You Can Reschedule Football. Not a Hurricane. But The Memories Linger.
Back in the day when Steve Spurrier started beating LSU in Baton Rouge (UAA Archive photo)
Bad weather in Tuscaloosa threatens big SEC game. But The Swamp?
By Buddy Martin
In the Southeastern Conference, we like to think we can handle just about anything.
Hostile crowds. Bad officiating. A fourth-and-one with the season on the line.
Hurricanes are another matter. They don’t care about your national ranking, your kickoff time or how hard it is to find a hotel room in Baton Rouge. The initial forecast for Tuscaloosa and the Georgia-Alabama mega-game was looking so grim that the was some talk of moving it to Atlanta (although doubtful).
Fans can sometimes be seriously imperiled. I learned that in 1964, with Joni beside me in a little Chevy and both of us wondering whether we’d ever make it home.
Hurricane Hilda was bearing down on Louisiana, forcing the postponement of Florida’s October 3 game at LSU. Football could wait.
Unfortunately, I decided we couldn’t.
We had gotten caught in New Orleans and tried to drive back to Florida just as the hurricane was hitting. Let me offer my assessment of that decision, with the benefit of more than six decades of hindsight:
Not my finest hour.
There were tornadoes all around us as we drove through the bayous. We white-knuckled it toward Pensacola, trying to get ourselves and that little Chevy out of harm’s way.
I remember getting across one bridge and later learning it had washed out about 30 minutes behind us.
Thirty minutes.
That’s not much of a cushion between a story you tell for the rest of your life and one you never get to tell.
We finally found a room in Pensacola. After a good night’s sleep, we made it home Sunday with a promise: Never again would we try to outrun a hurricane.
Some lessons don’t require a refresher course.
Meanwhile, back in New Orleans, somebody else was having a considerably better time.
Our crowd had been staying at the Roosevelt Hotel, including Tom McEwen of the Tampa Tribune and Red Mitchum, the Ocala humorist who could find an audience almost anywhere.
Even during a hurricane.
Red had called his wife and assured her he was battening down the hatches. He would be safe. He would have a quiet night.
Then he found the hotel bar at the Roosevelt.
It was lit by candles, and the Hilda refugees gathered there were about to get something they hadn’t booked with their rooms: a Red Mitchum performance.
Red sang, made up songs and strummed a matchbook as though it were a guitar. The storm had supplied the audience. Red supplied the entertainment.
Unfortunately for Red, one member of that audience was a newspaper columnist.
McEwen wrote about the festivities in the Tribune — the singing, the improvised songs, the matchbook strumming and the fellow who had entertained the bar for much of the night.
When Red returned to Ocala, his wife had left McEwen’s column on his dresser. The offending passage was circled in red.
Alongside it was a note:
“Quiet night in New Orleans?”
Hilda wasn’t the only storm somebody had to face that weekend.
The football game eventually was played December 5, with Florida returning to Baton Rouge for its regular-season finale.
By then, Louisiana had found an entirely different way to make us uncomfortable.
I remember temperatures somewhere in the twenties. We Florida writers had packed our usual summer suits, apparently believing December was merely October with a different page on the calendar.
Our teeth chattered. Some of the Gator media wound up wearing LSU jerseys because that was what they could find to keep warm.
I didn’t get one.
There are moments when journalistic independence is overrated.
In my memory, it was so cold the mimeograph machine used to produce the game statistics froze up. We couldn’t even get the numbers.
A press box full of frozen sportswriters and no statistics. Try explaining that one to the desk.
It remains one of the coldest nights I’ve ever spent at a football game.
Steve Spurrier and the Gators, however, seemed considerably less bothered.
Florida’s sophomore quarterback helped the unranked Gators beat seventh-ranked LSU, 20–6, in Tiger Stadium. At night, no less.
For Florida, a game postponed by a hurricane became a December upset worth remembering.
Fortunately, it looks like we won’t have to deal with anything more than maybe some rain this Saturday at the Swamp for homecoming. Here’s the forecast:
Gainesville, Florida on Saturday afternoon will experience scattered thunderstorms and thunderstorms with a high temperature of 83°F, a peak heat index feeling up to 92°F, and a 55% to 65% chance of rain.
For me, that 1964 score is only part of the story.
I remember the bayous. The steering wheel. Joni beside me. That bridge and the precious half-hour that separated us from whatever might have happened next.
I remember shivering in Baton Rouge, too, and Red discovering that a hurricane could interrupt a football weekend but couldn’t keep a good entertainer quiet.
Or keep a columnist from writing about him.
We love our football down here. Sometimes enough to make questionable travel plans and pack summer suits for winter.
But the promise Joni and I made in Pensacola still stands after six-plus decades.
Let the game wait.
Get home alive.
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