The Last Season by Stuart Stevens

Author:Stuart Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

My mother’s family was from Louisiana. Her mother had been born and raised outside Shreveport on the Rough and Ready Plantation. At eighteen, she ran away with the clarinet player from a band playing at a debutante party. It was not fated to be one of those happily ever after marriages, but it lasted long enough for my mother to be born. The clarinet player was mostly a stranger to my mother until later in life when they both ended up living in Jackson. He ran a music store, and I worked there off and on in high school and loved the time I got to spend with him. He was a Kelly, pure Irish, and a wonderful man.

My grandmother seemed to like marrying, if not being married, and kept at it through five different marriages. She would note, always with a twinkling smile, that she never married the same man twice, though she did marry cousins with the same last name. This proved to be a boon with monograms. Her maiden name was Mary Land. She loved to fish, hunt, and cook and wrote about all three. She was the first female member of the Louisiana Sports Writers Association and wrote a classic of southern eating, Louisiana Cookery. As a kid, I wasn’t really aware of her writing, but I loved to go fishing with her and listen to her stories of living in Mexico. For a while, she had a lion cub as a pet; that ended predictably when it mauled some overly friendly visitor. She drove a Jaguar XK-E, until the afternoon she flipped it into a bayou during a Louisiana storm. A Good Samaritan dragged her half-drowned from under the ruined car. She had respiratory problems the rest of her life.

My mother was a student at LSU when she transferred to Ole Miss to “colonize” a new chapter of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. It was both an adventure and a paying job. Her mother was between husbands and “none of them as rich as they should’ve been,” as my grandmother would joke.

Before she got on a train to Oxford, my mother’s only knowledge of Mississippi was the Gulf Coast, which is like knowing Boston through Cape Cod. Compared with the sophistication of New Orleans, where she had gone to the McGehee School, it must have felt like an exotic Peace Corps posting.

Growing up in a family with LSU and Ole Miss ties, I assumed that the intense rivalry between the schools was a peculiarity of ours, a family feud being acted out in Oxford, Baton Rouge, and Jackson for our benefit. It was only later that I realized that the Ole Miss–LSU football rivalry started in 1894.

When I had first talked to my dad about spending a season going to games together, he had immediately homed in on the rivalry. “When’s the LSU game?” he asked. “That will be the biggest. That will be the biggest.” He was right. Now the LSU game was six

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