Big game, great cause Saturday

Bulldog Sports Radio is throwing a party for Mississippi State fans and for a good cause.

The on-line network will host a State-Bama watch party starting at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at Burger and Blues Restaurant in Ridgeland to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Mississippi.

Bulldog fans and friends are invited to come cheer the Bulldogs as they face the No. 1-ranked Alabama Crimson Tide.

The game will be shown on a big screen in the dining room and throughout the restaurant, and 10 per cent of sales of all food ordered during the game will go to Make-A-Wish. That’s not all. Raffle tickets will be available for great prizes at just $5 each, and 100% of the raffle sales will go to Make-A-Wish.

Prizes include a pair of tickets to the Nov. 17 Arkansas-Mississippi State game, as well as a helmet and football autographed by Dan Mullen, and a baseball autographed by John Cohen. Gift certificates from several Jackson-area restaurants and businesses also will be available.

Make-A-Wish grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions. The late Kent Hull, the Bulldog great and Mississippi Sports Hall of Famer, was a long-time supporter of Make-A-Wish Foundation.

For more information, visit VSporto.com.

Orley Hood: Special night, special man

The boys got together Tuesday night — his boys — to give the old guy grief.

The yelling and hollering, the twisting of the face masks, the attention to detail that marked so vividly a 60-year career trying to grind concentration and dedication into locker rooms filled with kids.

It was Jack Carlisle Night at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum, the first of many annual roasts to come of Mississippi Hall of Fame greats. And it was wonderful. The Murrah years. Jackson Prep. Ole Miss. East Tennessee State. MRA.

His guys showed up en masse, some old, many older than old, filled with memories and laughter — and terror, more than one roaster said.

Happy Jack is the guy whose track teams at Murrah didn’t lose a meet for seven straight seasons, whose football teams won umpteen championships, who went to the wall that autumn afternoon in 1977 at Memorial Stadium to get Ken Cooper to put in substitute quarterback Tim Ellis, who immediately led Ole Miss on a game-winning drive against Notre Dame, which won the national title that year.

“He told me if I threw an interception that we’d both be fired,” Tim said. Carlisle wasn’t kidding. But Tim Ellis’ coach believed in him 100 percent.

There was one story after another, all the Carlisle eras overlapped into one, the MRA guys with the Prep guys with the Murrah guys with the Ole Miss guys, everybody nodding in recognition at every story. That’s because the players may have changed, the schools may have changed, but Jack Carlisle never did, not for a second.

Jack Carlisle: So many stories . . .

You will see on the front page of this website and on the "news and updates" page where the Hall of Fame will be holding a first annual Roast on Oct. 16. The first honoree — or victim — is legendary coach Jack Carlisle, Happy Jack to his legion of admirers. Folks, we are going to have some fun with this and we're going to make some money to make some badly needed improvements here at the museum.

For those who may not know about Happy Jack, here's a column I wrote about him years ago for The Clarion-Ledger:

You coach football for 50 years, mostly in Mississippi, you see some stuff. Jack Carlisle, retired and living in Brandon, has seen plenty. This is really his column. These are his stories. I'll do the typing. We start with Carlisle's first coaching job at Lula-Rich High School, north of Clarksdale. This was in 1954 and tiny Lula-Rich had only 14 players. One night they were playing at Oakland High, south of Batesville. There was no money for a bus — and with 14 players and a manager — no bus was necessary. The team made the trip in five separate cars. "Well, it got to be 8 o'clock, gametime, and one of the cars hadn't made it," Carlisle says. "Turns out, it broke down on some backwater road in the Delta. It was carrying the left side of my line." Carlisle was down to 11 players and the manager, a kid named Harris. Carlisle asked Harris to dress out. Harris said they'd have to ask his mom. So Carlisle asked the mother, whom he knew as Miss Polly, a science teacher. Miss Polly wasn't keen on the idea, but she reluctantly agreed. Sure enough, Carlisle's best player got hurt and was carried off the field. "So I tell my manager to go in the game and just stand off to the side and stay out of the way," Carlisle says. "I didn't want Miss Polly on me if the boy got hurt." First play: Lula-Rich was on defense and the smallish manager, draped in a uniform several sizes too large, stood 40 yards down the field. You've heard of the lonesome end? Harris was a lonesome safety. Of course, an Oakland runner broke through the line and barreled down the field with blockers ahead of him. One of those blockers took dead aim at Harris and knocked him head over heels into next week.

Orley Hood: Our pal, Duff . . .

Decades ago it was, a smashup between sports and music, a reminder that the best nights often start with one purpose and finish with another.

Something was happening with Ole Miss football. I forget what. It was 30 years ago. After covering a basketball game at Tad Smith, Rick and I wandered over to The Gin (may it rest in peace). “The Tangents are playing,” he said. “Bound to be some football players there.”

I don’t remember whether we got anything on Ole Miss football for the paper that night. I do remember the band — Winter time? What wintertime? — and he drank a lot of beer and they played a lot of songs I dearly loved then and still love today.

