Ole Miss vs. LSU rivalry: 160 years of love, hate and the river’s edge

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  Wright ThompsonSep 18, 2026, 10:30 AM ET

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  Wright 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.

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DURING 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. A recent article at Garden and Gun cites Sherman saying he thought of Barnard when he spared the campus 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 film aired, Kiffin agreed to leave Oxford and coach LSU, taking his cutting-edge offensive coaches and schemes with him, and some of his players, too. He played love me-love me not for a month during the greatest season in Ole Miss history, including 1959, the kind of season that could happen only once in a fan's lifetime. Then he left the University-Oxford Airport to curses and middle fingers on a big white Challenger 350 owned by an LSU booster and commercial real estate tycoon. Photos of the jet on the runway, and video of fans screaming through a chain-link fence, became instant core images in the Ole Miss iconography, along with Archie Manning rolling out, and Eli Manning dropping back, and Chris Mitchell laying a devastating goal-line hit and Lucas Carneiro nailing another clutch kick. I thought about asking the owner of the jet if I could sit in it at the hangar, for the same reason people try to rent the bungalow where John Belushi died -- morbid curiosity -- but I couldn't phrase the email without sounding unhinged. And when Kiffin tried to sign two former Ole Miss players from NFL rosters, and an SEC lawsuit against LSU named him personally, the grievance burned as hot around here as I can remember. My 13-year-old cousin broke his family's television by punching it when Kiffin came on the screen in the Tigers' opener.

My Grove tailgate group text thread, usually reserved for logistics about fried chicken pickups -- Popeyes, spicy, dark -- came alive with remembering past transgressions we'd come across in recent years. An LSU fan put his bald head through a plate glass window on the square. Another leaned precariously against a parked car after losing in Oxford, slurring at the top of his lungs, presumably about the Tigers' better bowl invitation -- although maybe he just had strong opinions about credit card companies -- as he screamed over and over, "Capital One, b----. Capital One."

My friend Anne-Marie Gordon, a former Rebelette, said her teammates had been reliving the game in the 1990s when they got pummeled with whiskey bottles on the field at Tiger Stadium. And recalling how the chivalrous tuba players, sensing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for tuba players to impress beautiful women, helped form a shield around them. The LSU-Ole Miss rivalry game, often played around Halloween night, dominated my childhood. Over time, as LSU fans hated Nick Saban and Alabama more than us, and Mississippi State-Ole Miss turned toxic during the Hugh Freeze-Dan Mullen era, the rivalry cooled but never went away. Ole Miss fans still scream, "Go to hell, LSU," during the national anthem, even when we're playing Texas or Washington.

My parents, born in 1946 and 1947, came of age in the late 1950s when Ole Miss and LSU were two of the top teams every season. My mother was in Tiger Stadium with her parents and her brother on Halloween, 1959. The mythical Halloween night, when Billy Cannon ended the Rebels' national title hopes with a late-fourth-quarter punt return, 89 yards to take a 7-3 lead, weaving through 11 Ole Miss defenders and the Mississippi River bottomland fog.

My dad collected bootleg cassette tapes of old radio broadcasts. He loved to listen to past Ole Miss-LSU games driving to current Ole Miss-LSU games. It took a little more than an hour to get from our home to Oxford, east on Highway 6 where it intersected with Highway 61 at Clarksdale. Archie Manning, born in 1949 up the road from my hometown, says he doesn't remember much of a rivalry before Cannon's punt return.

"Really stirred up then," he said. "I listened to that on the radio with my dad."

Manning has lived in enemy territory, New Orleans, for 50 years. "When I came here," he said, "Ole Miss and LSU people hated each other. I've always tried to have fun with my LSU friends. I don't hate them. The Ole Miss-LSU thing died down there for a few years and Alabama took our place. It lost a little something."

I could hear him smile on the phone.

"I think it's gonna be back," he said.

