Anthology of Louisiana’s most memorable moments in sports

Published 8:05 am Wednesday, February 24, 2016

For years I’d heard legendary New Orleans sports columnist Peter Finney tell the story about how he and some other leaders of the New Orleans media decided one Saints game to get a head start on the postgame press box elevator — and thus he did not personally eyeball Tom Dempsey’s famous NFL-record 63-yard field goal to beat the Detroit Lions in 1970.

The tale saved me a great embarrassment in Omaha, Nebraska, one year for the College World Series.

After LSU made the second out in the bottom of the ninth one Saturday, I, too, decided to maybe beat the rush down.

I took a couple of steps toward the press box elevators … before Finney’s Dempsey story, for some odd reason, jumped into my head.

It wasn’t a tight deadline day anyway so, what the hey?, I turned around and sat back down in my press box seat in old Rosenblatt Stadium …

And Warren Morris hit the next pitch out of the park for the most famous home run in college baseball history.

Thank you, Pete.

In fact, I did thank Finney the next time I saw him, and got the familiar catch phrase.

“Ohhhhh, ba-beeeee,” he cackled. “Never lived down missing that kick.”

So it was a joy this week to come across the original column that Finney wrote of his missing out on an eyewitness account the Dempsey field goal.

It and so much more and are all there in a new book, published by the LSU Press, out this week: “The Best Of Peter Finney, Legendary New Orleans Sportswriter.”

Funny, but one long-ago Finney column that always stuck out for me was missing from the book.

I was a little disappointed, in fact, not to find the “Suicide Note from New Orleans,” which as I recall carried the dateline “Huey Long Bridge” and detailed the anguish of a city after yet another unexplainable loss to the Atlanta Falcons in the late 1970s.

But that only tells you what a daunting task it was to narrow an estimated 15,000 columns (12 million words, give or take an adjective) down to the top 75 columns.

Finney, who’s 88 years old, began his newspaper career while a student at Loyola in 1945.

He was a regular in the press box — bright-eyed, chipper, ever-polite and relevant as ever — as recently as three years ago, as eager to get into Les Miles’ head as he once was with Paul Dietzel.

Finney is New Orleans to the core. He grew up in the French Quarter, one block from St. Louis Cathedral, even moved back there after raising the last of his six children.

One of them, Peter Jr., who followed his father into sports journalism, took on the labor of love of whittling a legendary life’s work into one 252-page book.

“My dad couldn’t beat up your dad,” Pete Jr. writes in the introduction. “But he surely could out-metaphor him.”

The son’s introduction alone, in fact, is worth the price ($29.95) of the book, especially when he recalls some of his dad’s escapades with his best friend, the late Buddy Diliberto, of Saints postgame radio fame.

The book chose to hit the highlights.

Finney Sr., still jokes that, no, he wasn’t ringside for the 1892 “Gentleman” Jim Corbett vs. John L. Sullivan heavyweight bout at the Olympic Club on Royal Street that basically invented modern boxing in the USA.

But he witnessed and, more importantly, chronicled most of the state’s illustrious sports history from the second half of the 20th century to the present.

And it’s all here in the book. Every stylish word artfully crafted with just enough detachment to stay credible, as often as not with a light dose of humor.

The columns still hold up as well as they must have when readers of the States-Item and Times-Picayune got his take fresh the next day. But, just as entertaining for the book’s purposes, Pete Sr., sets the stage for all 75 of these columns with a foreword of entertaining background stories or a retrospective on the event or sports figure involved.

It was probably my favorite part.

Best I could tell, the earliest column was on Billy Cannon’s famous 1959 LSU punt return. No, Pete didn’t get on the elevator early for that one — in fact, the next day he went to Cannon’s apartment for an interview that resulted in an almost a step-by-step account of the most famous sports play in Louisiana history.

Finney was there on “All Saints Day” when New Orleans joined the NFL, and he was there in Miami to cover a Super Bowl victory he thought he’d never see.

The Suicide Note isn’t there, but Finney was probably at his best jabbing at the local franchise — and summing up the feeling of his readers — during its many “Aints” periods.

Another ugly loss, which was the woebegone Tampa Bays Bucs’ first victory in history, consoles Saints fans that the disaster wasn’t as bad as the Johnstown flood, the Hindenburg, the Titanic or Little Big Horn.”

When Mike Ditka took a nonchalent poke at coaching the Saints, his wife Diana created a stir when she complained in a national magazine story that she had to “cover my nose” on a walk down Bourbon Street, Finney pointed out in one entertaining column that Saints fans had to do the same thing watching her husband’s team in the Superdome.

It was all part of making a point that the Ditka’s “will always be Chicago folks who can’t wait to get home.”

On and on.

It’s well worth a read. All 75 of them.

Simply, “The Best of Peter Finney” is the best this state has to offer.

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

“German Propaganda and U.S. Neutrality in World War I” (background graphic by MGNonline)