All right, college football starts this week. Everybody is undefeated. Excitement is at pitch, fever pitch, that is. And even if you don’t go to the games, you can turn on your TV at 11 Saturday morning and watch football non-stop till past midnight or until your spouse changes the channel and tosses the remote […]
Mississippi State and Southern Miss will play one another in football for the 29th time Saturday night in Hattiesburg. I’ve seen 27 of the 29. What follow are my top five most vivid memories from the series. • Nov. 7, 1981, USM 7, State 6. Both teams were nationally ranked and featured so much future […]
(Ten years ago, tens of thousands of Mississippians’ lives changed forever. Katrina blew a vast hole in our souls. Two days after the storm, editors sent me to my old hometown, Hattiesburg for a report. Later, I saw first-hand the destruction of Bay St. Louis, Waveland and the rest of the Gulf Coast. I had […]
Hattiesburg and Laurel played the Battle for the Little Brown “Between the Bricks” in Laurel for the 94th time last Friday night. For pure drama, it may have been the most memorable. Down 32-6 with under four minutes remaining, Hattiesburg fired back and won 34-32. There was no Fat Lady to sing in Laurel last […]
Our state’s literary excellence was on impressive display this past weekend during the remarkably successful Mississippi Book Festival. The Magnolia State’s tradition of renowned authors rivals our tradition of world-class athletic achievement. And, yes, those two traditions have intersected time and again, as we shall explore today. Indeed, many of our finest writers wrote first […]
When lifelong Chicago Cubs fan Mary Beth Cannon was a teen, she wrote a letterto Don and Carolyn offering to baby sit their boys, Keith and Kevin. She got the job. That was more than four decades ago. Cannon, now 57 and living in South Bend, Ind., drove back to Chicago this past weekend to […]
File this one under: PLEASE, PARDON OUR PROGRESS. We have lots of it to report at your Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum. The coming week — specifically August 24-28 — the museum will be closed while we re-carpet the main arena. We will reopen for visitors on Saturday, August 29, a little […]
The ritual that is Mississippi high school football begins again this week. It begins in the heat and humidity of August and extends to the usually chilly, first weekend in December. It is a roller-coaster of passion and pageantry that unites communities and has produced an inordinate share of the game’s greatest players. What makes […]
