re: Has anyone ever seen a visiting bus rocked or anything thrown at it?

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"They wouldn't let us off the bus," Robinson said. "There were about 2,000 students. They were rockin' the bus. I didn't expect that. That didn't happen when we played Oregon or Notre Dame. Eventually, they got the police, and we got out of there."

But the mob was not done.

"We lined up in two rows to create a walkway for the team to get in the stadium," said Vincent, who days later would start work as a student assistant in LSU's sports information department and would become its director a decade later.

"And we were all yelling, 'Tiger Bait! Tiger Bait!' The players looked shell-shocked when they walked off the bus," Vincent said. "There was no pushing or shoving, no cursing or taunting. Just several hundred LSU students in their face screaming, 'Tiger Bait!'"

Then USC was allowed to practice.

"After they were in the stadium, we felt like we had sufficiently terrorized our opponent," Vincent said.

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"All I remember is the fans and that Tiger," Charles White said. "We could hear him growling when we were in the locker room. It was scary."

At the time, LSU would put Mike IV in its wagon cage on game nights and park him just inside the portal of the southeast corner easily within earshot of the visitor locker room.

"He was right there when we came out on the field," White said. "It was amusing to me to see something that you only see on wildlife TV shows. And then, all of a sudden, he's right there in your face."

Mike IV's handlers had "creative ways to get him to roar," said Rick Perry, a student at LSU in 1979 who worked for the athletic department for decades and is now the president of the Tiger Athletic Foundation.

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"He was right next to us," Robinson said. "I can remember looking right at him and somebody poking him in the butt. They don't do that anymore. Too bad."

USC's captive bus ride and visit to the big cat portion of the zoo would soon end, and it was time to play.

"I think some of them were really scared when Mike was roaring," said LSU senior center John Ed Bradley of Opelousas, who became a national sportswriter at the Washington Post and Sports Illustrated and author of several books. "And they were stunned by the crowd when they first went on the field. I don't think they knew what the hell was going on. And they came out back on their haunches."

After a hearty collision on the first play of the game, a USC defensive lineman came up to Bradley. But not to trash talk.

"He said, 'Man, what about that Tiger?' Bradley said.

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