ROBERT KHAYAT, A BELOVED figure in Oxford, put the starting point of the rivalry slightly earlier. He starred on the team that lost the national title on Cannon's punt return, then played in the NFL and ultimately became chancellor of Ole Miss, 134 years after F.A.P. Barnard left. (He's the one who got rid of the Confederate flag at Ole Miss games.)

Khayat said LSU emerged as Ole Miss' top rival around 1956. That was the year modern college football was born, the first year for athletic scholarships, the rise of the seven-figure network broadcast contracts, which crossed the million-dollar threshold in 1952, driving commercialization of the game. The same year scholarships arrived, the Sugar Bowl integrated, the beginning of a meritocracy which the governor of Georgia once described as a Southern "Armageddon."

Cannon arrived as one kind of college sports ended and another began. The Ivy League bowed out of big-time football instead of offering scholarships and has never contended for a national title again. On Aug. 3, 1956, Cannon played his last high school game, an All-Star contest in Tiger Stadium. The day before, the last living Civil War veteran died in Duluth, Minnesota. For six years Private Albert Woolson, a drummer in the American army, lived on the same block as a young Bob Dylan, who as a high school student in 1956 would make his first recording. In 1957, the NCAA won a worker's comp lawsuit filed by the widow of a player who'd died on the field. In response, the governing body popularized the term "student-athlete" specifically to deny future claims. Walter Byers, the first executive director of the NCAA, admitted the cynical intention in a memoir. The court case victory rested in part on colleges denying they were "in the football business," which they clearly were. The entire modern sport rose from the foundation of a lie, the repercussions of which we are still managing, and the road to NIL and Lane Kiffin had been unleashed.

Khayat, who lives six doors down from me now, still gets fired up remembering Halloween 1959. LSU, the defending national champion, was ranked No. 1, and Ole Miss was ranked No. 3. Bunnie Cannon agreed with Manning that the rivalry started with her father and that night. It felt as nasty then as it does now. "I have a lot of stuff Ole Miss players sent my dad before the Halloween game," she said.

"Can I come see that?"

"Sure!" she said.

Billy died eight years ago. For his family, only reminders of his absence remain. Her house is full of memorabilia, some valuable, some arcane.

"We kept it all," she said, with a laugh. "Everything. Even his underwear."

CANNON ROSE FROM childhood poverty to fame and then to federal prison for 2½ years in the mid-1980s for counterfeiting. He was patient zero for a now cliched post-modern media narrative: Man is born into nothing and makes himself great, which transforms him into a folk hero, which comes with the expectation that he remain in character every moment of every day, until the character is the only thing left. Then he collapses, not under the weight, but from the inside out. A moral crumbling. John Updike called it the mask eating the face. But Cannon got the rare second chance, the redemption ending, which came during his final and most important act. He became the prison dentist, and then director of dentistry, of the Louisiana state pen at Angola.

His job there allowed him to rediscover the long-buried human being known as Billy Cannon, son of Harvey and Virgie. He became beloved by inmates. He insisted their shackles be removed in his office, and that they receive compassionate care. He loved helping people "who'd been thrown away," his daughter said. Cannon got a lot more interesting once I considered that there might be a divide between how he felt inside and how his public image represented him. He'd always existed in my imagination as a rough character who sneered in every photograph. As the opposition. As someone to root against.

The glory days of the Ole Miss-LSU rivalry happened between 1956 and 1972, from Cannon and Jake Gibbs through Archie Manning and Bert Jones, which was the era of segregated Southern football. Both programs integrated in 1972, the year of the last great controversy before Kiffin, when the Tiger Stadium clock operators allowed Jones and the home team to run two goal-line plays in four seconds, leading to a game-winning touchdown. The rivalry itself, like the last traveling beams of light from a dead star, is left over from that vanished era of college football. But the shadow remains. Lane Kiffin got in a lot of trouble for talking to Vanity Fair this summer about the difficulty of recruiting Black families to Ole Miss. He described conversations with recruits, which another Ole Miss staffer once described to me in private, that ended with, "My grandparents aren't letting me move to Oxford, Mississippi."

"That doesn't come up when you say Baton Rouge, Louisiana," he said.

