re: Beckham and Landry speak out

quote:

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I have mixed feelings about this. I did do a lot of stupid things at 18 & 19 BUT I did not have the entire Tiger Nation looking up to me and counting on me for great things. Y'all are better than everyone else with your athletic abilities so we expect y'all to act better than the average teenager in your off time.

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There are several of us on this board who knew people at 18 & 19 that didn't do such. In fact, they gave more of themselves than any of us have done. One was my father. When he was 18 he was in Europe fighting Nazis. He saw one of his best friends blown to pieces by a mine and that same mine injured him. He was captured by Nazis and was tortured by them, including having his left hand (he was left handed) completely sliced across and permanently damaged.
If that weren't bad enough, he was a child during the depression. Like many in the South, the family struggled and my father was picking cotton to help with his parents to put food on the table, that consisted a lot of times of just beans, cornbread and maybe another vegetable.
Getting a coca cola was a special treat for him when he was a kid. In a good year, he got two new pairs of pants at Christmas and if he was lucky, his shoes lasted until the next without him putting cardboard inside because the soles were worn out.

Yep, when I think of him and the many LSU men that graced the halls of our magnificent university and made all of Louisiana proud of the "Ole War Skule," I cannot accept the excuse of "they are 18 and 19 year olds" for our present young men who have had a much easier life.