(With the Final Four opening tonight in Indianapolis, Tiger Rag is reprinting this piece from April 2, 2016, written by Tiger Rag editor Glenn Guilbeau while at USA Today Louisiana on the 10-year anniversary of LSU’s team that reached the Final Four in Indianapolis 20 years ago this week. With permission from USA Today Louisiana.)
By GLENN GUILBEAU, USA Today Louisiana (April 2, 2016, editions)
BATON ROUGE – Before the New Orleans Saints rode the post-Hurricane Katrina wave into the NFC Championship Game in the 2006 season and onward to the Super Bowl XLIV title in the 2009 season, there was another iconic home team that played and won big for the great state of Louisiana.
And this team did not try to leave the state as bodies were being found in New Orleans in the weeks after Katrina touched down on August 29, 2005. At the time, Saints owner Tom Benson tried that via San Antonio before NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue blocked him that fall. With the Superdome’s roof wrecked, the Saints finished 3-13 in 2005 with half their home games in San Antonio and half in Tiger Stadium, where Benson argued with fans over his exit strategies.
It was not quite the LSU football team, either. Those Tigers did win the Southeastern Conference West but failed in the SEC Championship Game.
It was the 2005-06 LSU BASKETBALL team that won the overall SEC title and the NCAA Atlanta Regional championship to reach the school’s first Final Four in 20 years.
“We feel so much pride for what your basketball team has done,” then-Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco told LSU coach John Brady in a phone call not long after his No. 4-seed Tigers upset mighty No. 1 overall seed Duke, 62-54, on March 23, 2006, in Atlanta.
“This is great for the state,” said Blanco, who was still battling Katrina’s aftermath and Benson over the Saints’ unique lease agreements that had cost Louisiana double-digit millions a year in non-incentive based inducements – the likes of which no other NFL team has received before or since.
“Louisiana needs some positive news and positive images,” Blanco said. “And it was such a big win.”
Duke, which was 32-3 entering the LSU game, was held to its lowest point total in 10 years. It has scored fewer than that only once since. LSU guard Garrett Temple held Duke guard J.J. Redick, the Atlantic Coast Conference’s all-time leading scorer, to a mere 11 points – 16 below his average.
LSU SECOND LINES AFTER OVERTIME WIN OVER TEXAS
The Tigers went on to finish the job, beating No. 2 seed Texas, 70-60, in overtime to reach the Final Four. In an impromptu postgame celebration, LSU’s 300-pound sophomore forward Glen “Big Baby” Davis grabbed a gold boa from his mother and danced a thunderous version of the New Orleans classic “Second Line” umbrella song. And the LSU band played a fitting “Do What You Wanna,” by the Rebirth Brass Band.
“If I’d have known, I would’ve brought some umbrellas,” Brady, a McComb, Mississippi, native who loves New Orleans. “And none of that was planned. That just happened. That was a tribute to New Orleans.”
Many of the outnumbered non-LSU fans in the crowd of 27,130 at the Georgia Dome didn’t know what was happening.
GLEN DAVIS: “I Wanted To Give A Shout Out To The Victims Of Katrina.”
“I wanted to give a shout out to the people of Louisiana – the victims of Katrina,” Davis said at the time. “I was giving them some motivation, so they’d have a good feeling about their state because people are trying to recuperate from what happened.”
Davis, a nine-year NBA veteran who is now a basketball analyst for the SEC Network, has always been prone to hyperbole. But he remembered Katrina all too well as a Baton Rouge area native as were five other LSU players, including four starters.
Davis was from University High on the LSU campus as was Temple, a redshirt freshman guard that year who is still in the NBA.
Superstar redshirt freshman power forward Tyrus Thomas, the fourth player picked in the 2006 NBA Draft and a nine-year NBA veteran now playing overseas, is from McKinley High.
Backup forward Darnell Lazare, whose 10 points vs. Duke in the first half with Davis and Thomas in foul trouble kept LSU in the game, was a junior from Woodlawn High. He finished playing professionally just last season and is an assistant coach in the NBA Developmental League.
Freshman wing forward Tasmin Mitchell, who is now playing overseas, was from Denham Springs. Sophomore walk-on guard David Fleshman, now a Baton Rouge attorney, was from the Dunham School.