Kiffin didn't say anything untrue but he committed the sin of reminding everyone that in the beginning, where source-code images and sounds curate and shape our memories, there were seas of Confederate flags being waved at football games in Oxford, thousands of them, and there was Billy Cannon's punt return. Both schools were seen in the 1950s as representing the "Southern way of life," another bit of euphemistic code that just meant the caste system. The actual states of Mississippi and Louisiana have nearly identical histories around slavery and Jim Crow but the flagship universities carry those sins in different ways, because of the images created in football stadiums between 1956 and 1972. Our histories are written in coded signs and not in the recitation of facts. A photograph of fans and Confederate flags carries more emotional information about Ole Miss than David Sansing's book, and listening to the radio call of Cannon's Halloween run washes away almost everything but his greatness from that era of LSU.

I knew Billy at the end of his life. He could be prickly and gruff, but he treated everyone the same. Once we sat on the tailgate of his truck outside the prison gates, and he told me that me and my fellow media people needed to leave then LSU phenom Leonard Fournette alone. He knew how fame and expectations could wound a human being once the cheering stopped. In that way, Cannon and his Ole Miss adversaries have more in common with each other than with the people who cheer for or against them might remember or understand. The search for symbolism in the rivalry starts and stops with fans, who each supply their own meaning. The actual players have a much different experience. These men remain trapped, never allowed to age, avatars in a complex, multigenerational morality play.

Even on football weekends that feel loaded with meaning and meanness, we don't usually remember why we hate, or why we love, a copy without an original, and the price we pay for these emotions is visible in how the objects of our animus and affection crumble under the attention. We have been conditioned to believe the culture war is between competing visions for America, but the real enemy in the war for our soul might be amnesia. If we cannot remember something as fundamental as a reason for loving and hating, then no memory, no inheritance, no tribal imperative, is forever. If I cannot remember something as sacred as which Ole Miss button I buried with my father, then does any memory matter at all? What use is loving, or hating, if we might one day forget how, and then forget we'd never known? So we project things onto sports rivalries, and hold grudges in our personal lives, as a ritual and a practice. A rite. We stay sharp in case we turn on each other again. We stage these reenactments in preparation and the stage lights keep us from seeing how badly everything seems to fall apart, from Kiffin on a private jet to Cannon in the fog.

Once Billy and I stood around talking at a reception at the warden's house during the Angola Prison Rodeo. An LSU fan spotted Cannon across the garden and eventually made his approach.

"Are you Billy Cannon?" the man asked finally.

Cannon smiled, with an edge of melancholy in his voice.

"Well," he said, "I'm what's left of him."

I STOOD ON Bunnie Cannon's porch and she let me inside. Her dad's Heisman Trophy sat on her tiled kitchen counter. I ran my hand over the plaque.

"How do you insure that?" I asked.

"I just put it under my homeowner's," she said.

This is the trophy that sat for decades in the dining room of TJ Ribs, a beloved Baton Rouge bar and barbecue joint. Billy loaned it to the owner to keep it from getting seized by creditors. Now Bunnie has it back. We walked into a wide hallway off the living room. Jerseys and letter jackets and memorabilia filled an enormous black gun safe. She pulled out a pair of cleats.

"His original shoes from LSU," she said. "He only had two pairs. I have both of them."

"Are those the punt return shoes?"

"I think so," she said.

Then she pulled out the items I drove down to see.

"So before there was social media ... ," she said, cackling with laughter.

She spread out a bunch of yellowed newspaper clippings and scrawled hate-filled notes, along with some odd and slightly menacing gifts. Her parents got these in the mail before the 1959 Ole Miss-LSU game. Several Rebels fans -- not players, it turns out -- took it upon themselves to poke the bear. It bothered Cannon enough that he never threw them away. Or maybe he just thought they were hilarious.

"This is the kind of s--- that they would get in the mail from the Ole Miss folks," Bunnie said, laughing. Some people wrote notes. They were mostly innocent. The most violent one he got was a threat to "stop you dead," followed by, almost as if the author was going out of his way not to send a death threat, a caveat: "We mean no yards, son."

