“Saturday Night in Tiger Stadium: Reflections on 120 Years of LSU Football” exhibit on display at Hill Memorial Library

BATON ROUGE – Hometown heroes, bitter rivalries, and close games that generate enough crowd excitement to move the earth are the hallmarks of LSU Tiger football.

A small exhibition currently on display in the lecture hall at Hill Memorial Library, “Saturday Night in Tiger Stadium: Reflections on 120 Years of LSU Football” showcases the players, games, facilities, and culture that have made Tigers football the spectacle it has become over the last 120 years.

Free to the public and accessible via an interactive station, the exhibition features images of and interviews with some of LSU’s greatest players, teams and coaches. These include College Football Hall of Famer Abe “Miracle” Mickal, a former LSU fullback who went on to become a major figure in the Louisiana medical education field; Gaynell “Gus” Tinsley, LSU’s first unanimous All-American selection and former LSU head football coach; Bert Jones, former LSU and NFL quarterback and the first quarterback in LSU history to be awarded consensus All-American honors; former running back Lora Hinton, the first African American to receive an LSU football scholarship and one of the first black players on the team; former quarterback Tommy Hodson, the first quarterback in Southeastern Conference history to surpass 8,000 career passing yards and 60 career passing touchdowns and the quarterback for LSU during the 1988 “Earthquake Game;” and former LSU Athletic Director Carl Maddox, after whom LSU’s Carl Maddox Field House is named.

Also part of the exhibition are unique archival materials that include game programs, flyers and sheet music; the seismogram that recorded ground movement during the famed “Earthquake Game” in 1988 between LSU and Auburn University; and personal items such as a student ticket booklet from 1934 and Lora Hinton’s football jersey.

Documenting 12 decades of LSU Football, the exhibit highlights a sampling of LSU Football treasures from the University Archives, the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, and the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, all housed in LSU Libraries Special Collections.

To learn more about Hill Memorial Library and LSU Special Collections, visit http://lib.lsu.edu/special.