Huey Long, Tiger King

As recounted in Robert Mann’s book Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU (2023), from the time Long was elected governor in 1928 until he was fatally shot in the Louisiana capitol building in 1935, he was LSU’s unofficial football coach, touring-band and cheer-squad leader, mascot, and president. By 1934, he had become so synonymous with the school that a syndicated sports columnist reported the final score of an LSU game as “Huey Long, 29; Vanderbilt, 0.” Much like his controversial but effective state politics, Long’s ambitious vision, cartoonish antics, and egocentric grip over LSU and its football program drew equal parts admiration and condemnation. 

Though Long never went to college, fond childhood trips to LSU for track and debate competitions, along with its proximity to the capitol building, led him to spiritually adopt the school as his alma mater. During the 1928 football season, Long’s first as governor, he began showing up at practices led by the Tigers’ new coach, Russ Cohen. “LSU can’t have a losing team because that’ll mean I’m associated with a loser,” quarterback Oliver “Ike” Carierre remembered Long telling the team.  

Long eventually started accompanying the players to in-state away games, playing his jaw harp with the band on train rides. The governor sent his personal bodyguard, Joe Messina, to scout out the size of the University of Arkansas’s players the night before a matchup in Shreveport, giving the Tigers a pep talk based on his findings. “They ain’t got a thing!” Long said of the Razorbacks’ musculature, before LSU proceeded to lose 7–0. 

At the start of 1929, much to Cohen’s dismay, Long began actively recruiting Centenary College star player Joe Almokary, by promising the youth well-paid state and campus jobs if he transferred to LSU. “I’ve got you an all-American player,” Long told Cohen. The coach wasn’t so sure. “Joe is a big boy . . . but he’s no all-American,” he told the governor. Almokary started on the team that fall. Long unsuccessfully tried a similar move with Tulane’s Don Zimmerman that same year, telling Cohen he’d simply give the player’s father a state job in Baton Rouge. 

In 1931, Long hand-selected LSU’s new president, James Monroe Smith, a quintessential yes-man who let Long do whatever he wanted—including annoy Cohen. In addition to aggressively funding the school’s expansion, Long had been giving regular halftime pep talks to the Tigers and frustrating referees with on-field shenanigans that crossed the line from mere cheering. Rules forbade coaches and trainers from calling plays from the sidelines, but Long, doing so as a state politician, was technically exempt. After a series of strange comments and play suggestions, Cohen correctly began to suspect that the governor didn’t know the basic rules of football. 

When three LSU players were benched due to injuries that fall, Long informed them that they would convalesce at the governor’s mansion, where he would personally serve them meals. “Huey’s idea of doctoring us was to feed us steaks twice a day,” remembered player Billy Butler. Left tackle Ed Khoury said that by the time he was well enough to return to the field, he had gained so much weight he could only make two or three plays. Long spent their dinners interrogating the injured players on the rules of football. He also enlisted Tulane and Vanderbilt coaches to create plays for him, which he copied in his own handwriting to impress Cohen. “Every time I show these fellows a play, they think I don’t know what I’m talking about,” Long told Tulane’s assistant coach. “I want to show them a play that an expert has drawn, and then I want to see what they will say.” 

Long’s purview extended to the cheer squad. He called a nighttime October pep rally at Tiger Stadium that season, personally demonstrating Long-approved cheer techniques to the student body. Silly as it seemed to Cohen, Long’s enthusiasm had real results, with one Morning Advocate sportswriter crediting “Governor Long leading the LSU cheering section” for a late-game double-touchdown win over Mississippi State. Long’s wild howling in victory, tortured fits in defeat, and recurring role as a waterboy began to make regular sports headlines.

Also in 1931, the governor approved flashier purple-and-gold uniforms for the marching band and insisted on doubling its size, funding unlimited band scholarships. At practices and parades, he often led them in performing his favorite song, “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” sometimes showily tipping the performers $1 each from his pocket. On many an occasion in New Orleans and in cities across the South, he personally led the marching band on parade.

Because of Long’s constant meddling, Cohen exited LSU two years earlier than contracted. Cohen warned the incoming head coach, West Point’s Lawrence “Biff” Jones, that “Huey’s idea of a coach was somebody who coached the team in the week and handed it over to him on Saturday.” Jones accepted the job under the condition that Long would not interfere with his coaching. When Long became a US senator the following month, vacating the governor’s mansion for Washington, DC, he honored the agreement simply by virtue of his new, time-consuming national role. As a result, perhaps, the Tiger’s next two seasons were a breakout success. Long wore his LSU sweater on the senate floor to celebrate. Newspapers continued to conflate the politician with the school, regularly referring to the football team as “Huey Long’s LSU Tigers.”  

