Former LSU tackle recalls ’58 title team
Published 7:00 pm Thursday, January 9, 2020
Rick Hickman
So you were probably thinking that when LSU plays Clemson Monday night, the Tigers will be attempting to restart their national championship cycle where it all began and against the same team, huh?
You’d be half right.
It’s true. The 1958 Tigers won the school’s first national championship, capping the season in New Orleans with a 7-0 win over Clemson.
But that Sugar Bowl game wasn’t for the national championship.
LSU had already clinched that in New Orleans, in the same Tulane Stadium as the Sugar Bowl, but it was in the final regular-season game of the season against the Green Wave.
You think social media tends to roast the national championship process now? Just think if Twitter and its merry band of bloggers had been around back then.
The national championship then was decided strictly by the polls, two of them, The Associated Press (media) and the United Press International (coaches).
And neither could be bothered to do another poll after the handful of bowl games had run their course.
So LSU’s only trip to New Orleans that had any real effect on the national championship was a month earlier when it built heavily on 6-0 halftime lead to beat Tulane 62-0.
The following Monday both polls proclaimed the Tigers No. 1, as they’d been since beating Florida in the sixth game of the season. Never mind LSU still had a bowl game to play.
Dave McCarty knows.
The retired Lake Charles insurance agent was a tackle on that team under Paul Dietzel and later was on Charles McClendon’s LSU coaching staff for his entire 17-year run.
“I can’t tell you how many people that to this day still remember the 1958 football team,” he said. “I still get introduced as being on that team. It’s been a big part of my life.”
But that Sugar Bowl against Clemson wasn’t that big of a deal.
You just think most of the bowl games today get accused of being exhibitions.
Rick Hickman
“There wasn’t lots of publicity on the game like there is now,” McCarty remembered. “We stayed in Baton Rouge and practiced the whole week and (due to the holidays) there was nobody on that campus but the football team and the squirrels.”
This year LSU will arrive in New Orleans with great fanfare and police escorts on Friday, which itself is a little short notice for current bowls. But the College Football Playoff treats the semifinals more like traditional bowl games while allowing teams more home time for the championship.
On New Year’s Day of 1959, said McCarty, “We just got up the morning of the game and rode the bus to New Orleans, just like we did for the Tulane game.”
It wasn’t much of a game, he remembers, certainly not LSU’s finest hour in an 11-0 season led by the following year’s Heisman Trophy winner, Billy Cannon.
“We knew we were national champions and I don’t think we played really well,” McCarty said.
The Tulane game was the bigger deal — despite the final score, LSU was a seven-point favorite — as the Tigers knew they’d clinch the national championship in that game.
LSU even had a banquet in mid-December to honor its national championship before it played its final game.
“You’re the national champions and you want to win the game,” McCarty said of the bowl game. “But it wasn’t like we were as pumped up as we were for some other games.”
It showed with a sloppy performance against Clemson, which was the Atlantic Coast Conference champion at 8-2 going in under legendary coach Frank Howard.
The Tigers won with Cannon, better known for his running, throwing a touchdown pass to Mickey Mangham in the third quarter for the game’s lone touchdown.
“We just didn’t play real well that day,” McCarty said.
In fact, McCarty said he recently came across a fuzzy film of the game on the internet.
“Any resemblance to modern day football is purely coincidental,” he laughed. “Everybody was all bunched up, we didn’t have any wide receivers.
“The biggest difference in football now and when we played is you have to defend the entire football field sideline to sideline.”
He said fellow LSU assistant Doug Hamley (a former LaGrange High School head coach) used to joke that “you could throw a 10-cent dish rag over all 22 players.”
McCarty, an offensive line coach all those years under McClendon, used to joke that Charlie Mac only watched the offense to make sure none of his best 11 were on it.
“He would have adjusted,” McCarty said. “You have to adjust nowadays. When I was playing, if it was third down and more than three, we had to punt on third down. If you punted now on third down, they would fire you before the end of the game.”
Certainly nobody from that era could foresee this year’s Tigers and their 564 yards and 48.9 points per game.
“I have never seen a team at LSU, or any team, period, in college football, throw seven touchdown passes in the first half of a ballgame,” McCarty said of LSU’s recent 63-28 destruction of Oklahoma in the Peach Bowl. “It’s just a different game right now.”
