playWright ThompsonSep 18, 2026, 10:30 AM ETCloseWright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN and is executive producer of TrueSouth and co-executive producer of Backstory. He is the author of New York Times bestselling The Cost of These Dreams.Multiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsDURING THE WEEKS leading up to Lane Kiffin’s return to Oxford, I thought a lot about a button my dad wore to Ole Miss games that said GEAUX TO HELL LSU.My dad alternated between this button about LSU’s place in the fiery afterlife and another one that said ARCHIE’S ARMY, a tribute to the great scrambling quarterback Archie Manning. Both sides of a fan’s emotional currency, love and hate. Dad seemed to choose the LSU button more often than not.
Something about the bitterness of hatred trumped the sugar high of love, which is probably why the GEAUX TO HELL button remains a core memory of my late father. I buried him with it, along with a ticket to the Masters, and I can see it now, the serifs on the font, the white background with red letters. I tend to see color and sound where full memories should be, the flash of a madras shirt, the sunlight skipping off a sousaphone’s bell or the chrome bumper of a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham. I don’t remember specific days, or scores, and the only moment that remains completely intact is when my dad threw a pass to me during a tailgate and I laid out to make a diving grab.
At that moment Jake Gibbs, former Ole Miss football star and New York Yankees catcher, walked past and said, “Nice catch!”Dad loved retelling that story on game days, so all these years later, sitting here adrift in memory, I wonder if it really happened at all. I sometimes feel the urge to protect every fragile piece of the past, to catalog artifacts, to preserve the old stories and relics. I feel it now, with a football game approaching, and bringing with it a rivalry’s welcome and unwelcome ghosts.I remember clearly the day before my dad’s funeral. The house on Clark Street filled with food and people.
I remember walking through our grove of magnolia trees and talking to an obituary writer from the Memphis or Jackson paper. Inside, Abe’s barbecue sandwiches sweated grease through brown paper sacks. I had the sensation of watching myself fulfill a prophecy. Someone from the funeral home rang the doorbell.
They needed clothes. My mother and I picked an Italian sport coat he loved. I slipped the Masters badge into a pocket and went into a drawer in my dad’s dressing room to find the Ole Miss button. I remember now both buttons were in there.
GEAUX TO HELL LSU and ARCHIE’S ARMY.I hear the creaky noise the drawer made when it opened and closed.But I cannot remember picking the button up, putting my hands on one or the other. The choice seems to slip from my mind even as I’m telling it. I panic at the desecration in that. What kind of son doesn’t remember something that important?
I have tried these past 22 years to carry his memory with me, but I am failing. Things erode and blur.I recall wondering whether love or hate was a better sentiment for the afterlife. But the memory ends there. The next thing I can picture is a long slow line of cars, and a program from the previous funeral left behind in the hearse, for a boy who had died in a fraternity house fire.
That’s it. My father is buried at the intersection of Lee Drive and Stovall Road, and his body is down there in the dirt right now with an Ole Miss button. I just can’t remember which one.BEFORE THERE WAS animosity there was friendship.For more than 160 years, a story about Ole Miss and LSU hid in plain sight. I stumbled upon it this summer searching the archives of the New York Tribune.
On April 19, 1891, the paper printed letters exchanged during the Civil War between the former first chancellor of Ole Miss, F.A.P. Barnard, and the first superintendent of the school that would become LSU, William Tecumseh Sherman, both Northerners who sided with the United States in the Civil War. Barnard, the Tribune article stated, asked his friend, General Sherman, to spare the Ole Miss campus while leading soldiers all over the state of Mississippi.Barnard’s original letter, according to Barnard’s widow and Sherman, had been lost. David Sansing’s canonical history of Ole Miss says Sherman and Barnard first met on the Mississippi Central train.
The two men’s friendship is often reported in university histories and in Chapter 11 of Barnard’s posthumously edited memoirs, as is the general sense the campus may have been spared because of relationships. But none of the books I read about Ole Miss, Sherman or Barnard reported the plea for mercy. The newspaper article is the only mention I found, a reminder that not even something as chronicled as the Civil War is ever fully excavated.We take the past seriously in our corner of the world. My aunt recently called my mom and walked her through our family tree all the way back to Charlemagne, the original Confederate general.
Mississippi and Louisiana, before the Revolution, were part of French Louisiana. La Louisiane. Ole Miss-LSU for us goes back long before anyone thought of Billy Cannon’s Halloween run, or the crooked clock operator in Tiger Stadium — set your watches back four seconds; if you know you know — or the fact that two different men in the last 20 years, Ed Orgeron and Lane Kiffin, have been head coach of both the Rebels and the Tigers.Mississippi and Louisiana are separated by the Mississippi River, including the bluffs of Vicksburg where the United States Navy bravely ran more than 3 miles of cannon fire to flank the city and end the Confederacy (most people don’t know that Vicksburg fell on the same day as Robert E. Lee’s retreat in the rain from Gettysburg).
The states are connected by Highway 61, the most famous road in music. Elvis Presley was born in Mississippi but got his big break in Louisiana. Jerry Lee Lewis was born in Louisiana, on the river, but died in Mississippi. Eazy-E’s grandparents were born in Greenville, Mississippi, and Ice Cube’s grandparents were born in Jackson Parish, Louisiana.
We’ve got Sam Cooke and Rick Ross (both Clarksdale). They’ve got Percy Sledge (lived in Baton Rouge) and Lil Wayne (Hollygrove, New Orleans). Both states love crawfish, music and, of course, football.We share Kiffin, and Coach O, and Archie Manning, from the Rebels and the Saints, a native of Drew, Mississippi, and a five-decade resident of New Orleans. Billy Cannon, the 1959 Heisman Trophy-winning LSU running back, was born in Neshoba County, Mississippi, before his dad moved to work at the Standard Oil plant in north Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Our states share so much, is what I mean, from Sherman and Barnard’s friendship to the Mississippi River and Highway 61, the Blues Highway, from Billy Cannon to N.W.A. I understand the connections between my state and our neighbor, and how the football rivalry cycles between friendly ribbing and real animus.Maybe all those similarities are why the flagship schools have hated each other, the kind of competition that exists between brothers, but that’s not how it felt in Oxford, Mississippi, this summer and early fall. I don’t want to speak for Baton Rouge. But the other night, my 5- and 8-year-old daughters watched some of the LSU-Clemson game.
Without a word from me, they started yelling at the screen about hating LSU, which they’d both clearly heard at school. The 5-year-old felt particularly aggrieved that LSU “stole Juice” Kiffin, Lane Kiffin’s yellow lab who’d been a popular guest at Oxford preschools. Louise wanted to know if Juice would still come see them. She didn’t understand that he would never again return to her school, and that the reason was football.ALL SUMMER AND INTO the 100-degree fall, Ole Miss people seethed about Kiffin and the end of last season.
He coached the Rebels to the playoff and starred in a documentary about how much Oxford had saved his family and maybe even his life. Sixty-six days after the fi
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