Jones enjoyed two focused years of coaching before Long came roaring back to Tiger Stadium in 1934, this time even louder than before. In advance of an important away game against Vanderbilt, Long decided that all 1,500 of LSU’s student-military cadets and the now 120-piece band should go to Nashville as well. The trip would require four trains and cost $19 per student. Long negotiated the price down to $6 with the railway and promised LSU would pay the fare.  

When Long found out regular students wanted to come too, he announced that anyone needing a loan for tickets and meals could line up for one. A massive daylong rush sent 500 Tigers to Long as he personally doled out $3,500 in $7 increments, prompting students to coin the term “I. O. Huey.” In all, five trains would end up carrying a 3,200-person LSU-Long circus to the Vanderbilt game. The “Roman holiday,” as the Nashville Banner called the parade-filled scene, was so successful in selling game tickets, other schools around the South began requesting Long appearances. LSU won 29–0, and one reporter in North Carolina declared that Long had “put the game on the front pages” around the nation.  

Long quickly wore out the goodwill his stunt had earned by following it up with a disastrous sequel. After joking that he was going to appoint LSU star player Abe Mickal to the Louisiana senate, Long wrote a proclamation and held a mock ceremony on LSU’s campus to do exactly that. Rather than owning it as a prank, Long confused the press by having staffers prepare a senate desk with Mickal’s name on it, placing his name on the capitol’s electronic voting board, and announcing that Mickal would receive a lawmaker’s typical $10-a-day stipend. When he returned from his away game, Mickal was extremely embarrassed to discover his “election,” and Jones was livid. He told Long that the Southeastern Conference’s rules against professionalism could cost Mickal his amateur status thanks to the confusing prank. “These are all fine boys,” he told Long. “I won’t have them made fun of.”  

When the LSU student newspaper, the Reveille, ran a sophomore’s letter criticizing the stunt, Long called the editor “a rotten little son of a bitch.” He ordered LSU President Smith to have the issue reprinted without the letter. In the incident’s immediate wake, faculty began regularly censoring the Reveille, kicking off a tug-of-war between LSU’s Long loyalists and journalism students. The fight made national headlines, culminating in the Long-ordered expulsion of student paper staffers later known as the Reveille Seven. The ousted student journalists were awarded scholarships to the University of Missouri for standing up to Long’s attack on free press, an episode that only strengthened anti-Long accusations of authoritarianism. “Huey is the first statesman with the gall or originality to take over a state university . . . all as a political circus,” wrote syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, who later penned a front-page story in the New Orleans Item headlined, “It’s Heil Huey in Louisiana!”  

That December, during a tense game with the University of Oregon, Long burst into the locker room during halftime and demanded to talk to the football team. Jones refused. Furious that Long was breaking LSU’s noninterference pledge on top of his mock-election antics, the coach announced on the spot, “Win, lose, or draw—I’m through!” Jones won the game for LSU and resigned a few days later. Long-friendly assistant coach Bernie Moore was hired to replace him. 

Near the end of the 1934–35 school year, the editors of LSU’s Gumbo yearbook hand-delivered Long a copy of the new edition, which featured an effusive tribute to his contributions to the school. Receiving the yearbook in his pajamas, Long reportedly “cried like a baby” when he read it, according to one editor. Despite his reputation as a dictator, Long had an indisputable impact on the school’s growth—tripling its enrollment, reducing tuition, introducing new scholarships, vastly expanding facilities and faculty, adding new departments, and, of course, boosting its premiere football program and marching band.  

When Long was shot in the state capitol in September 1935, five LSU students and seven football players offered to donate their blood. Despite five transfusions, the assassination attempt on the senator was successful. Moore canceled football practice to allow LSU players to attend the funeral, where members of the marching band served as guards of honor around Long’s casket, laid with a wreath of purple and gold flowers. Bandleader Carazo, who had cowritten “Touchdown for LSUOpens in new tab,” “Darling of LSUOpens in new tab,” and “The LSU Cadets March” with Long shortly before his death, arranged a minor-key version of “Every Man a KingOpens in new tab” for the funeral. Earlier that year, he had cowritten the tune with Long as a campaign song for the senator’s planned 1936 presidential bid, which never came to pass.