The Hot Seat by Ben Mathis-Lilley

Author:Ben Mathis-Lilley [Mathis-Lilley, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

I’d seen Hanagriff the previous morning, when he was doing a radio show at a restaurant called Ruffino’s. True to what I had come to think of as Louisiana form, it was in a nondescript ranch building on a haphazardly zoned state road, but when you stepped inside, you entered a different and better world: black-and-white tile, red carpet, dark wood, the kind of decor that organically generates Frank Sinatra songs. I wanted to move in and live there. Hanagriff was broadcasting from the bar with a cohost, a producer, and a representative of one of the show’s advertisers, Supreme Rice. He was chatty between commercial breaks and had been kind to invite me, but the show was gambling focused, as more and more sports coverage is these days, which I find excruciatingly boring. Long conversations about things like what Colorado State’s injury report might mean for its chances to score more than such and such number of points against New Mexico. Who cares? I talked to the Supreme Rice rep, who looked like a younger version of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, a well-built guy with a haircut that you might call a power mullet.

Like everyone, he thought LSU was going to lose to Florida. “Max Johnson’s gonna be good,” he said about the starting quarterback. “But they don’t have anyone blocking for him. And they can’t run the ball for shit.” I asked him where Orgeron had gone wrong. “He lost it when they were doing the social justice stuff and he didn’t walk with ’em,” he said.

That was something. I had seen this theory on Tiger Rant as well. In August 2020, Orgeron had appeared on Fox News and told a host, “I love President Trump.” He had not previously been known for being politically opinionated, and he had actually appeared at a fundraiser for Democratic Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards. So maybe he was, in part, trying to be a normal, go-along-to-get-along authority figure. But Trump was not a normal president. George Floyd had been murdered by a police officer in Minnesota just a few months earlier, and Trump’s administration had ordered the tear-gassing of a subsequent protest outside the White House. Two weeks after Orgeron’s Fox appearance, a number of Black players marched from the football building to the university administration building. Orgeron—unlike coaches such as Saban at Alabama and Harbaugh at Michigan, who joined their players in similar protests—was not present until the players called and asked him to meet with them after the march.

That this was perceived as Orgeron’s screw-up turned my head around given the attitudes that most white Louisianans, according to polling, hold about Black Lives Matter protests. (“Louisiana has a little more level of racial animosity or conservatism, I guess if you want to put it that way, racial conservatism,” I had said in raising the issue with the pseudonymous PodKatt, who grew up in south Louisiana and lives about an hour from Baton Rouge. “You don’t have to be delicate about it, man,” he said.

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