October 30, 2009
The (Cannon) Shot Heard Around the World
Billy Cannon’s Halloween Rocket Run Propelled the LSU Star to Heisman Heaven
By Dan Borné
Public Address Announcer
Tiger Stadium, Baton Rouge
When former student and sports web maven Stephen Evans asked me to do a brief reflection piece on The Run I jumped at the opportunity, especially since earlier this week I had recorded the voiceovers that will highlight the Golden Anniversary of one of the greatest games in collegiate football history.
How could it be 50 years? One half century. Five decades since Billy Cannon took an Ole Miss punt on his 11 yard line and ran 89 yards to glory. And the same 50 years since The Stop, the fourth-and-goal-line-stand that iced the victory for the defending National Champion LSU Tigers.
I was not one of the 300,000 fans who say they were in Death Valley that humid October 31, 1959. (My sister-in-law, Beverly, actually was in the stadium, which held 68,000 back then.)
I was at a Halloween party for seventh graders at Carolyn Moore’s house in my native Thibodaux. The girls were huddled in one corner of her living room talking about us boys who had formed our own huddle around an ancient radio, one of those whose tubes glowed so brightly that it looked like it was from outer space.
Courting, dancing and spinning-the-bottle could wait. We had a whole lifetime ahead of us to do that. What mattered most that night was what mattered most any other fall Saturday night growing up on the Bayou Lafourche. We were listening to the LSU football.
The Run lit the place up, and even the girls did their best to cheer along with us. Later that evening, being ferried home in the back of a 1957 Chevy Bell Air, we listened to The Stop, the incredible goal line stand that snuffed out the Ole Miss drive inside the LSU two yard line, with Billy Cannon and Warren Rabb putting the pads to Rebel quarterbacks Doug Elmore.
It was only later, when we could view highlights of the game on our black-and-white television sets, that we could appreciate the magnitude of this signal event in LSU sports history.
In the grand scheme of things, it mattered less that the very next week the Tigers lost to Tennessee 14-13 and were no longer National Champions, a title the school would have to wait 45 years to re-capture, only to earn it yet again a mere four years later.
After all, national championships come and go, but in the psyche of Tiger fans, there will never be another Run, and there will never be another Stop. Taken together, I don’t think there are more revered plays in LSU’s great athletic tradition.
I have been blessed over the past near-quarter century to be the public address announcer in Tiger Stadium and I have had the privilege of meeting many of the LSU greats of the past. One of the most memorable encounters came last year when I spent over an hour interviewing Billy Cannon on the playing field of Death Valley.
It was one of those long-form, no questions in advance, cover the waterfront conversations that are so prevalent on the websites nowadays. We covered everything from his family’s move from Mississippi to Baton Rouge, to his weight training in high school under the fabled Alvin Roy, to his college, professional and dental careers, to his family, to the challenges he faced later in life and to remarkable work he is doing now at Angola State Prison.
What impressed me the most about Billy Cannon was his modesty, his humility, his self-deprecating humor and the constant praise he heaped on his teammates. He spoke of Max Fuglar like it was Max who had won the Heisman. He kidded about Warren Rabb, Tommy Davis and Johnny Robinson. He spoke of Johnny Vaught, the legendary Ole Miss coach with respect and reverence, and he never missed the opportunity to pass the credit for his success to someone else.
That said a lot to me about Billy Cannon—not Billy Cannon the athlete, but Billy Cannon the man — and it’s why I will watch the big video screens with a special interest this Saturday Night in Death Valley, when Tiger fans of all generations re-live the all hallowed history of The Run and The Stop.
And I will count it a great privilege to play a small part in celebrating the Golden Anniversary of such a 24-karat memory.