One fan said Ole Miss running back Charlie Flowers -- I went to high school with his grandchildren -- would "run over" the Tigers. A lot of them called Billy a woman. One fan mailed him a pair of panties. Another carefully crocheted a, um, gentleman's sausage. Complete with two potatoes. It was red and blue.

Bunnie held it up and we both burst into laughter.

"So this is the pièce de resistance," she said. "They would not put that in the museum."

"Well, I don't blame them," I said.

"It's art," she said, still laughing.

One fan mailed a small Confederate flag.

One fan wrote, "Football is for men. You all women."

Another signed the note, "Old Myth."

The back half of her house was a shrine. She kept his record collection. A bottle of unopened Taylor's champagne from Billy and Dot's wedding in 1956. Programs and newspaper clippings, which Billy's mom saved. All his high school track medals. I'm what's left of him. In packed cabinets, the Sugar Bowl trophy, an award from a local VFW chapter, and in the hall, a shadowbox holding everything he carried on the day he died. A wool watch cap, and a pair of glasses. A wallet and a pocket knife. A horseshoe for good luck. An idea took shape. Bunnie, too, is fighting a battle against amnesia, not just to protect her father but to protect herself, because if he vanishes, then she does, too.

"Do you like being surrounded by all this stuff, or does it make you miss him more," I asked.

"Both," she said.

We sat in her living room, in front of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, and talked. The truth is, she can feel his legend fading. Young kids grow up hearing about Joe Burrow now. The players don't know Billy anymore. He used to visit the LSU locker room and his alpha male energy earned him immediate acceptance. The current stars looked at him and saw themselves. But eight recruiting classes have arrived on campus since his death. Cannon is receding. His youngest daughter is fighting to protect his memory. At her urging Louisiana Public Broadcasting made a documentary, which was premiering that night at an event on campus. Bunnie wants to write a book and is hoping to turn that script into a feature film.

The third act of all of these projects focuses on the change Cannon made at Angola, both in the men he helped and inside himself. He met an inmate, serving a life sentence for murder, soon after he arrived. The prisoner, Roosevelt Hall, was born the year Cannon enrolled at LSU. Hall began working for Cannon as a trusty. They became friends. Hall once described to me how much he loved Dr. Cannon, and how they used to talk about shame and forgiveness.

"They saved each other," Bunnie told me.

When Cannon knew he was dying, he sat down and handwrote a 20-odd-page letter to the Louisiana Parole Board, explaining how Hall had been rehabilitated and what he'd meant personally to Cannon. When Billy died his family found the letter and mailed it. The parole board released Hall from Angola. He's now back with his family and keeps in touch with the Cannons.

Bunnie spends a lot of her energy helping people remember her dad.

"I keep thinking, OK, well, what am I gonna do?" Bunnie said. "I have all of this stuff. Let's put it in a museum. And I'm just trying to do the next right thing. I'm trying to make my dad a cult hero at LSU. Because they're forgetting about him. And I don't want them to forget about him."

I felt that deeply. My dad has been gone since 2004. Sometimes months pass without someone saying his name to me. Every now and then a stranger will reach out with a fond story. The most recent came from Bill Hayes, from Wheaton, Illinois, who was an Ole Miss fraternity brother. He'd seen a photograph of me as a child with my dad in the most recent Southern Living magazine. He recognized my father and tracked down my email.

"The last time I saw your dad was in the late summer of 1968 at a wedding in Clarksdale," he wrote. "After graduation from Ole Miss I went on active duty with the army for two years, then lost touch with my Ole Miss brothers over the years. About five years ago I reached out to Jack Laurenzi and he notified me of your dad's passing. I was saddened to hear this. One of my biggest regrets was not staying in closer touch with my Mississippi friends. Your dad was a fun, nice and honorable man. I was lucky to have known him."

My favorite thing about the ritual of Ole Miss games, particularly against LSU, is how my dad feels so present. Rivalries carry both love and hate, like his buttons. The protagonists change, coaches and players come and go, but we reenact these dramas and tragedies on the same ground, year after year, trying to hold ashes in our hands. It's a delicate balance. That's what makes Kiffin's conduct so upsetting to so many, I think. Not that he followed the rules of modern capitalism but that he didn't understand how his personal ambitions supercharged the hate of the game and pushed the love into the shadows. He was casual with something sacred. To Kiffin, the Ole Miss-LSU game is about scoring more points, about right here, right now, but to me, and to Bunnie Cannon, and to people like us in Oxford and Baton Rouge, the game is an excuse to remember, to cherish those who have left us, and protect them from oblivion for one more year.

I GOT TO THE documentary movie event early.

People from Louisiana can always be trusted with a party. All around me at the Lod Cook Alumni Center, right on the lake, caterers set up chafing dishes of jambalaya and fried chicken. The bartenders got the beer cold. They looked cold, you know what I mean? A four-piece jazz band dressed in purple and gold set up. There were 250 seats. The room was still empty. A few people sat in the front row, and next to them sat an old woman in a wheelchair.

It was Dot Cannon. Bunnie waved me over.

Dot nodded at the seat next to her. We talked for a few minutes. A huge screen in her line of sight displayed a black and white photograph of Billy, with his crew cut and cocky sneer. She told me she found all this "overwhelming," and as we caught up, she grabbed my hand. After a minute or two, not wanting to monopolize her time, I started to make my goodbyes and subtly remove my hand. She gripped it tighter and we sat in silence, for the longest time, maybe a full minute, holding hands. The pressure to speak felt overwhelming to me.

Finally I asked, "Where did y'all meet?"

She smiled.

"Istrouma High School," she said.

The room filled with people in coats and ties, people coming into the air conditioning from the low-hanging heat of campus. The sun set. Outside the live oaks threw shadows off the Mediterranean buildings and across the wide parade ground, a reminder that this college was opened by William Tecumseh Sherman. Four of Billy's five kids found seats. Terri couldn't make it. Billy Jr. wore overalls. The former NFL MVP Bert Jones showed up. So did Patriots star Kevin Faulk. Everyone leaned down to kiss Dot on the cheek and tell her about their lives.

"Hello, sweet lady," one said.

Two men in tan flat caps waited just outside the circle. They clearly wanted an audience but didn't want to be disrespectful. Former players and elected officials shook hands with the Cannons. Finally Dot looked through the crowd of well-wishers and saw a familiar face. She made eye contact with one of the two men.

"ROOSEVELT!" she yelled with delight.

Roosevelt Hall, Cannon's longtime Angola trusty, rushed over and they embraced, holding the hug longer than she held the others.

"Thank you for coming," she said softly.

THE NEXT MORNING, I took Highway 61 out of Baton Rouge back towards Mississippi. Even the supernova of the rivalry, the man who birthed the hatred, spent the last act of his life chasing forgiveness and peace, and I couldn't shake the vision of Bunnie Cannon keeping everything her dad ever touched and losing him anyway. I thought of my dad's mystery button and felt Dot Cannon grip my hand. On my left loomed the exoskeleton of the ExxonMobil plant, the old Standard Oil facility, where Billy Cannon's father, Harvey, moved for work. Harvey's dead, and Billy's dead, but the plant still processes half a million barrels a day. The first town south is St. Francisville, where Cannon lived and kept his horses. A sign pointed to Rosedown Plantation, which first opened for tours in the 1920s, at the very end of King Cotton and the beginning of the nostalgia for it. In 1956, the year Cannon arrived at LSU and college football became professional, an oil heiress purchased the decaying property from the original owner's family, spending millions to restore it. Her father's company, Humble Oil, is now called ExxonMobil, owners of the plant where Billy Cannon's father worked.

A sign across the highway advertised deer corn.

