LSU tightens Purple Curtain on fans, media

Published 6:00 pm Wednesday, August 16, 2017

The other day I stumbled across a new word, although in this case using the word “stumbled” is probably not doing justice to the severity of the head-on collision, which, after much staggering and slipping, ended with an awkward belly flop into the dictionary.

The new acquaintance is a $10 word normally reserved for philosophical exchanges between dangerous intellectuals, mostly those with more college degrees than the Nobel Prize selection committee.

There are unconfirmed reports that this word is often effective as the final dagger dropped into psychological debates, generally when staring though a whiff of pipe smoke obscuring a furrowed brow and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched at the end of a very learned and probably pointed nose.

By these competitive measures it is a fairly short word, but is often an excellent counterpunch to catch a distinguished opponent off guard, mainly because it doesn’t end in “tion.”

Anyway, the word is … “aporetic.”

Don’t nod your head like you know it. I’ll save you the Google search.

In layman’s terms — although it rarely comes up in such — it means to be “doubtful,” or, in extreme cases, “skeptical.”

Both are fine words in their own right, suitable for most any occasion, including mixed company.

But after the chance encounter with my new best word — and also after being released, with only flesh wounds, by the medical staff — I just knew it was a word that was long overdue in being introduced to sports fans.

I knew it would soon make an appearance here.

I just didn’t know it would be so soon.

Then came the official announcement, which most intellectuals like us had already figured out, that LSU was canceling its annual Fan Day festivities in advance of the football season.

The republic will likely survive.

Hopefully, little T-Roy wasn’t counting all summer on getting Derrius Guice’s autograph. Reportedly the school is exploring other options in distributing the schedule posters.

But then came the official explanation, and it was a cropper.

LSU said, by golly, that it had no facility available for such an affair.

Wait a minute.

LSU had no what?

Come on, Tigers, you can do better than that.

There’s got to be somewhere in that vast athletic complex to do it.

The athletic department has spent a crazy-cajillion dollars in recent years on just about everything athletic related, some of it almost essential.

You’re telling us that, after all of that Tiger Athletic Foundation money hard at work, there’s nowhere on campus that can handle a few thousand LSU fans and 100 football players?

The alternate plan, the school says, now is to have Fan Day as part of the spring football game. Which may be just another ploy in duping fans to go to the even more meaningless spring game, which has always been a tough and frustrating sell for the program.

So, it turns out that I am positively aporetic over this development, which doesn’t mean that I have developed an eating disorder.

Tiger Stadium is out, they say, due to the dicey nature of Louisiana’s August weather patterns.

Well, go ahead, accuse me of being overly aporetic, which doesn’t mean I’ve taken to singing with the Three Tenors.

But this is not about Fan Day, at least not per se.

Caught in the crossfire of calling off Fan Day was also the traditional LSU Media Day. It won’t happen either. Call it the collateral damage.

Normally media day takes place the same day as Fan Day, usually going off without serious incident before players and staff head over to meet the zealots.

So we’re to believe there’s no place for it either?

I know for a fact that Media Day will fit in Tiger football’s very own indoor facility. I know this because it always has, and the joint is obviously available because the Tigers haven’t missed a beat practicing even though it has rained Razorbacks and War Eagles almost every day this August.

But it was enough of an excuse to kill two birds with one stone for an August that is being staged in unusually tight security even by LSU’s standards.

Honestly, you wonder if there’s not more than football going on back there. The atom has already been split, so that’s out.

Yet never have the Tigers been so secretive about what’s going on.

So forget aporetic. In less intellectual, but far more plain-spoken terms, I’m calling B.S. on this one.

Bottom line: Whatever LSU is doing football-wise behind those closed doors better be good.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.com