1958 champions put LSU football on national map

• By SCOTT HOTARD
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Nov 22, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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To reach Tiger Stadium on a Saturday night, Billy Cannon takes the long, scenic route.

He begins at the Faculty Club, crossing Highland Road with a belly full of supper. He cuts through the Parade Ground toward Memorial Tower. He weaves through the Quadrangle and zips across Fieldhouse Drive. He ends at Victory Hill.

“It’s a magnificent stroll,” Cannon says. “One of my favorites.”

Cannon, the only Heisman Trophy winner in LSU history, turned 71 in August. But when he makes that walk, he could believe he’s 21 again.

And it’s a trip Cannon, along with so many of his former teammates, will take when LSU’s 1958 national championship team returns to campus for today’s Ole Miss game. The team will be honored at halftime, part of a weekend-long, 50th-anniversary celebration.

“It’s always a joy to be back,” Cannon says. “It brings to mind a lot of warm, great memories.”

Tiger Stadium now seats 92,400, roughly 25,000 more than in Cannon’s day. The campus has grown. The enrollment has tripled. LSU football has put two more championship flags in the north end zone, each of them arriving in the previous five years.

But the legacy of the ’58 squad is as sure and solid as a Cannon stiff-arm. It is Forever LSU. Like the red-tiled rooftops of the school’s old stucco buildings, the live oaks and the crape myrtles and the columns and archways, it is a portrait of perfection unchanged.

“This team was important in projecting LSU as a national team,” says Bud Johnson, who worked in the sports information department that year. “LSU had good teams before. But that particular team captured the imagination of the national media.”

That year, LSU football planted a flag on college football’s hilltop. And it ushered in the longest stretch of consecutive winning seasons (16) in school history.

But what the Tigers did is only half the story. More interesting is how they did it: