Itchin’ for a quick road trip, I flew down to Baton Rouge, LA Wednesday to see my Missouri Tigers play LSU at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center.

This is Mizzou’s first season in the Southeastern Conference.  As is life in any of the power conferences, Missouri is finding it rough going on the road.  Mizzou got blown out in its first two conference road tests at Ole Miss and Florida and came up three points short at LSU Wednesday night.

The common theme in all three road losses to open the league schedule was a horrendous lack of energy in each of the game’s opening ten to twenty minutes.  Against LSU, Mizzou was badly outhustled for most the first half despite being four point favorites in the game.

Missouri point guard Phil “Flip” Pressey (pictured above) had difficulty locating open teammates.  He took it upon himself in the second half to rally his team despite stagnancy around him when Mizzou had the ball.  Pressey’s streak to the hoop when the Tigers go into fast break mode is unstoppable.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t get his shots to fall from downtown.  Flip missed all but one of nine trey attempts including a shot to tie with seven seconds left in the game.

The final was 73-70 LSU.  Pressey finished with 25.  He’s an electric performer but should have deferred to others on some of the sequences that ended with Flip hoisting from deep with a loaded shot clock.  The NBA seems possible for a guy with Flip’s speed.  He owns pro moves to the hoop and is a maestro dishing on the set play.  Working against his NBA aspirations is an unreliable outside shot and his 5-11, 175 pound frame.

Attendance was 8804.  Capacity at the Maravich Center is 13,215.  A few hundred LSU students in a section behind one of the baskets was the only real sign of life in the building.

I bought a $15 ticket at the box office an hour before tip-off.  Beer was not available unless you had access to a high-roller space near the floor.

Earlier in the day, I wandered the campus.  The biggest knock on the enclosed layout is the intrusion of vehicular traffic throughout.  Students are forced to traverse busy roadways between classes.  Several ongoing construction projects were noisy and messy.  Many walkways were unkempt or in a state of disrepair.

Old trees with massive trunks and gorgeous classroom buildings can be found near the Quad (pictured above) and the student body emits energy and exuberance.

The Maravich Center is located directly across the street from LSU’s massive football stadium.  Both inside and out, the Maravich Center (referred to by the locals at “The P-Mac”) reminded me of the shape and size of Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois.

I opposed Missouri’s move to the SEC.  The far-flung, deep south college towns that comprise the SEC aren’t easily reachable from Columbia, MO.  Mizzou’s football and basketball teams will ride chartered airplanes to small, non-commercial airstrips like those near Oxford and Tuscaloosa.  That’s great.  But what about the volleyball team?  Or wrestling team?  That’s a lot of highway to cover for student athletes who find themselves in a league based primarily in a region that’s half a country away.  Mizzou’s move to the SEC tilts the mission of the University’s athletic program into more of a big-money, big-stakes endeavor.  I realize the chaos of conference re-alignment opened up an opportunity viewed as too good to pass up by university leaders who see a net gain on the revenue side.  But college sports is more than just football and basketball.  At a school like Mizzou, athletics should emphasize regional competition to allow participants from all sports the chance to get back to campus the day after the game without extreme travel itineraries.

All that said, Mizzou’s entry to a league steeped in excellence and tradition gives me a good excuse to visit what for me is a whole new world of college sports venues.  Missouri is my alma mater.  For four years in the mid-eighties, I was at every home football game and basketball game except for those during winter break.  I made it to Norman, Boulder, Lawrence, Lincoln and Ames.  The Big Eight became the Big 12 and now here we are.

What’s done is done.  The Mizzou football team got roughed up its first season playing the big boys.  It’ll take a long time and likely some deals with the devil for Mizzou football to dream about competing at the top of the SEC.  Basketball is a different story.  The one and done star players of the college hoops game make for parity – even in a league that includes the sport’s royalty Kentucky and Florida.

I suppose the most pressing question facing Mizzou basketball is whether the University wants to retain the services of head coach Frank Haith long term.  A Yahoo Sports story published last year included significant detailed information closely linking Haith to scumbag booster Nevin Shapiro during Haith’s tenure as head coach at the University of Miami.

