Memories outlive The Box

• By JARED JANES
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 12, 2008 - Page: 1A - UPDATED: 12:20 a.m.

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Fans couldn’t take their seats with them Sunday after the last regular season game at LSU’s Alex Box Stadium, but they could take their memories and, if they wanted, a souvenir T-shirt  or  program.

Like nearly everyone else at the ballpark, Bobby Box left with more than a few of each those things.

Box, 55, a Baton Rouge resident who is the nephew of the stadium’s namesake, recounted growing up a few blocks from the stadium named years before in honor of an uncle he never met.

As a youth, he would ride his bike over to the stadium with his friends and shag foul balls for the baseball team, Box said Sunday during the regular season finale against Mississippi State. In return for foul balls,  he said, the players gave the children their cracked wooden bats, which Box and his friends taped up and used in their own games.

Box knew all about his family’s legacy attached to the stadium — his father, Neal, had told him at an early age about Alex Box, an LSU baseball and football player and U.S. Army first lieutenant killed in North Africa during World War II.

But for Bobby Box — and about 6,555 other fans who crowded into the stadium for one more game — the memories weren’t about the name that adorned the stadium, the seats  or  the  field.

It was always about the game.

“Everybody is used to baseball at The Box and it’s going to be different,” said Box, who has had season tickets since the Skip Bertman era in a seat now named for his father. “But (baseball) will still be here next year.”

Maybe in a few weeks, too.

With a No. 22 ranking, a lead in the SEC Western Division and 12 consecutive wins, some say LSU has put itself in a prime position to host an NCAA regional at Alex Box Stadium one last time.

Can you say Omaha?

But regional sites won’t be announced until the final day of the Southeastern Conference Tournament on May 25, so many fans left the ballpark Sunday afternoon wondering if that was the last game they would see within the stadium’s walls.

That’s the reason why there was no question LSU had to have a ceremony after the game commemorating the park’s history, said Bertman, the outgoing LSU athletic director  and  architect  of  the national championship winning program.