There he stood.
Or rather, there he dunked.
Frozen in bronze, beside a row of palm trees, in 40-degree weather.
We're not sure if the massive sculpture of Shaquille O'Neal at LSU's new basketball practice facility is larger than life or not. Shaq himself is larger than life. So, let's settle for large as life.
What's large about life at the moment is the opportunity to get out of the cold and be bathed in purple and gold in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. My wife and I pass Shaquille O'Neal, the warrior perpetually dunking in front of that gleaming, multimillion-dollar practice facility – The House that Shaq Built in front of The House that Pete Built.
To our left, a lonely, blond brick structure is scarcely noticed by the passers-by huddled in the cold. It's a classical natatorium where my grandmother swam. The moonlight and gnarled, live oak branches nearby soften the effect, but the natatorium is dying a slow death, neglected as a lesser muse on a campus focused on the demigods of spectator sports.
We hurry into the basketball arena that resembles a hulking flying saucer. Not long ago, an Arkansas sportswriter opined that the modernist PMAC is a blight among SEC basketball arenas, a goofy anachronism that ought to go the way of the wrecking ball. I look at the natatorium, smile and think of Arkansas's recent lean years of basketball. Not much better than our own. I smile again at the thought of beating the pigskin Razorbacks 41-17 on Thanksgiving weekend and think: Not much good comes from Hogs, save for bacon and Carl Sandburg.
Inside, we order hot dogs and Coke Zeros (why do we keep drinking these things, because they're there?); popcorn comes later. The PMAC doesn't fill up like the old days. Basketball crowds seem to run in inverse proportion here to the zenith of LSU football fortunes. But Pete Maravich would be proud of the new crop. Johnny O'Bryant (The Third! as arena announcer Dan Borne likes to remind us) is a dunking machine in dreadlocks, only a few inches shorter than Shaq. Anthony Hickey, a ballhandling wizard in dreadlocks, is a foot shorter but a bundle of basketball talent plucked, somehow, by LSU Coach Trent Johnson after a Mr. Kentucky Basketball season. Both players are freshmen, and the future bounces brightly.
Johnson's team tonight is playing his alma mater, Boise State, and the coach in his pregame banter dismisses new school-old school rivalries as "nonsense." We take him at his word. It has been, after all, 33 years since Johnson donned the blue-and-burnt orange in Boise.
On the court, much remains the same this season. Mike the Tiger dances clumsily beside the glitzy, graceful Tiger Girls. But Mike manages to outshine the competition. He wears a newfangled, blinking wreath of purple-and-gold lights around his belly. His Tiger costume is topped by a purple Santa suit trimmed in gold fringe. He is the Liberace of the hardwood.
Much also continues to change. The hip-hop music here seems foreign and fantastic to us baby boomers, except on occasions when a few measures of familiar yuletide melodies are sampled in on this Saturday, a fortnight before Christmas. For us old fogeys, the Tiger Band even blends in some brassy versions of "Sweet Caroline," "Shake Your Booty" and "Jungle Boogie" -- the latter two scandalous in their day but seeming tame beside the new standards.
Other things are changing and yet are not changed. In a new media enclave at one end of the court, venerable sports editor Butch Muir of The Advocate settles into a perch to scout the Tigers. His game writer sits a couple of rows below him. From our purple seats up in the crowd, we spot former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown yakking to a confidant. Brown, even now, I can see as an enthusiastic new head coach in the summer of '72 walking across the PMAC with a recruit, coaxing him to play basketball here before the first of a thousand games since.
Our family moved out of state that summer, and would move again. And again. And again. But here the PMAC still sits, fresher and newer than I remember from the past and filled with dazzling new stars and a 7-foot mountain boy from Utah, by way of Iowa.
We lead such vagabond lives these days, plowing through transitory fields, that finding anything as consistent as a 40-minute game, still played on a wooden court, still celebrated by zany students, and still attended by dowagers in gaudy, tiger-striped scarfs seems eternally satisfying.
And always, there's the game. This one began rather badly, LSU down 22-17 late in a tedious first half. Yet the Tigers would break through in the final stanza, outscoring the boys from Idaho 47-23 down the stretch. Speaking of permanency, I spy the venerable basketball sports information director, Kent Lowe, fiercely clutching something in the middle of the court after the win. A microphone, perhaps? Something for an immediate Trent Johnson interview at center court? I pull out my binoculars to see better, and laugh: The charcoal object he grips like a scepter is some oversized mobile phone with a composite antenna. Change ...
Waiting outside the restroom for my wife, I gaze at the metal plaques on the concourse Wall of Fame. There dribbles LSU's first basketball All-America, Sparky Wade. Nearby is his coach, the hat-wearing Harry Rabenhorst. We step outside, briskly descend the steps from the flying saucer and there he remains: Shaq, the perpetual dunking machine, frozen in the moonlight. This season, we will see him again and again, and yet we will never see that again. Not that move. Not that man.
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