The Alex Box story

“The Joe” is a common term for Sewell-Thomas Stadium at the University of Alabama.

Alex Box Stadium, named for the former LSU baseball and football player killed in World War II, is typically called “The Box” or “Alex Box.”

To a few people, those names resonate in ways others can never fully grasp.

LSU is set to play the final regular-season game at Alex Box Stadium this afternoon — the last game, period, if the Tigers don’t host a postseason regional — before moving into a new ballpark in 2009.

The imminent closure of the old stadium stirs memories and emotions on the branches of the Box family tree.

Sam Box, 90, lives in a nursing home in Mobile, Ala., where on a wall hangs a rare photo of younger brother Alex, who died at war in North Africa on Feb. 19, 1943.

Two years later Sam named his firstborn son after Alex, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross before his death, and the Purple Heart after.

Sam often thinks about his brother’s unrealized potential.

“I always wondered what he’d be doing in life,” he said. “Would he be a coach? Would he be at LSU? I wonder. He’d be 87 now. There seems to be a good many people who know who he was and want to honor him.”

Simeon Alexander Box, 63, lives near Augusta, Ga. Like the uncle he never knew, he signs correspondence as S. Alex Box. Like his uncle, he goes by Alex Box.

“From the time I was old enough to understand who I was named after, I’ve considered it an honor to have his name,” he said.

Whatever your name is, say it aloud. Add the word “stadium” at the end.

Now imagine being the namesake of a family member who died a hero before you were born — and a lifetime of hearing and reading Your Name Stadium.

Baseball fans are referring to the closing of a ballpark when they talk about the final days of Alex Box. The phrase triggers thoughts of a more poignant milestone for the Box family. They think about the final days of an honor student, an ROTC graduate, an emergency track athlete, a brother, an uncle, a first lieutenant buried — dead at 22 — in Carthage, Tunisia.

When thinking about his disarming smile and his seeming ability to succeed at everything he tried, family members recall the 1988 movie “Everybody’s All-American” about a fictional LSU football player. They wonder why there’s never been a film about the story of Alex Box.

“It would be a great movie,” said Sam Box, 57, who lives in Mobile near the father he is named after. “Alex was a real All-American.”

Alex Box, the athlete

If someone were indeed to make a movie about Alex Box, there are war records and news accounts and LSU publications to provide a timeline with plot points.

Those stories have been written. Sam and son Alex and the rest of the family fill in colorful missing pieces for anyone who asks.

They could tell moviemakers about the Alex Box from Laurel, Miss., who turned down an offer from the Cincinnati Reds to accept a football scholarship to LSU in 1938. He rejected offers from Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Alabama, Tulane and Tennessee.

The movie could show the halfback dislocating his shoulder in 1939, his first year of eligibility with the LSU varsity team, in a game against Ole Miss. The shoulder was further damaged in the next game, at Holy Cross, ending his football career.

“I just couldn’t give up sports altogether,” he told a reporter in 1942, “so I got a job in the intramural sports office to keep in touch with all the boys.”

Sam recalled Alex being a tutor of football players after switching to play baseball. If he threw the ball from the outfield, chances are his shoulder would pop out of place, so teammates would hold him on the ground, put a knee against his chest and set it back.

“I shudder to think what that felt like,” his nephew Alex said.

That happened enough that subsequent throws came underhanded.

Alex Box, the nephew

Sam’s first son — Alex’s first nephew — was born in 1945 in Texas.

His mother died of toxemia a few hours later, and his grandmother raised him like a son. His father had his hands full on supply ships for the U.S. Merchant Marine.

Alex remembers being raised by grandparents still mourning the death of the uncle for whom he was named.

“I think I was kind of a replacement — I’m not sure how good of a replacement for Alex — but I think in my grandmother’s mind that was kind of like replacing him,” Alex said. “I can tell you she never got over losing him.”

He felt connected to LSU. The first football game he remembers seeing in Tiger Stadium was in 1958 against Ole Miss.

“I guess you could say I was hooked,” he said.

They went back a year later and saw Billy Cannon’s famous punt return that beat Ole Miss and secured the Heisman Trophy for him.

“Boy, I can still visualize that,” Alex said. “We were sitting in the end zone where he scored, looking straight up the sideline, watching him come down the sideline that night. Man, I tell you I will never forget that.”

Especially not after seeing a photo of his uncle in an LSU football uniform. The picture in Sam’s room in Mobile shows Alex Box wearing No. 20.

That’s the number Cannon would wear 20 years later, and that no LSU player would wear again. It remains the only football number retired by the school, a tribute to its most famous Tiger.

So when, as an adult, Alex the nephew saw the photo of his famous uncle clutching a football with the number 20 on his chest, he was struck.

“When I saw that, I really wanted a copy of that,” he said.

Years later, one more No. 20 surfaced in an LSU football uniform: Dennis Quaid playing Gavin Grey, the Grey Ghost, in “Everybody’s All-American.”

Alex Box, the war hero

There is, in fact, a movie that brings you close to where Alex Box’s life ended. The first battlefield you see in “Patton” is the aftermath at Kasserine Pass, where the first major fight between German and American forces ended with heavy casualties.

Two months earlier, First Lt. S. Alex Box wrote a letter to Red Evans, his former LSU roommate, telling him of the American march in November 1942 through French North Africa. He included details of how he came to receive the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor during war.

The handwritten description began modestly.

“In our battle coming in,” he wrote, “I got in a little fracas myself, and the Colonel of the unit I was attached to thought enough of it to really give the ballyhoo.”

More serious details, one soldier to the other, then emerged.

