Game-day tradition dies with Mike VII

Published 6:36 am Sunday, January 22, 2017

It turns out that McNeese State unwittingly became the answer to a key LSU trivia question last week.

But will it need an asterisk?

Yes, sadly, the long-term aftershocks of not actually completing that 2015 McNeese-LSU season football opener in Tiger Stadium are still being felt today.

There was rain that night, as you recall, but mostly some pesky lightning forced them to clear the field early in the first quarter.

The teams never quite went back to go at it.

It wasn’t LSU’s finest hour when the suits in charge eventually decided not to finish the game in the wee hours or even to come back the next day, as McNeese was apparently agreeable to. It was officially canceled. That awkward decision-making could have been used against the Tigers while squabbling with Florida last season over weather issues.

But now there’s a real dilemma.

It turns out that that night — Sept. 5, 2015 — was the last time that Mike VI, LSU’s live mascot, visited the inside of his namesake stadium.

Mike VI, of course, died in October after a four-month battle with cancer, having never set foot in the place again.

There will be a Mike VII, LSU has announced, with the school going through proper channels to get one on campus by August in time to, according to the release, “join the incoming freshman class” of 2017.

I wasn’t aware that the new tiger would need to go through freshman orientation or registration, but it does alleviate fears that reduced funding of TOPS might be an obstacle to his higher education.

Note to Mike VII: the last day to drop classes is Aug. 30, 4:30 p.m., or you get a “W,” which, as opposed to the gridiron, in this case is not good.

But the real news in the announcement was that, henceforth, LSU’s live mascots will not enter Tiger Stadium for the ceremonial lap around the field before games.

This is not to blame on high ticket prices or the snarled postgame traffic or even the pain of watching an antiquated offense (which has been promised to be updated anyway).

In recent years Mike VI showed little interest in going, and his vet school handlers had long since stop forcing or even coercing him into the small travel cage for the trip across the street.

Now they’re not even going to check with him. That tradition is officially dead. No future tiger will go to the stadium again.

At least he’ll have hi-def TV.

So McNeese State, 2015, will go down as the last opposing team an LSU mascot ever witnessed with its own eyes.

A higher court may yet rule on this, but I say it counts as the trivia answer even though the visit produced no final score.

Keep in mind, the various Mikes never stuck around for the game anyway.

As spelled out in the contract, his duties were to intimidate during pregame before returning to his palatial estate. McNeese and LSU performed that pregame in good faith, so it counts.

Otherwise, the end of a somewhat storied tradition is no big deal.

The live tiger in Tiger Stadium was probably the most overrated aspect of the whole LSU game day/night experience anyway.

It was more fodder for opposing teams to marvel about in the tall-tale retelling than anything LSU fans seemed to really be paying attention to.

I recall years ago getting a call from a sportswriter who covered an unnamed Pac-12 school (Oregon State), which was due to play in Baton Rouge that week. Under the guise of warning his own readers, he wanted to know if all the wild tales he’d heard about the tiger in the stadium were true.

I asked him what he’d heard.

“Well, that they let the fool thing out and he runs loose all over the place,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s about right,” I answered nonchalantly. “Of course, before games they feed him well, so there have been very few incidents.”

Had him going there for a second.

In truth, Mike’s rare appearances in recent years weren’t really a big deal anyway, if they ever were.

He’s more comfortable in his luxurious digs, and it makes sense to leave him there. Game days is when his $3 million habitat gets its biggest crowds anyway, so it doesn’t make sense to have them staring at an empty expanse.

Fans get far more interaction out of that than staring through binoculars and trying to get them to focus through the screen of that travel cage down on the sideline.

And apparently it will be an even more palatial estate when Mike VII arrives.

LSU says there will be habitat renovations with an eye on getting the luxurious digs “accredited as a tiger sanctuary.”

What more that tiger mansion could possibly need to get accredited I haven’t a clue.

A hot tub, maybe, perhaps a mini-fridge or a few extra throw pillows.

It already has room service and a waterfall.

A Google search wasn’t much help, although I did come across something about getting your backyard certified as a wildlife habitat.

A tiger? In your backyard?

No, it turns out that DIY project was only good for your basic robins and butterflies, maybe a particularly rambunctious squirrel.

But it sounds like LSU has it figured out.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com