You want the real dirt on the old Alex Box Stadium? You got it.
You want to sit in your old seat—albeit in your own house—and close your eyes and think about Ben McDonald’s fastball or Todd Walker’s sweet batting stroke or Ryan Theriot sprinting around third headed for home? It’s all yours.
Just go online to alexboxauctions.net and bid away. All the stuff is sitting in a warehouse on the other side of Baton Rouge just waiting to get sold.
It’s been done many times before: Think Yankee Stadium, for one recent example, but rarely to this degree with a college venue. In the case of venerable old Alex Box Stadium, the idea came from LSU superfan Ron McDaniel, who pitched the concept the last time LSU renovated Tiger Stadium. He wanted to sell the seats that were torn out, but the school declined.
When the new Alex Box Stadium opened and its old namesake was destined for demolition, LSU’s Herb Vincent and McDaniel’s company figured out a way to make it work. Sales of everything that could be salvaged—from the gold seats to signs to sections of bleachers to pieces of the foul poles to, yes, even dirt—are available.
LSU will receive 50% of the gross revenues, which will be split between the athletic department and the university. We’re not talking about a fortune in the grand, major-college-athletic scheme of things—McDaniel hopes to generate a half-million dollars in gross sales—but the emotional connection for buyers is huge.
“I pinch myself that we’re actually doing this,” McDaniel says.
Relatives of the late Alex Box himself have bought items. McDaniel tells of one fan who bought items because his late parents were LSU fans, and the memorabilia strikes so close to home.
“As passionate as we are about this, I tell people all the time that we have LSU baseball fans that don’t know we have a football team,” McDaniel says.
A large part of that credit goes to legendary coach Skip Bertman, who led the Tigers to five NCAA titles, the last in 2000. Bertman, interestingly, isn’t interested in the items himself.
“I do have some great photographs, though,” says Bertman, who took over as LSU’s coach in 1983 and became personally responsible for improving The Box from a small ballpark to a mecca for college baseball.
Bertman has signed many of the pieces and said he was thrilled that fans are buying them.
McDaniel, 42, grew up in Central and graduated from Southeastern Louisiana. But he’s a huge LSU fan and a football, basketball and baseball season-ticket holder who is one of the original founders of the LSU-devoted Web site tigerroar.com and was brought in by the Tiger Athletic Foundation in 2000 “to be a fan consultant and give a fan’s perspective to their Web site,” he says.
What’s more, his Maxon Media is a graphic design and multimedia company that got its start working with TAF. McDaniel’s Maxon partner, Michael Lipe, is an LSU grad from Shreveport who is fully immersed in the Alex Box project, as is Calvin Fabre, who developed the auction system, McDaniel says.
“Maxon had done work with the TAF in the past and has been a successful partner, so they were consulted and eventually contracted on this project,” says Vincent, LSU’s associate vice chancellor for university relations and senior associate athletic director.
“We were already doing some sites that had shopping and shipping, so we knew what to do,” McDaniel says. His company’s take won’t be as large as LSU’s, because Maxon has paid extensively for the moving and storage of the items and the costs involved with selling them.
“It’s more about passion,” McDaniel says with a smile.
Rows and rows of those old bright-yellow seats. Signs that are way too big for your living room. Small signs from the snack bars. Pieces of the backstop net framed and signed by current LSU Coach Paul Mainieri.
There are also items for sale, not up for auction, including prints of the final out in 2008 by Lafayette artist Tony Bernard that include a handful of Alex Box dirt. Other items can be personalized, and everything comes with certificates of authenticity. The most expensive item to go so far was a set of the iron gates through which fans entered the stadium, which sold for more than $4,000.
“Auctioning off these items from the old Alex Box is a great way for fans and former players and coaches and former coaches to hold onto a piece of history and great memories and parts of their lives,” says Mainieri, who capped off the last season of the old stadium with a stirring victory that sent the Tigers to the College World Series and then opened the first year of the new venue by winning it all.
“It’s awesome. The way they’ve done the chairs and the bleachers and even saved the dirt make for tremendous mementoes.”
Some of which have already made their ways into the Mainieri home.
“I’ve got a couple of the items, and I’m going to continue to stock up on the items,” Mainieri says.
“The original Alex Box Stadium meant a lot to me, too, having played here in 1976 and then coming back to be the coach in the last game ever played there. And who will ever forget the way we closed it out with the great come-from-behind victory over Cal-Irvine and the return to gorilla ball for the final game when we beat ’em 21-7 to clinch a trip to Omaha?”
The answer, of course, is the many buyers and bidders of what’s left from the old Alex Box Stadium.