That was my introduction to Duff Dorrough, one of the all-time great guys. Duff died today after a long and Duff-like weirdly cheerful battle with liver cancer. He was to get a liver transplant a couple of weeks ago. Duff was the Pied Piper at the hospital, one doctor told a friend, playing his guitar and charming the other patients into random moments of care-free fun. But the cancer had spread out of control and the liver went to someone else, who, to my way of thinking, is now responsible to squeeze as much life as possible out of that organ.

You know, the way Duff would have.

There are a thousand stories about a guy who had thousands of friends and spread music and happiness around like they were peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread.

Here’s one more:

Long time ago, we’re sitting on Lallah Perry’s porch in Sleepy Hollow at the Neshoba County Fair, Lallah and me and Duff. She taught him art at Delta State. It was late morning, lazy time, no where to be and nothing to do. Coffee. A roll. Maybe a thought to the day’s first beer, Lallah telling stories about Duff.

He goes inside, maybe to find a top to pop. Lallah said, “You know, Duff is a deeply talented painter. The soul of a poet.” I nod like I know what she’s talking about.

“He’s good at everything,” she said. “Especially at being a human being.”

Orley Hood: When Saints really were Ain'ts

Oh, the humanity …

OK. The Saints aren’t a zeppelin burning in Lakehurst, N.J. As far as I know, nobody died in the Superdome last Sunday. Technically, anyway. The Saints are 0-3.

We can be forgiven, I guess, for thinking they’d be 3-0 going into the Packers game this week.

Alas … You win a Super Bowl, you figure, hey, this is the way life’s going to be. You go 14-4 before losing at San Francisco in last season’s playoffs. You suffer the weirdest lousiest off-season maybe ever, lose your all-world coach for a year, and a lot more besides, you haven’t tackled anybody the last two seasons, and still …

Washington, Carolina, Kansas City? Oh, please …

Who dat?

We can blame the refs. On the bright side, unlike John Fox and Jack del Rio, we didn’t get fined 25 grand for dissing the bums. On the downside, did you see that travesty?

Anyway, maybe we can figure the Packers got screwed even more egregiously and have spent valuable time this week venting because they got stone cold robbed at Seattle the other night.

Things could be worse. Trust me. I covered the Saints decades ago when J.D. Roberts, second only to owner John Mecum Jr. on the all-time Saints clueless list, coached. After the final game of one particularly awful season, Dave Parks, who had been a fine passing-catching tight end at San Francisco before coming to New Orleans, passed out a press release in the locker room at Tulane Stadium.

I read it, one page. It said he would never play for New Orleans again no matter what.

“You’re firing the organization?”
“I am,” he said.

I laughed.

He smiled.

At least now, the Saints have a chance.

Don’t they?

Orley Hood: Cool air + Friday night = bliss

Kismet or serendipity, take your pick. Autumn and cool weather have arrived in tandem as our high school lads in the larger classifications begin their quest to make the state football tournament tonight.

All across the state questions will be asked, and some answered, as we put away sweet old rivalries — aka, the preseason — and dive into divisional games, many of which are based these days not on the ancient hatreds but on the algorithms of enrollment figures with a necessary but often subtle nod to geography.

Can Brandon be that good? Or are Clinton and Northwest Rankin that bad? What of Madison Central and South Panola, two titans in apparent decline, scarred by staggering early losses?

What of Olive Branch? Are the Conquistadors the colossus of the North now that the sun seems finally to be setting on South Panola?

What of mighty Meridian? Petal?

Oak Grove? Would you bet a Coke and a hotdog against a team whose offensive coordinator is a three-time NFL MVP?

Regardless, fans will park their cars beneath the magnetic glow of stadium lights all across our state tonight, drawn to the light, to hope, to the idea that the opening of division play can be the start of a magical run.

Lather yourselves in bug spray, my friends, and may you go unbeaten, unbowed and unbitten.

 

Roasters aplenty for Carlisle event

Roasters of Jack Carlisle at the first annual Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Roast Oct. 16 will include many of his players from the many successful stops in his legendary coaching career.

Skipper Jernigan, who played for Carlisle at Murrah before going on to be a standout offensive guard at Ole Miss, will be the master of ceremonies. “That means I get to roast the roasters,” Jernigan said.

Roasters will include Rhesa Barksdale (Murrah), Wallace McMillan (Murrah), Paul Dongeiux (Murrah), George May (Prep), Tim Ellis (Ole Miss) and James Smith (Madison-Ridgeland Academy).

Carlisle, as an offensive assistant coach at Ole Miss in 1977, insisted on inserting Ellis into a game against eventual national champion Notre Dame. With Ellis at the helm, Ole Miss rallied in games waning moments for a 20-13 victory, one of the biggest in school history.

All proceeds from the roast will go to the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame, which has operated for more than 16 years without any tax money from any level of government. Carlisle was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2004.

His high school football teams won 262 games and lost 70, a winning percentage of 82 percent. He also served as the head coach at East Tennessee State where he coached current Atlanta Falcons coach Mike Smith.

The event is set for Tuesday, Oct. 16, at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum. A reception will begin a 5:30, followed by dinner and the program at 7. For more information on tickets or sponsorhip opportunities, call 601 982-8264 or go to msfame.com.

Click here for Roast Order Form