STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

Article to be released in next Sports Illustrated. -ag
>  This is the kind of publicity LSU is getting right now. This is Rick
> Reily's column in this week's Sports Illustrated. He is the feature
> columnist on the last page.
> --------
> Sports? No, sports had absolutely nothing to do with the Gulf Coast's
trying to survive Hurricane Katrina.  Except that while the fifth-ranked LSU football team practiced in Baton Rouge, about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, the coaches were
hollering above the drone of helicopters, 20 in all, dropping off evacuees.

Except the infield of the outdoor track was being used as a heliport
24  hours a day.

Except that the basketball arena, Pete Maravich Assembly Center, had
been turned into a two-hooped hospital. Triage was where the band plays
during games. Dialysis was where the scorekeepers sit. And pediatrics was
where students usually wail. People still lined up outside to get in,
though. It's just that they were all on stretchers.

No, sports weren't at all involved, except that the field house next
door was a patient ward. And the baseball stadium was an evacuee
processing center.

Katrina chaos was everywhere. In the LSU sports information office,
student assistant Bill Martin couldn't sleep after volunteering at the
Maravich Center, so he decided to urge his friends to help out by e-mailing
them about what he'd seen.

Helicopters were carrying in victims who'd been stranded on roofs. Buses
rolled in from New Orleans.... A lady fell out of her wheelchair and
we scrambled to help her up.... A man from New Orleans was badly injured
on his head. Five minutes later he was dead. Mothers were giving birth in
the locker rooms.... A man was rolled in on a stretcher [suffering from]
gunshots. A paramedic said a looter needed his boat and he wouldn't
give it to him.... The auxiliary gym was being used as a morgue. I couldn't
take myself down there to see it. (this is actually an abreviated version of the email that I got from him)

Martin's friends should have heard the story of his colleague Jason
Feirman.  He was stranded on I-10, near the police roadblock 20 minutes outside
New Orleans, when a displaced and distraught woman snapped and walked
straight into traffic. Feirman jumped out of his car, sprinted down the
highway, grabbed the woman and dragged her to the shoulder.

It was a week none will forget, much as they would like to. The
Tigers' starting quarterback, sophomore JaMarcus Russell, had a lot on his
mind too  -- the team's game this Saturday night against Arizona State and the
22  displaced people in his three-bedroom apartment. The guy sleeping on
his couch? Fats Domino.

Domino, the R&B icon who'd been listed in the papers as missing for
two days, is the granddad of Russell's girlfriend, Chantel Brimmer. After
the levees gave way in New Orleans, Domino was trapped on the second
floor of his house. He was rescued by boat and taken to the makeshift hospital
at the Maravich Center. Russell happened to be volunteering there that night
as  so many LSU athletes were -- bumped into Domino and took him home.

 Since then the quarterback has been attending to the people in his
apartment. "I've been staying up real late getting medicine and
stuff,"  bleary-eyed Russell said. "Plus, I couldn't eat after what I saw [at
the Maravich Center]."

Is he worried about losing the big game? "What's losing a game," he
said, "when people are losing their kids, their parents, their houses?
Nothing."

 Just ask Russell's teammate, defensive end Donald Hains. As of Sunday
he still hadn't heard from his parents, who live in Diamond Head, Miss.,
which took a direct hit from Katrina. "I'm glad I have football," Hains
said. "It's my only escape."

The LSU equipment manager, Greg Stringfellow, was up to his clipboard
in everything but football. "The Minnesota Vikings just called," he
said, staring at his Blackberry during Saturday's practice. "They're
sending two semis full of supplies." A Detroit Lions fan named Vince Soulsby was
sending 25. Out in the parking lot LSU athletes had already filled up one
tractor-trailer with stuff they had donated or collected on their
own.

Everybody in the athletic department was in chin-deep. Driving to
campus, the football team's trainer, Jack Marucci heard a plea from the hoop
hospital over the radio: Vaseline, gauze and 20cc syringes were
desperately needed. Hey, Marucci said to himself, I have all that. Fifteen
minutes later, he delivered them.

So, no, sports had nothing to do with the Gulf Coast's surviving
Katrina, except everything. And that's because you always forget what sports
can provide -- can-do staff, fit and focused athletes, and huge,
versatile arenas -- in times of trouble.

Inside the field house-hospital, half the patients wore LSU purple
and gold because so many students had donated clothing. As I gazed out at that
sea of beds, I thought it looked as if the school's booster club was fresh
from train pileup.

 "I never used to root for LSU much," said one purple-shirted
diabetic, who'd been rescued by boat from the flooded Charity Hospital in New
Orleans, "but after this, I guess we're all fans."

Issue date: September 12, 2005

Just wanted to share esp since I got that one email last week and that's how I found out a lot of what was happening at LSU since the media was not allowed to report it.