And senior point guard/team leader Darrel Mitchell, the “Quiet Assassin” whose 3-pointer with 3.9 seconds left beat Texas A&M, 58-57, in the second round, was from nearby St. Martinville and continues to play overseas.
A TEAM FROM LOUISIANA FOR LOUISIANA
It was Louisiana’s team and a team from Louisiana. And it cried and partied right with its state. When the Tigers’ home arena, the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, was turned into a field hospital and its practice floor a morgue in the days and weeks post Katrina, Davis and his teammates visited patients.
“I saw a lot of stuff,” Davis said. “I saw little kids in intensive care and old people real bad off. I witnessed a surgery on a patient from New Orleans. He didn’t have any flow of oxygen. He couldn’t breathe. So they did surgery right there, and I was just holding the IV, watching. He didn’t make it. It was something you don’t see in everyday life. It gave me a sense of purpose.”
Then-LSU assistant coach Butch Pierre, who recruited the 2005-06 Tigers and was just named a North Carolina State assistant after eight years at Oklahoma State, said Katrina impacted the entire team.
“Our guys saw a lot of people injured in the Assembly Center after the hurricane,” Pierre, a native of Darrow between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, said. “They saw people dying or close to dying. Our guys were so emotional. That brought our team together. And it was a Louisiana team. It gave the guys something to play for. It was a unique season.”
JOHN BRADY BROUGHT LSU ITS LAST FINAL FOUR SO FAR
Getting to the Final Four meant a lot to Brady professionally as LSU athletic director Skip Bertman was pressured to fire him in recent seasons, but he stuck with him. But it meant a lot personally to Brady as well.
“New Orleans is one of my favorite places,” he said. “If our team can help in any way alleviate or motivate or restore pride and belief in Louisiana, then we’re humbled by that. And we want to do the best we can to represent that spirit.”
In the end, Bertman fired Brady less than two years after that Final Four season as the Tigers fell to 17-15 overall and 5-11 in the SEC the next season and to 8-13 and 1-6 in 2007-08 with forward Tasmin Mitchell missing virtually all of the season and center Chris Johnson missing seven games with injuries. Pierre replaced him as interim coach for the rest of the season. Brady was quickly hired as Arkansas State’s head coach and just retired after the 2015-16 season.
The season after Brady left, new coach Trent Johnson – with a healthy Mitchell and Johnson and other top players left by Brady like Marcus Thornton and Temple – won the SEC and reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament for a 27-8 and 13-3 finish. Knowing the score, so to speak, Johnson gave Brady a much-deserved championship ring.
Brady looked back on his treasured Final Four while at the Final Four this week in Houston.
“I had no idea how good that team would become,” he said. “When we made it to the Final Four, I was just so happy for our players and for the City of New Orleans. The timing of everything was pretty cool. Just about the whole team was from Louisiana, and it really felt like we were playing for Louisiana.”
Brady, who has long had an apartment in New Orleans, will now retire to the city.
“If Darrel Mitchell doesn’t make that shot against Texas A&M, none of this happens,” Brady said. “I don’t get credit for beating Duke. Garrett doesn’t get to stop Redick, and maybe doesn’t get his reputation as a great defender that got him to the NBA. Tyrus Thomas might not have become the fourth pick of the NBA Draft. I don’t sign the big contract (for $1 million). That one shot affected a lot of people’s lives and livelihood.”
JOHN BRADY: “I’ll Never Forget It”
Then Brady laughed.
“Maybe he should’ve missed it,” he said. “Then maybe Tyrus comes back, we keep winning, and I don’t get fired.”
But Mitchell swished it, Temple immediately began talking about stopping Redick, and the rest is Louisiana history.
“The coaching staff did a great job of preparing us for what we were going to see from Duke,” Lazare said this week. “It’s surreal that it’s been 10 years. That time went by real fast. We were a close group and still are, especially the guys from Louisiana.”
Everything ended quickly at that Final Four in Indianapolis a week later. No. 2 seed UCLA manhandled an LSU team that just didn’t seem there by 59-45 before the Bruins lost the national championship game to Florida.
“I think we were still second lining in Atlanta,” Brady laughs now. “We never quite got straight after that. But it was great. I’ll never forget it.”
Be the first to comment