Alex Box Stadium Was The LSU Football Practice Field 2
Jun 6th, 2008 by gtull1
Did you know that Alex Box stadium, the home of our awesome LSU baseball team, used to be used as the practice field for the LSU football team? I didn’t, but it sure was. I read a very interesting letter written by a preacher in Baton Rouge to the Advocate that shares this man’s feelings about losing his former practice fields when Alex Box is gone. It’s a great read so we hope you enjoy it:
Much hoopla has been made about the passing of Alex Box Stadium, and rightly so since it is legendary in present day baseball lore.
However, my memories of the old stadium do not revolve totally around baseball. For a long time, until the present football practice facility was built, Alex Box outfield was the practice field for many LSU football teams. There were no colorful bleachers or prolific advertising signs along the fence back then; in fact, there was just a chain-link fence in the outfield with a few bushes or bamboo to keep people from seeing what the Tigers were working on in our drive to become the first national champions of LSU football.
For us and many football Tigers, Alex Box was a place of pain and struggle and sweat and endless conditioning drills. In those days, drinking water during practice was not looked upon as good. About halfway through afternoon practice of August two-a-days, we were given only one frozen orange to perk us up. I struggled to eat those precious commodities without my removable bridge. The Box is where we were tested each fall to see what kind of shape we reported in. It’s where lightning struck one day in a rainstorm and only after at least one coach was laid out by that sudden bolt that struck the field, did we get to go on in to the showers. One day, before an important game with Ole Miss, I think, the Tiger band, cheerleaders and many students came to the Box to lift us up with a pep rally for a good performance in that fabled season of 1958.
This was all before the big-money days of sports specialization and building to stay ahead of the Vols, Crimson Tide and the like. Our coach, Paul Dietzel, never made more than $30,000, and basketball coach Harry Rabenhorst doubled as the baseball coach. Later, Jim Smith, head football equipment manager, held the job.
There were many things I remember about Alex Box Stadium — endless wind sprints; gassers; goal-line drives; busted lips; head bruises from drills with Billy Cannon, Johnny Robinson and Billy Joe Booth; knocked-down shoulders and pinched nerves in the neck; hearing Coach Mac say, “Kinchen, suck it up; if you can’t practice, you can’t play on Saturdays.”
I will be sad to see The Box go the way of progress, but for me and many Tigers of the past, it was associated with football as much, if not more, than baseball.