Cannon’s legacy endures

Published 10:09 pm Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Scooter Hobbs

You often have to wonder what would have been different if Billy Cannon hadn’t always been so youthfully defiant.

It wasn’t the first time — and wouldn’t be the last — that a young Cannon decided that rules were for others.

So, what if he’d followed LSU coach Paul Dietzel’s strict-standing order never to field a punt inside the 15-yard line?

For sure, the 89-yard punt return never happens.

Would LSU have later found a way to beat Ole Miss that night anyway? By all eyewitness accounts, the Rebels dominated the game except for those 89 yards that Cannon dodged and twisted his way through.

Would Cannon have gone on to win the Heisman Trophy that he basically clinched that night?

Probably so. When he picked up the hardware in New York, it was one of the biggest landslides in the trophy’s history. Cannon had more votes than the next eight contenders combined.

But does LSU go on to win the national championship and …

No, wait. Contrary to popular belief, that happened the year before, led by Cannon, but with no dramatic punt returns.

After the punt return, LSU lost the next week at Tennessee, 14-13, when Cannon was ruled short on a 2-point conversion run that, until the day he died Sunday at the age of 80, he insisted that he scored on with plenty to spare.

The Punt Return didn’t win squat for LSU that year.

But still. That was a heckuva play, even without considering the circumstances — the eyes of the college football world (ears, anyway, because it was radio only) were on Tiger Stadium that night similar to the LSU game in Tuscaloosa in 2011 when the Tigers and Alabama played another Game of the Century.

Perhaps no sporting icon, particularly one who had so many highlights to choose from, is so identified with one single play.

Almost 60 years later, it flickers on as one of college football’s defining moments, not just in Louisiana — where the word “Halloween” brings to mind a foggy night in Tiger Stadium as much as trick-or-treat — but certainly throughout the South.

Cannon was a freak of nature far ahead of his time. His 6-foot-1, 215-pound frame doesn’t sound like much these days.

But Cannon was the fastest man in the SEC — he won the 100-yard dash in the conference track meet — yet he also threw the shot put and he was bigger than all but one of his LSU offensive linemen.

He was later named the SEC Back of the Decade.

Yet it was one play that defined southern college football of the crew-cut, bobby-socks era.

Still does.

I was reading this week when Cannon later said that it was several years afterwards before he watched The Punt Return. When he did, he noticed something was off-kilter with his recollection.

Then it hit him.

The way he recalled it, the whole thing had unfolded in living color.

Maybe it did. Probably so. I guess LSU’s helmets were yellow that night. Ole Miss was probably in baby blue helmets.

Maybe if you were there.

But not for the rest of us. The memory, the moment — that play —will always be in black and white, somewhat grainy and slightly blurry at key points.

And maybe that’s the way it should be.

It was a different time. For those of us too young to remember it, it seems like the 1950s were all in black and white.

Color didn’t come to the world until along about the 1960s.

It only points out how long the legend has endured to see The Punt Return framed in the shades of the day.

Watch it even now and you don’t have to look up the year — it just looks like Eisenhower was probably president then.

Yet it remains the play that captures the imagination, even to those whose parents weren’t born when it happened.

It will always be Cannon’s legacy.

Well, that and the counterfeit thing.

Yes, there was that.

It wasn’t his finest hour when the feds arrested him as part of ring churning out bogus $100 bills, sending shockwaves through a state that still had him on a pedestal.

It turned out he was far too human.

His return from disgrace, however, might have been as amazing and impressive as The Punt Return.

It’s common today to hear athletes gone sideways with the law talk about “mistakes in judgment” and how they’ll “learn from this.”

They could all take lessons from Cannon.

He served his two-plus-year prison term without complaint or excuse ­— even with self-deprecating references to what bumbling criminals he and his bunch were — getting out early as a model prisoner. Then he kept a low profile in the Baton Rouge area for several years.

He didn’t force the issue.

But gradually he started showing up at different LSU events. People got to know him again, better, perhaps, than they had before.

He especially liked being around LSU players who, though 60 years younger, knew all about him.

The ones who now were a generation removed from the prison term.

It’s so fitting that, as he is laid to rest today, the burning memory of him is still in black and white. It is the legacy not of the fake money but of that real, very real, punt return.

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

Billy Cannon, shown in 1958, led the LSU Tigers to a national championship that year.

Associated Press