I drove slow and stopped often, without a particular reason. The river hid behind the levee. The Mississippi brings crops to market, and petroleum to the world, a river of commodities. The history of America is the history of cotton and oil is the history of Mississippi and Louisiana. Somehow it seems fitting that the colleges from down here are at the heart of the NIL game and the sorts of moves that Kiffin has made. Mississippi and Louisiana came of age as colonies of London bankers, Manchester manufacturers and Liverpool shipping barons, many of whom were also slave traders. The harvest moon never sets. The Liverpool Price of Cotton is the one true way. Lane Kiffin stands atop a long tradition of Mississippi and Louisiana men who traded crops and crude.

Our states share the river, which represents nature, and we share the levees, which represent our unending attempt to control it. The levees broke in Mississippi and Louisiana in 1927. It's 2026 and the Army Corps of Engineers exerts tremendous human control over what used to be God's dominion, and so concrete aprons and weirs direct the water where we want it to go. Control breeds overconfidence. Our family farm abuts the river. I know what I'm talking about. I have a house within eyeshot of the levee. My uncle lives on the other side of it, unprotected, in concert with the ancient forces. When the water gets high, he takes his young grandson to school in the predawn darkness by driving a side-by-side from his house to a boat, which he steers with cold, chapped hands to dry land, where his truck is parked. I asked him once what he and this little boy did in the boat. He smiled and said they huddled together and sang Old Man River.

Living alongside the river feels like a superstitious pagan religion. We never speak of the lurking power. Four and a half million gallons of water rush into the Gulf every second. Growing up, the adults told horror stories about what happened to kids who took ski boats out on the river. That hand-me-down fear is the only visible sign of the otherwise unspeakable knowledge that one day, the river will erase us. Before the Ole Miss football team was nicknamed the Rebels, they were known as the Ole Miss Flood. The first LSU mascot was the Pelican, which represents self-sacrifice, or as Randy Newman sang, they're trying to wash us away.

I stopped for state line hot boudin and drove across the border into Wilkinson County. My grandmother, my mom's mom, was a Wilkinson. That side of the family arrived shortly after the Mayflower, moving over generations from Virginia to North Carolina to Georgia and, finally, to Mississippi, in the decade before we became a state. A road sign pointed towards a county museum. I parked on the main drag, which is not thriving but not dead either. The chatty woman in the museum, who talked in a manic tumble about Indian mounds and hometown boy Jefferson Davis, told me a strange fact about Wilkinson County.

The man who invented the dollar sign died here.

WHEN I GOT to Cary, Mississippi, near where Sherman's men fought off a Confederate unit to protect the navy's gunboats, I saw a shipping container painted blue and yellow in a yard. On the side were huge letters: "United we stand, divided we fall." I drove up Highway 61 through Leland, hometown of Jim Henson, who created the first Kermit the Frog in 1955, the same month the Supreme Court's "Brown II" decision ordered the South to integrate. Kermit's central problem in life was the color of his skin, and how it wasn't easy being green. Through Shaw and Cleveland, where I stopped for a box of Dodge's gas station chicken with packets of Texas Pete. A yeast roll soaked up the grease. Then Mound Bayou, the all-Black town founded by Jefferson Davis' brother's freed slaves, and then Shelby. My mom's hometown.

These are the pastures of my youth. I remember hitting tennis balls over my grandmother's house with a Wiffle ball bat. The air felt close and hot. My parents celebrated their wedding reception in the yard where those balls would land. The church where they married burned this summer and is now a wounded wreck, sooty charred beams stripped of modesty, rotting in the verdant air. I passed it like a spirit moving between dimensions. The hot flat sun conjured heat devils over the budding cotton plants and the white plastic irrigation pipes. Just up on the left, covered in vines, kudzu and scrappy trees, is a shell of a building, almost invisible through the foliage. That's the hospital where my mother was born. When my daughter Louise was 3, we drove through Shelby and from her car seat, she called out in a little voice with the cutest toddler lisp, "Why are the building so sad?"

