Book review: The Fighting Tigers 1993-2008

Longtime award-winning Baton Rouge sportswriter Scott Rabalais understood all too well, after the fact, why New Orleans counterpart Peter Finney wasn’t up to updating his book about the first 100 years of LSU football.

And it wasn’t just because Finney is past 80. LSU football is so intense that even covering 15 years is really hard work. Luckily for LSU fans, it was worth it.

Rabalais, known best in Baton Rouge for his prose as an LSU beat writer and columnist for The Advocate, is now a blogger on TigerGumbo.com. He grew up in Baton Rouge, graduated from LSU and has spent his entire professional life here.

His 232-page effort, published by LSU Press, is the ideal combination of retrospective and media guide in that it not only offers fabulous stories and accounts of the games and best moments of the past 15 years, it has a record book of every Tiger football season from 1893 to 2008.

Long for the days of Curley Hallman’s firing? Or Gerry DiNardo’s “Bring Back The Magic?” Or the special moments of the 2003 season when LSU won its first national championship since 1958? It’s all there, with great side notes as well.

What’s more, the book is spiced up with pictures, courtesy of LSU, that bring the pages to life.

There has been a proliferation of LSU football books the past few years, from personal accounts to commemoratives of the two national championships. This one should be on the shelf of every LSU fan who needs to recall that certain game, special moment or favorite player of the past 15 years.

The legendary Finney, by the way, wrote the forward, and that’s worth reading, too.