“About midnite, we were suddenly pinned down by machine gun fire — couldn’t tell what was there — sent our patrols, no luck,” Box wrote. “So I volunteered to take my halftrack through this village — locate enemy guns — knock them out if possible — and if not to report their positions.

“Went through — ran into point-blank M.G. fire, 27 mm cannon, and numerous riflemen — knocked out some of them — came back with equal success — reported to commander, and decided to send pincer patrols out, give them time to get into position — and go back through town — drawing enemy fire — thus disclosing positions.”

After a break, he wrote, they again engaged the enemy.

“Gave patrols 40 minutes, and set out again — drew enemy fire — came back through town, throwing hand grenades right into M.G. nests — and then let the patrols do the rest,” he wrote. “Cleaned the town out in thirty minutes with hand grenades — we moved on through, and within an hour after we moved our past position was under intense artillery fire.

“Maybe that was why the Colonel appreciated my action. At any rate, your roommate is still as lucky as ever, and is still kicking …”

Members of the Box family retell the story, each imagining Alex lobbing grenades underhanded because of his old football injury at LSU.

The final letter in the possession of Bobby Box, a nephew in Baton Rouge, was written by Alex Box to Red Evans on Feb. 12, 1943.

One week later, while his unit was preparing a minefield and roadblock, one of the mines accidentally exploded, according to “Eight Stars to Victory,” a history of Box’s battalion.

He was one of those killed.

The Purple Heart posthumously awarded to Alex Box rests with the Distinguished Service Cross and other memorabilia the Box family presented to LSU in a shadow box in 1991.

Alex Box, the legacy

People in Quitman, Miss., where he was born, and in Laurel, where he grew up, learned in newspapers and by word of mouth that Alex Box was the first Laurel son to die in action.

They were accustomed to reading about other firsts.

Reports in Baton Rouge newspapers credited him with being the only LSU football player from the freshman class of 1938 to graduate in 1942. The same stories lauded him for being LSU’s first petroleum engineer to finish in four years instead of five.

But his brother remembers a scrappier Alex Box.

During a sparring match in a boxing ring at school, Sam Box’s opponent landed a blow that unfastened his shorts, leaving him vulnerable and exposed.

While Sam struggled to pull up his shorts with his boxing gloves, the other student kept pummeling him. Alex jumped into the ring to help his brother.

“He whupped his butt,” Sam said, cackling at the memory.

But it also was that rescue that led the two schoolboy brothers to argue over who could whip the other, Sam said. Tired of hearing the debate, their mother finally said, “Let’s find out.”

She made them have a “knock-down, drag-out” battle in their big farm-house kitchen. Later, they fought on the porch.

“Today, they’d throw her in jail for something like that,” Alex the nephew said. “It was a different time.”

Sam made it sound like a pretty even fight. His son Alex added a footnote.

“By the time they were grown men,” he said, “I think Alex could have handled him pretty good.”

Sam said that was the last time he fought Alex.

“He’d pick out a place on you, like on your heart, and he’d just pound that place,” Sam said. “I got to where I couldn’t hardly breathe. I got down and choked him.”

LSU documents reveal a groundswell at the Ole War Skule to honor Alex Box after he died overseas. In May 1943 the LSU Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to name the baseball stadium for Box.

“For the first time in the school’s history,” reported an article in the student newspaper The Reveille, “the service and memory of the military hero came to be esteemed so highly that a structure on the campus was named in his honor.”

Alex Box, the stadiums

Alex Box the nephew came to Baton Rouge in 1991 with his father and other family members to present the military decorations and other keepsakes at an LSU baseball game. Rain postponed play and the ceremony, and Alex and Sam never saw a game there — and it appears they never will.

The family hopes Sam will be vital enough to be at the opening of the new stadium in February 2009. Sam, at times coughing through his words in his room in Mobile, said in a 2006 interview that he thinks about his brother Alex every day.

He wanted a visitor to know about Alex’s hook slide, which let him avoid the tag while having one toe touching the base. He was glad someone wanted to know about Alex as LSU prepares to move from one Box to the other.

“I imagine Big Alex is watching over all of this,” he said.

Mostly, he laughed a raucous laugh, reliving stories about the two oldest Box brothers.

“We played together, we fought together, we loved together,” Sam said, choking up. “I will never forget Alex. As long as I’m living and I’ve got these memories, he’ll be living.”

He said having a new ballpark keeping the name of his brother is important.

“I know he’s still with the LSU team,” Sam said.

LSU finished what would later be named Alex Box Stadium in 1938, the year Alex Box arrived on campus. Seventy years later, his nephew was unable to schedule a trip to The Box for this weekend.

Given the choice between one or the other, he said he’d prefer to see the first game at the new stadium instead of the final game at the old one.

In the past decade, as talk of a new stadium surfaced, the Box family worried LSU might name it after someone else, such as Skip Bertman, the coach who won five national championships with the Tigers.

“I just think it would be a travesty,” Alex the nephew said of naming the new stadium for anybody else. “Alex was a big part of LSU history.”

What about Skip Bertman Field at Alex Box Stadium?

“I would have no problem with that at all,” he said.

Bertman took care the past few years to emphasize the new stadium would have the Alex Box name. The nephew who has the same name has mixed feelings about the inevitable demolition of the old ballpark.

“There’s an awful lot of emotional attachment to that,” he said, “but I know they can’t remodel it properly, and it’s served its purpose.”

If he makes it in February to the first game at the new stadium, he’ll be able to see his uncle’s name — his name, too — attached to something more permanent than a promise. There, high above the main entrance, will be the name that rings differently for him than for anybody else.

Like the sport that has no clock, it will be like extra innings for Alex Box — a tribute that, like the game itself, could go on forever.