ForeverL$U

The book

ForeverL$U: The Golden Calf of Death Valley. Cover: a golden calf on the roof of Tiger Stadium at night, with the state's money pouring down the stands.

ForeverL$U: The Golden Calf of Death Valley. Two dollars. A hundred and four pages in print, about 30,000 words, ninety-six numbered sources, no em dashes, on principle.

The book is dedicated to Kevin V. Mulcahy, 1945 to 2023, the professor of cultural policy who named the calf from a lectern in 2000 and saw it before it was poured.

It opens on the peak, the Superdome on January 13, 2020, and works backward and forward from there: the dormitory trick, the dollar ticket, the club, the statute, the governors, the three-dollar student ticket of 1998, the match that lit the arms race, the fee that was not a fee, the ascension of Mark Emmert, the locked room, the descent, and the powder. It is the story of one building through the money that moved through it, told by a man who has kept the receipt since 2003.

Buy the book. Two dollars.

Kindle and PDF. The book will never cost more than a student ticket cost in 1998, which is a promise no one else in this story has ever made you.

A dormitory with seats on top, and on the seats a golden calf, between the Capitol and Memorial Tower

Frontispiece. A dormitory with seats on top, and on the seats a calf, poured from the people's gold. The sentence at the bottom is Dr. Mulcahy's, from 2000.

Contents

Four hymns

Between the chapters the book stops for the songs, by title and history only: "Touchdown for LSU," written by a senator and a hotel bandleader in 1935; Pregame, the ninety seconds that cost nothing to make; "Callin' Baton Rouge," which is about a man feeding quarters into a phone; and "Neck," the song the institution cannot control, the chant it cannot stop, and the product it eventually sold.

Read the opening

You do not know you are descending until you have stood on the peak.

I stood on it once. January 13, 2020. The Superdome in New Orleans. Joe Burrow had the Heisman on the shelf and Clemson on the schedule. We won 42 to 25. Fifteen and zero. The band played. The building shook. Somebody near me cried and blamed the beer. It was me. It was not the beer.

I have stood on another peak since then. Mount Whitney, 14,505 feet, the highest ground in the lower forty-eight. You climb all day for the top. You get a photograph and a few minutes of thin air and a stranger's granola bar. Then you turn around, and every step for the rest of the day is down. Nobody tells you the descent is longer than the climb. Nobody tells you the descent is where the knees go, and that they go quietly, like a Board member's conscience.

That night in the Dome was the last LSU game I attended. I did not plan it that way. I just never went back. This is the story of why. It is also the story of what was already happening in the years I was walking into Tiger Stadium for three dollars, and of how the people who love this place most sat in the stands and watched it happen, because all we could do was watch.

It is a story about a calf.

I did not name it. A professor did, out loud, in a classroom, in 2000, while the thing was still under construction. We will get to him.

I was raised Southern Baptist in Moss Bluff, which means two things. I can spot a collection plate in the dark, and I know that when the preacher starts talking about the building fund, somebody's earrings are about to go missing. So I have always read Exodus 32 differently than the Sunday school teachers taught it. When Moses went up the mountain, the people got nervous. They went to Aaron and asked for gods they could see. Aaron said, bring me your gold. They brought it, all of it, the earrings out of their own ears, and he melted it down and shaped it with a graving tool, and when it was finished they looked at it and said, these be thy gods, O Israel.

Read that again and notice whose gold it was. The calf is always made of the people's gold. Nobody stole it. The people handed it over with both hands and asked for something shiny to follow. And when the man came down off the mountain and saw what they had made, he ground it to powder and made them drink it.

We are not at the drinking part yet. We are at the dancing part. Tomorrow night the calf is on national television at 6:30 Central, with College GameDay set up in front of it and nearly nine hundred credentialed media inside the temple, the most in the history of the building. It will be a wild scene in Death Valley. Everyone says so. Everyone is paid to.

I will not be there. But I know every word of the liturgy, and I remember what it cost to get in.

Keep reading. Two dollars.

The author

Donald C. Hodge, Jr. arrived at LSU in 1998, when a student ticket cost three dollars, and stayed through five degrees, a student the whole way. He was in the Student Senate when the chancellor got a seventy percent raise, in the Reveille when the Tradition Fund doubled, and in the courtroom in 2003, as a student, when the stadium was leased for $25,000 a year and the ticket became a donation. He lost that one two days before Christmas, over a dissent that quoted Humpty Dumpty. He was there for all of it, and he understood what it meant to be ForeverL$U. He has kept the receipt.