Cannon’s run ingrained in football lore (10/30)

Posted October 29, 2009 at 11:32 pm
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By SCOOTER HOBBS
AMERICAN PRESS

A half-century after unquestionably the most famous play in LSU football history, maybe in the history of football in the South, Billy Cannon can’t imagine what he could add to it.

But LSU will honor Cannon Saturday night at the Tulane game, 50 years to the day that he broke head coach Paul Dietzel’s rule against fielding punts inside the 15-yard line and promptly ran through a half-dozen or more Ole Miss tacklers and into SEC lore with a stunning 89-yard punt return.

“I had to make them promise that there would be no reenactment because I’ve seen some of our guys and I don’t think any of them could finish it,” Cannon said.

Maybe he’s just speaking for them.

Cannon is 72 years old now, and that All-American crew cut is long gone, grayed and fuzzy, but the thick, broad-shouldered frame that made him a freak of nature in 1959 — at 210 pounds he was bigger than all but one his linemen and ran the 100-yard dash in 9.4 seconds — still looks fit enough to have a go at today’s players.

“I think I could play day before yesterday,” Cannon smiled, adding, “Of course a lawyer here in town once told me that (lack of) confidence was a never a problem with me.”

His punt return has certainly survived the test of time, still showing up on that grainy black-and-white film from time to time on television.

“It’s getting a little yellow now,” Cannon said.

But, to be honest, he never gets tired of watching it, with a twist.

“I usually have some of the grandchildren with me,” he said. “And to see the look on their faces. They’ve heard about it, but to see that look on their faces, that that really happened.”

It survives, Cannon said, because it was the highlight of what was at the time easily the most hyped college football game ever in the South, a meeting between the No. 1-ranked and defending national champion Tigers and the No. 3 Rebels.

“The time and the moment, that’s what makes a great play stand up,” Cannon said. “If we had been up two touchdowns, I don’t think anybody would remember it.”

It also may have been forgotten if LSU hadn’t preserved the 7-3 victory with a last-minute goal-line stand.

Cannon said he gets too much credit for that, mostly due to a photograph that shows him and quarterback/defensive back Warren Rabb wrapping up Ole Miss quarterback Doug Elmore just short of the goal on fourth down.

“Warren made the initial contact,” Cannon said. “I did a (Brian) Bosworth and jumped on too.”

Cannon obviously hasn’t lost his sense of humor, unafraid to talk about the pitfalls of fame and legend, specifically the 2 1/2 years he spent in a federal prison in the mid-1980s after being convicted for his part in a counterfeiting ring.

When he spoke Monday he looked down and said, “I haven’t seen this many tape recorders since the FBI left town.”

He wasn’t through coming clean. It turns out he has a big connection with this week’s game against Tulane.

It’s one of the less savory traditions of the LSU-Tulane series, a rivalry that has never been accused of overflowing with honey and sportsmanship.

Cannon confessed that it was he — not Dietzel — who was responsible for starting the string of identical 62-0 scores than LSU ran up on the Green Wave. There were three of them in a seven-year span, beginning with LSU’s 1958 national championship season.

It started with Cannon.

LSU already led 55-0 and the starters had long since been out of the game.

There’s a famous picture of Dietzel and Cannon standing together on the Tulane Stadium sideline, squinting into sun, staring out onto the field in the closing moments.

What they were looking at, Cannon said, was reserve running back Don Purvis, who’d just clipped off a nice run down the sideline but was injured on the play and couldn’t continue.

Due to the substitution rules of the day, Dietzel either had to put Cannon back in or burn the redshirt of a younger player.

“Coach Dietzel put me back in,” Cannon remembered, “and he told me, ‘Go in there and tell (backup quarterback) Durel (Matherne) to run that ball up the middle, run the clock out and get it over with.

“Like a good soldier, I went in there and told Durel to run that toss to me wide to the left. I took the toss, 35 or 40 yards, touchdown, I only had to break maybe one tackle.”

Moments later, Cannon looked up to see Tulane coach Andy Pilney, almost out at midfield.

“He was cursing Dietzel and Dietzel was saying, ‘I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it.’”

LSU also won 62-0 in 1961 and 1965.

Cannon chuckled that Dietzel forever had to take the blame for it, especially from a Tulane fan who seemed to follow Dietzel everywhere.

“That guy would tell him, ‘I had the binoculars on you, I saw you tell Cannon to do that.’”

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