldman. “When you go through adversity like that, playing in that pressure environment with everything going in their direction. To win there, like that, we took great pride in that.”

‘It doesn’t seem like justice’

A month after the USC-LSU game, the Tigers lost to a Florida State team, coached by 49-year-old Bobby Bowden, that was on its way to an 11-0 record that secured a bowl berth. Two weeks after that, Bradley and LSU teammates came off the field soaked again, this time from a mix of rainfall and sweat. Alabama beat LSU 3-0 on a stormy night in Tiger Stadium to stay on track for its national championship.

“We’ve now played two No. 1 teams and unbeaten Florida State,” McClendon said, as Finney wrote, after the loss to Alabama. “It doesn’t seem like justice. Someone up there mustn’t like me.”

You’d have to ask an LSU fan how the conditions that night square with the saying that Bradley chose as the title of “It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.” Like so many things from that 1979 season, the telling of the story is everything.

As Finney knew, McClendon also knew — even before the last two scheduled games and a Tangerine Bowl win over Wake Forest for a 7-5 record — that the season had broken his heart, the same heart that his players had won forever.

“People are always asking me what team I remember most,” Cholly Mac said after the loss to Alabama. “Now I can tell them. I will remember this team because they’ve done more with less than any of the others. They’ve milked their ability dry game after game and I’ll never forget ’em.”

Sporting hearts might be broken Sunday when USC and LSU meet again. Fans of both know that ache. If we may circle back to the ’70s one more time: In this rivalry, if that word applies in what to date has been just a two-game series, longtime LSU fans know the first cut is the deepest.

 

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Epilogue: I’ve tried to take care in framing heartbreak and loss within a sports context. Nineteen days after Charles McClendon coached his final game, there was real loss. Bo Rein, LSU’s pick to succeed McClendon as head football coach, died in a bizarre plane crash. Had he lived, he would have been 79 years old today. I do not pretend that the events chronicled here are on the same level as Rein’s death, and I hope my references to sporting heartbreaks convey, rather than betray, my perspective.

And a footnote: This story was ready for publication Aug. 21, but I had to get my employer’s permission to post it on my blog. I’ve updated the post with a few more links since then.

© Carly J. Dubois, 2024

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Photo information, in order of appearance (all courtesy of LSU Sports Information):

~ The top photo is the play of the game. On third-and-9, USC quarterback Paul McDonald spins away from LSU’s Demetri Williams after USC’s Keith Van Horne (68) managed to impede and redirect Williams enough to initially prevent a sack. Williams eventually tackled McDonald for a big loss, but not before teammate Benjy Thibodeaux was called for a 15-yard face-mask penalty that gave USC a first down at the LSU 49.

~ LeRoid Jones scored LSU’s only touchdown on a 13-yard pass reception.

~ LSU’s Benjy Thibodeaux dives for USC’s Charles White in the first quarter as John Adams (86) looks on. White, that year’s eventual Heisman Trophy winner, rushed for 185 yards and a touchdown on 31 carries in the win against LSU.