LSU-Ole Miss football: This is a series that can change a person’s life
By Rick Cleveland | Originally published by Mississippi Today
LSU and Ole Miss will play one of the most anticipated and important football games in Mississippi history Saturday night in Oxford.
Put all the Lane Kiffin stuff aside (please!). LSU-Ole Miss is meaningful enough without all that, especially when both are Top 10 teams. Games in this rivalry can change lives.
I remember talking about the 1959 Ole Miss-LSU regular season game with Rebel great Charlie Flowers shortly before he died 55 years later in 2014. LSU won that game 7-3 on Billy Cannon’s 89-yard punt return.
“I still have nightmares,” Charlie told me. “We should have won that damned football game. We were better than they were”
The Rebels proved it in the Sugar Bowl about two months later when they thrashed LSU 21-0. Nevertheless, Cannon’s remarkable touchdown run on Halloween night spoiled an otherwise perfect season and kept Ole Miss from being an undisputed national champion. It probably kept Flowers from winning the Heisman Trophy, which went to Cannon instead.
This LSU-Ole Miss rivalry creates legends and heroes, and sometimes the most unlikely of heroes.
Exhibit A: Andrew Walters Ritter. Remember? Ritter, the great grandson of Mississippi sports writer legend Carl Walters, was a fifth-year senior placekicker for Ole Miss when the Rebels faced off against No. 7 LSU in October of 2013. The Tigers were a 10-point favorite and Ole Miss was playing without five injured defensive starters.
“We had freshmen all over the field playing key positions because of all the injuries,” Ritter, now an Oxford real estate developer, said this week.
But strange things happen in this LSU-Ole Miss series. Ritter’s chip shot field goal gave the Rebels a 3-0 first quarter lead. With quarterback Bo Wallace playing one of his best games as a Rebel, Ole Miss extended the lead to 10-0 at halftime and then 17-0 early in the third. LSU fired back with two scores to cut that to 17-14, before Ole Miss scored again to extend the lead back to 24-14, setting the stage for a wild fourth quarter.
Ritter had a short field goal blocked early in the fourth, and here came LSU tying the score with first a field goal and then an 80-yard, 11-play touchdown drive that made it 24-all with just over three minutes remaining.
Ole Miss used almost all that time to move from its own 15 to the LSU 24 with 6 seconds remaining. TV cameras showed Ritter smiling on the sidelines as the drive progressed. What was he thinking?
“So much was going through my mind,” Ritter said nearly 13 years later. “You have to understand I am a fourth generation Ole Miss Rebel. My parents, my grandparents were diehard Ole Miss people. My great grandfather, Carl Walters, didn’t attend Ole Miss, didn’t go to college at all, but he was made an honorary graduate because of his sports writing. All that was going through my mind.
“I thought about all the kicking camps my parents took me to around the country. I came back for a fifth year to get the opportunity to kick field goals and to get my MBA. And I know I was thinking about how hard my teammates had fought and that they really deserved to win the game. All that was going through my mind and probably a lot more. I knew this was a moment I had had spent years preparing for.”
The snap and hold were perfect. Ritter swung his right leg. The kick started to the right then hooked a good 2 feet inside the right upright. A standing-room-only crowd went berserk and stormed the field. Ritter’s fiancee – and now the mother of his two children – found him amid the bedlam. The celebration lasted long, long into the night and next morning.
How does he remember it 13 years later?
“I’m just so glad I made it,” he said. “It was everything I had dreamed about my whole life.”
Did it change his life?
Ritter laughed. “Sometimes I think to myself that if I had missed that kick, I’d be living in Seattle or Portland or somewhere far, far away from Oxford,” he said.
And, yes, Ritter says, he will be in Vaught-Hemingway on Saturday night for the 112th edition of the LSU-Ole Miss rivalry. He likes the Rebels’ chances, especially if the game comes down to another last-second Ole Miss field goal try.
“I just think Lucas Carneiro is the best placekicker in the country,” Ritter said. “”He’s a weapon, one of the best weapons we have. If we cross midfield, we are in position to score. He’s so consistent – not only with his distance but with his trajectory. I’d feel mighty good if the game comes down to a field goal with him kicking it.”
Ritter says he would love for Carniero to get to feel what he felt 13 years, a marriage, two children and a head of hair ago.
Said Ritter, “The feeling was indescribable. Still is.”
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