I reached my hometown, Clarksdale, passing a mile and a half from my father's grave and his Ole Miss button, which decomposition experts told me had already decayed so much that the text was "most likely" long gone. Did it still matter which one I put in his jacket pocket? Did any single act of memory matter as much as the remembering in the end? Billy Cannon's nickname was Legend, his number retired at Tiger Stadium, and Bunnie fears even he is being forgotten. What chance do the rest of us have? She carefully folds yellowed hate mail and protects old jerseys in a fireproof safe. The beauty of her actions lives in their futility. Almost nobody remembers that the Ole Miss-LSU rivalry was born with the radical invention of athletic scholarships. Those rule changes rattled the establishment and caused all the same hand-wringing that dominates the news today. We raged and we forgot. The same amnesia will follow Kiffin and the NIL revolution. Someday nobody will remember anything about what college football was like when all an athlete got was a scholarship. Nobody will remember what Dabo Swinney cared about, or why, or that his values ever existed. The collective angst isn't because of the changes so much as the speed of the changes. Things used to disappear slowly and we grieved over time. And we let go of some things and held onto others for a little while longer. Now things are erased overnight. Indiscriminately. They say water remembers but the river is always changing course and forgetting where it ran.

I made a right towards Oxford, a town captured by the growing fervor awaiting Kiffin's return. I thought about recent headlines -- Ole Miss suing kids who transferred to LSU with Kiffin to get the NIL money back. I thought about the building on campus named after Barnard, who was run out of town. It houses the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, an institution he would have admired. Sherman did not burn the building. No record exists of whether that decision had anything to do with the letter his friend wrote him. There is bitterness between the schools, but there is friendship, too. Love and hate, in equal measure, like my dad's buttons. We all get to choose. My text thread erupted with more news about Oxford's building rage against Kiffin. A local mom wrote such a scathing letter to DoorDash about hiring Lane as a pitchman that the company called her. She signed it "with extreme disappointment." I suspect the anger at Kiffin is preemptive self-loathing. He's a proxy. We hate that we will forget his betrayal. We will forget how he made us feel. In our hyperreal world the forgetting can happen at the instant of remembering. A single transaction. One day, perhaps soon, the only memory of this synaptic anger will be archived in stories like this one. Which won't ever exist on paper. Recently I learned many of my old stories had been erased from the internet. Eventually the page you're reading will be a 404 error message.

THERE IS ONE living Ole Miss player who was on the field for the Halloween night punt return. I texted Jake Gibbs, who is 87 and lives south of the Oxford town square.

His wife wrote back from his phone.

"I knew your father Walter well and was so fond of him. Actually have a cute story about him as we had a blind date our freshman year. I was Amanda Povall from Lexington."

We agreed upon a time and I rang their doorbell. Jake led me through his house into his den, where he sits in his comfortable chair and watches the big television mounted on the wall. This is where he'll watch the LSU game. His parking pass is too far from the stadium for him to walk, and if the game starts to go bad, he can just look at the blown-up photo hanging above the television. It's the 1960 Sugar Bowl. Ole Miss versus LSU, the rematch of the punt return game. In the photo the score is 0-0 and Gibbs is about to throw a long pass. His arm is cocked at a right angle. He still remembers the throw. It went for a touchdown.

"I hit Cowboy," he said. "Wide open. He went 43 yards for a touchdown."

Cowboy is what they called James Woodruff, who died over eight years ago, too, in Florida where he'd retired. He requested his ashes be buried back in Mississippi, next to his mom. These men were Mississippi legends their whole lives. Woody Dabbs. Robert Khayat. Larry Grantham. Cowboy.

Jake looked at me. Sixty-six years disappear.

"Billy Cannon had 8 yards rushing in that game."

I must have looked skeptical.

"Look at the stats," he said. (He was correct.)

He's got an old-fashioned Southern accent, almost extinct, softer than the cartoonish twang from popular culture. It reminded me of my dad. His wife called out from behind a closed door. She asked me to come in and apologized for "not having her face on," as she explained she hadn't been feeling well. But she wanted to tell me a story about my dad. As freshmen, they'd gone on a date to an Ole Miss football game in Jackson. Riding the Phi Delta Theta bus back to Oxford, she said she looked around and couldn't locate my dad.

