CoSIDA Hall of Famer Louis Bonnette will reach another milestone on Oct. 24 when McNeese State and Southeastern Louisiana meet on the gridiron; it will be the 500th straight football game of Bonnette’s tenure, which began in 1966. The game takes place at McNeese's Cowboy Stadium where the field is named in Bonnette's honor.
Note: It is indeed a CoSIDA family affair for the Bonnettes, as Louis' son Michael is the LSU Associate AD for Sports Information, and son Matthew is the associate SID at Northwestern (La.) State.
See related story: Bonnette reaches milestone with 500th Consecutive Game (from www.mcneesesports.com)
photo courtesy of mcneesesports.com
October 22, 2009
by Alex Hickey, American (La.) Press sports
Read this online HERE
Few people have the patience, skill or good fortune necessary to do anything 500 consecutive times. Fewer still have a football field named after them and are still around to talk about it.
McNeese State Sports Information Director Louis Bonnette is the exception.
Bonnette, already the namesake of the field at Cowboy Stadium, will reach another career milestone on Saturday when he is in the press box for McNeese’s game with Southeastern Louisiana. The contest will be the 500th straight football game of Bonnette’s tenure, which began in 1966.
“It’s just amazing, the consistency, the dedication and the loyalty that he has shown to this university,” said McNeese Athletic Director Tommy McClelland, who was not yet born when Bonnette’s streak began. “The university can’t calculate the impact he’s had promoting and expanding this department to where it is today.”
Though the world has changed in just about every way since Bonnette’s first game, he has remained a constant part of the picture at McNeese.
Before the streak started, Louis Bonnette was a newspaperman. His first job after graduating from Louisiana Tech was as a sports reporter for the
Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise. When the paper opened a Lake Charles bureau, he was sent there to run it.
After three years of working for $95 a week, Bonnette wasn’t opposed to finding a job that might put a little more money in the bank account. When the McNeese News Bureau had an opening for a position that paid a stately sum of $7,000 a year, he jumped at it.
“That was good money back then,” Bonnette said. “Shoot, you could get a hamburger for 25 cents.”
One of the first things he did was replace his old ’55 Chevy.
“I bought a white Chevy,” Bonnette said. “But I couldn’t afford to get air conditioning.”
In the beginning, Bonnette was the assistant director of the bureau, which entailed his role as sports information director in addition to other campus media relations duties.
Eventually, he moved to the athletic department under AD Jack Doland, who also put him in charge of selling tickets and running the business office. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Bonnette’s gig consisted solely of doling out sports information.
He remembers the first game of his career, at Texas A&I, not so much for the details of the game itself but the long, long bus ride the team took to Kingsville, Texas.
“I remember riding through that King’s Ranch,” Bonnette said. “It seemed like it took all day to get through it. We got in it and we stayed in it for a long way.”
McNeese lost that first game, but over the years wins have been a far more common sight. Bonnette has seen a pair of teams finish the regular-season with undefeated records, three Independence Bowls and two national championship games.
He’s also seen a number of future NFL stars on the opposing sidelines. Though the 1968 team finished with a 4-6 record, two of those wins came against future Hall of Famers. Roger Staubach’s Pensacola Navy team lost 54-13 to the Cowboys, while Terry Bradshaw’s Louisiana Tech squad was handed a 27-20 loss.
“Mean” Joe Greene, Bobby Hebert, Stan Humphries, Bubby Brister, Daunte Culpepper, Darren Sproles, Brian Mitchell and Kurt Warner are among the other notable foes who have faced the Cowboys with Bonnette watching.
He’s also seen the entire careers of plenty of McNeese greats such as Buford Jordan, Kerry Joseph, Henry Fields and Stephen Starring.
With 499 games to choose from, Bonnette said it is hard to pick out specifics from each one without first looking at an old score book — but some are still more memorable than others.
The 1976 Independence Bowl was particularly notable to Bonnette because McNeese was actually asked by the Southland Conference not to go after several players were declared ineligible for the upcoming game. The Cowboys still showed up and beat Tulsa 20-16.
“We were losing, and I was taking some writers down the elevator so they could go to the field for interviews,” Bonnette said. “By the time we got down there, Oliver Hadnot had scored the winning touchdown. But I couldn’t believe they asked us not to come.”
Bonnette also can’t forget the debut of Tony Citizen, who rushed for an NCAA freshman record 304 yards in his first game as a Cowboy in 1986.
As has been the case for the previous 499 McNeese football games, on Saturday Bonnette will be providing media members with the game’s statistics. However, the tools he uses are vastly different than what he had at his disposal in 1966.
Back then, Bonnette used a typewriter to keep a play-by-play account of the game while a pair of student assistants would keep track of the stats by hand. Carbon copies would be made and handed out to the newspaper writers on the first floor of the open-air press box and the radio broadcasters on the second floor.
Game stories were called and dictated to
The Associated Press and other out-of-town media outlets after the game.
Now, it’s all computerized work in an air-conditioned press box fancy enough to be called a Sky Ranch. One click of the mouse does what several phone calls once did. And printing out stats is much less messy than using a machine that “left your hands blue whenever you made a copy.”
Even though the mechanisms may be easier, Bonnette said he still feels he puts in a hard day’s work every Saturday.
“My folks always went to work every day and did their job, both of them,” Bonnette said. “I think I got it from them. People say ‘You work at it too much,’ but I don’t see it that way. I see it as something I like doing.”
McClelland said he’s impressed by Bonnette’s ability to adapt to the technology that has completely changed the nature of his job.
“He started interviewing a guy with a pen and paper, writing it up on a typewriter and then sending it out to a media outlet so they could use it for a story maybe two days later,” McClelland said. “Now, fast-forward to managing a Division I Web site with 16 sports and 350 student-athletes. The Internet wasn’t even invented when he started, and now he’s come full circle.
“I know people, my dad being one, that are frustrated when they have to go to a gas station with electronic pumps and push buttons. And here’s Louis at the same age, and he’s running a Web site.”
For anyone who works weekends, missing time with the family is an area of concern. Bonnette bridged that problem by making his family part of the job.
His wife is by his side each week, and his children grew up helping out in the press box. Clearly, the experience grew on them — Michael is the [Associate AD/]SID at LSU, and Matthew is an associate SID at Northwestern State.
Louis said that his daughter, Anne, would also make a fine SID had she decided to go into the field rather than nursing.
“The thing about our family, the first thing in the morning, we all read the paper,” Bonnette said. “And it’s not just reading the front page or sports. It’s all the way through. It’s been that way forever, and growing up that’s what the kids did sometime during the day. We’d have some good discussions.”
Bonnette isn’t sure how many games beyond 500 his streak will continue. He turns 69 in December, and is aware that one day he’ll have to call it quits. From what he’s heard from his friends, though, he’s not so sure that he’s ready for retirement just yet.
“I’ve got one friend who says all he does is spend time at Home Depot looking around,” Bonnette said. “He says, ‘They want to chase me out because I never buy anything, I just look around.’ I’m not ready for that, although maybe I’d go to Academy (Sports) and look around.”
Even when Louis Bonnette is no longer serving McNeese, having his name stamped on the football field will be an enduring piece of his legacy. It’s an honor that he still has a hard time believing.
“It’s something I never even thought anything about (as a possibility),” Bonnette said. “(Current football coach) Matt (Viator) had told me that Robert Noland wanted the field named after me, which was a total shock. I don’t know how to put it in words. You had all these guys that played down there, all-Americans that went to become all-pros. All these coaches.
“All I did was just keep accounts of what they did.”