Typical, Louisiana.

Same ol’ politics.

When faced with doing the right thing, it took 25 years after Dale Brown retired as LSU basketball coach before the playing court in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center was named after him.

Dang thing kept getting bogged down. Red tape. Petty bickering. Sniping back and forth. You know how it goes.

But, finally, dedicated just last year, it’s right there on the court, a perfect replica of Daddy Dale’s distinctive cursive autograph scribbled on the basketball floor.

Better late than never.

Dale Brown Court.

Yet now it appears that those same politics that bogged things down, when suddenly tasked with evil, may need only 13 months to all but cancel out the good will of a well-deserved honor.

It could come to a vote before the LSU Board of Supervisors on Friday, a motion to change the name of the floor to Brown-Gunter Court.

OK, might as well get this out of the way right now.

This is nothing against Sue Gunter.

Oh, you could make the argument that what Gunter did for the LSU women’s basketball program pales next to what Brown — with the sheer force of his personality and dogged persistence — had to do to force-feed his program to a football school in a pigskin state to make his hoops relevant nationally.

But there’s no need for that pettiness. No need to drag Gunter down to make the point that all it does is dilute and cheapen the honor that Brown had to wait on far too long.

Gunter died of emphysema in 2005, a year and a half after having to take a mid-season medical leave from a team that eventually made the first of five consecutive Final Four appearances. She deserves her spot in LSU lore — just not sharing the floor with Daddy Dale, which doesn’t do justice to either of them.

There are plenty of ways to honor Gunter without dishonoring Brown, who still, at 87 years old and a quarter-century removed from the game, is unquestionably the name most associated with LSU basketball of any gender.

There is, for instance, already a statue of Gunter in the Maravich Assembly Center concourse.

Name the basketball practice facility or the women’s locker room for her. Anything.

But let Dale Brown Court be Dale Brown Court.

Singular.

Still, what could be happening here is not the worst of it. It’s the way it is happening.

Mainly, close-mouthed politics. Most of it behind closed doors.

The original vote to name the floor after Brown was passed by the Board of Superviors, 12-3, in September of 2021. At that time, according to reporting by Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Marx, there was an amendment proposed to add Gunter’s name to the court. It failed by the same vote of 12-3.

Of the three dissenters on the Board, according to Marx, Mary Leach Werner of Lake Charles was the most vocal in wanting both names attached to the court.

But a 12-3 vote seems pretty cut and dry. The Board spoke loud and clear.

So what could have changed so drastically in a little more than a year that the other side thinks it may have the votes.

Well, since then, somehow, for some odd reason, both Gov. John Bel Edwards and LSU President William F. Tate have gotten actively involved — both solidly in the camp of a dual-named basketball court.

Both, presumably, should have far more pressing issues on their plates than the name of a basketball floor. In fact, I’m guessing both wish they’d never heard of Brown or Gunter.

But they are in it now. Up to their political chins. Lobbying, for whatever reason, for both names to be on the floor.

Tate met with Brown trying to sell him on the idea. Gov. Edwards summoned several Board members (but not a quorum) to the governor’s mansion to discuss just that issue.

Or maybe its no big deal.

The way things are going, the whole campus may eventually be renamed after current women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey anyway.

—

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