"Where's Walter?" she asked someone.

They laughed and explained that he was at the back of the bus.

Mooning other motorists.

Amanda Povall Gibbs, from Lexington, Mississippi, laughed with glee, and I did, too. She smiled and I slipped back into the den, taking a seat beneath the television and the photograph.

Jake talked about how he never escaped that Halloween fog. He played 10 seasons with the New York Yankees, a teammate and friend of Mickey Mantle. For 19 years he managed the Ole Miss baseball team, and when he'd coach third base at Alex Box Stadium in Baton Rouge, LSU students would play the radio call from the punt return on a boom box. He learned to make jokes about how he missed Cannon twice.

Finally late in life they met again. Cannon had been invited to a fish fry out in the country near Oxford, at Ole Miss PA announcer Charles Walker's place. A bunch of old Ole Miss players waited on Cannon to arrive, with plates of hot fish, and bottles or cans of cold beer.

When Cannon walked in the room, Gibbs approached with a grin.

"Buddy, let's go outside," he said. "I'm gonna tackle your big ass tonight!"

Everyone laughed. They signed Ole Miss and LSU helmets and talked about glory days and grandkids. The old men broke free of their images. They just didn't see the point anymore in looking for anything but connection.

My dad loved the Episcopal prayer that ended with "the world is now too dangerous for anything but the truth and too small for anything but love," and if I had to bury him again, I don't think I would choose something from a sports rivalry. Perhaps I'd include a photograph of the grandchildren he never met. I managed grief then with the inherited artifacts of tribal codes and now that those have disappeared, literally burned away by the gases of time, I can see a path towards the future that doesn't only loop back into the past. One day Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss AD Keith Carter will meet as old men.

Billy Cannon, after that initial trip, came back to Oxford a few times. The last visit was for Ole Miss coach John Vaught's 94th birthday, near the end. They sat outside together on an iron bench at a nursing home, talking about the night of the punt return. A group of former Ole Miss players, once enemies now friends, crowded around their shoulders and smiled.

MY FATHER DIED on September 29, 2004, less than two years before Coach Vaught, during a losing season, and 52 days before Ole Miss played LSU at night in Tiger Stadium. (LSU won 27-24 on a last-minute interception.) He loved Ole Miss, and he loved hating LSU, and probably hated how much he actually loved the Tigers, too, and the romantic idea of their Gothic football stadium on the banks of the river. I remember the last time we tailgated in Baton Rouge together, making an amateur attempt at jambalaya before Eli Manning beat the Tigers in 2001, and we both stayed in the stadium long after the game ended, listening to the Ole Miss band.

I'll remember that on Saturday when I walk to the Grove with those grandchildren he'll never meet. Or maybe he has met them somehow. My oldest daughter, now 8, told me once, matter-of-factly, that he lived in the sunset. One year on his birthday, April 14, she asked if we could write him a message and tie it to a balloon. We went to a parking lot near our house, next door to Khayat randomly, and released the message into the air, watching until it vanished from sight. I wept and she gave me a hug. You know, if I had to bury my dad again, maybe I would include the GEAUX TO HELL LSU button, or ARCHIE'S ARMY, and it wouldn't matter that one day I'd forget which one.

Because I remember the moment in front of his open drawer when I paused the rituals of death and remembered the things he loved about life. He loved the river. He loved singing Old Man River. He loved Elvis and Jerry Lee, loved Percy Sledge and Sam Cooke, and he'd have loved the discovery of the letters between Sherman and Barnard. He loved Archie Manning, and the mythology around Billy Cannon's punt return, and he'd have loved my daughters. That's what I'm thinking about right now in the shadow of Ole Miss versus LSU. I believe he'll be with us, with them, on Saturday, not just in spirit but in every way imaginable, so long as we remember what he loved, and that he loved us. And I believe whatever he felt about Lane Kiffin wouldn't survive the moment he laid eyes on those two little girls.