Mizzou says it didn’t know about Haith’s close interaction with Shapiro (and/or the booster’s fast and loose bribery schemes aimed at recruits) at Miami when it hired him.  Results from a NCAA investigation of Haith and Miami’s athletic department were on the brink of putting Haith in the frying pan until it was revealed last week the probe was compromised by a technicality.

Haith can recruit with the best of them.  His demeanor is well-suited to the grind of a big program although he mind-cramped in a bad way during his team’s loss to Norfolk State in the Big Dance last March.  Haith deserves credit for being a steady, composed public presence during the university’s transition to a new conference.  Perhaps Haith can put his chumminess with Shapiro behind him.  Mizzou has said it will wait to pass judgment on their second-year head coach until the NCAA probe is complete.  Missouri athletic director Mike Alden has put out more pro-Haith signals since the Shapiro news broke than negative ones.

All I need to know about Haith is that he repeatedly and recklessly exchanged text-messages with a guy so toxic, he couldn’t have been fully committed to avoiding taint.  I’d cut ties with Haith as soon as feasible.

I stayed at the Cook Hotel on the eastern edge of the LSU campus.  There’s not a single public transit option at Baton Rouge’s small airport so I took a taxi both ways.  The one-way fare with a healthy tip was 30 bucks.  The Cook offers a free “southern style” breakfast in the Shaquille O’Neal room every morning but my 6 AM flight out of town Thursday forced me to miss it.  I’d recommend the Cook if I was visiting LSU for a sporting event.  The rooms are huge, clean and quiet.

The only substantial meal I had in Baton Rouge during my sixteen hours in town came at Louie’s Cafe near the University’s north gates.  The popular 24-hour diner was filled with students and faculty members when I arrived for an early lunch.  I had the catfish po-boy and an order of the hash browns.  Both were excellent.  The fish was fresh, flavorful.  The hash browns were heavily seasoned and mixed with a healthy dose of fried onions.  The coffee was excellent.

The highway between LSU’s campus and the airport is lined with evidence of the region’s heavy involvement with chemical production and oil refining industries.  My cab driver Ed told me he had worked at a chemical plant in his hometown of Baton Rouge for 16 years.  He abruptly quit in mid-career he said because co-workers were “dropping” from ill effects of the chemicals they were exposed to.  “I was making $25 an hour.  That was a good wage.  But I had my health to worry about,” he said.

Ed took a lower-paying job with the public school system and retired a few years ago to drive a taxi.  As he drove confidently past factory after factory speckled with tens of thousands of tiny white lights, smoke billowed from hundreds of smoke stacks.  He gazed over at the Exxon (now Exxon-Mobil) facility he used to punch a clock at and smiled.  “God told me it was time.  He said it was time.  I know I made the right decision.”

The journey back to New York on Thursday included two notable episodes.
(1).   The 50-seat regional jet that left the gate in Baton Rouge a few minutes before 6 AM was covered in frost.  The captain informed some 40 customers on board that a de-icing truck would spray glycol on the plane before taking off for Houston.  A half-hour went by and the captain returned to the public address system.  He said the ground handler contracted to perform such a duty didn’t have a working de-icing truck and the only other de-icing truck at the airport had a dead battery.  After another hour of waiting, a now-exasperated captain said he was going back to the gate to allow the frost to melt in the natural sunlight.  When a similarly sized regional jet with the same departure time could be seen taking off without deicing, it prompted some customers to question the necessity of de-icing on our plane.  This seemed to enrage the captain.  He issued a wandering, wordy statement about safety and proceeded to blast the fact ground support personnel at Baton Rouge were “outsourced.”.  A little more than two and a half hours after scheduled departure time, passengers re-boarded and were on their way.  Most interesting to me about the whole thing was the conduct of some customers who seemed more interested in making their connection than putting their full trust in the hands of the guy flying the plane.

(2).  With winds howling straight out of the west, the 737-700 I rode bound for LaGuardia made a memorable landing on runway 31.  Gusting 40 knots at 260 degrees on the compass, the plane’s left wing got pushed hard in the upward direction.  It forced the experienced driver to compensate the other way which created some thrills just a few hundreds yards above Flushing Bay.  It’s the first time in a long time I can recall the cabin erupting in applause when the craft screeched to a stop and turned onto the taxi-way.