It was the mid 1950s, and Danny Borné was eager to get his first look inside Tiger Stadium. Eight years old, he’d already fallen in love with the pageantry of
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Borné laughed and didn’t think about it again. But then, in 1985, Crocker announced he was going to retire. Borné, who had gotten out of the broadcast business, called Crocker and asked why he was quitting.
“He said he wanted to do in the stands things he couldn’t do in the booth,” Borné said of Crocker wanting to be a fan. “And I knew exactly what he was talking about.”
Some things shouldn’t be done or said in front of a microphone. It’s college football, but it’s still polite society.
Borné wrote to then-athletic director Robert Brodhead expressing interest in the job. And for eight long months, he didn’t get an answer. But then, two weeks before the start of the season, Brodhead’s assistant called him in for an interview.
Brodhead had come from Miami and was still getting a feel for Louisiana. His question to Borné was simple: “Can you pronounce these names?”
There was a list of Boudreauxes, Broussards and Heberts.
“Pronounce them?” Borné said. “I know their daddies.”
He got the job on the spot. The little boy who arrived by ferry two decades earlier, who saw the mist coming off the river and felt the glory of LSU football, had become the voice of Tiger Stadium.
Ask any cook, he said, and what’s almost as important as the ingredients is the pot you cook it in.
“That stadium is the pot where LSU football simmers and lives and scores and soars,” he said. “And that’s why it’s so important — the stadium itself. The stadium is steel and concrete, but it has a life, it has a history, it has a presence, and it has a future.”
With a perspective and a vocabulary like that, of course Borné would do more than say who caught which pass and who scored which touchdown. He’d add a little spice of his own.
BORNÉ SAID HE takes advice from William Shakespeare. “The play,” he said, “is the thing.” Anything that detracts from that shouldn’t be in a PA person’s portfolio.
He used to do a straightforward version of the pregame weather forecast, giving the temperature, humidity, wind direction and strength. Lastly, he’d provide the chance of precipitation.
It wasn’t in the plan, he swears, but one day in the 1990s he must have thought of his Aunt Doris because he blurted out at the end, “Chance of rain? Never.”
He thought he might get an earful from fans for that. And he did. But it wasn’t the negative reception he expected. They loved the callback to the saying among LSU fans that “It never rains in Tiger Stadium” — origin story, unknown.
Speaking those words out loud, Borné brought the tradition further into the spotlight. He’ll be walking the aisles of the grocery store, minding his own business, when a stranger will approach him, grinning. “Hey Dan,” they’ll say. “What’s the chance of rain?”
“Who knows why these things catch on?” he said. “But now, I mean, you don’t say it and they come looking for you.
“Now, everybody screams it back to me before I even get to say it.”
But that’s not the only moment where Borné has punched up the Tiger Stadium experience.
It was an afternoon game — again in the 1990s when Borné was apparently on a roll — when the third quarter ended and the band began to play its distinctive pregame song. The drum line got to work and then the horn section got busy.
Buh-buh-buh-buh!
Caught up in the moment, Borné noticed it was dusk and saw the grounds crew lowering the flag.
“And I just looked at that,” he recalled, “and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the colors are being retired and the sun has found its home in the Western sky. It is now Saturday night in Death Valley.'”
Again, that was not the plan. But it resonated. John Parker Wilson, in the middle of a game, noticed the reaction of fans. “The people go nuts,” he said.
More recently, Borné’s impact has come into greater focus. Before Alabama and LSU take the field — as has happened before every home game since 2010 — Borné’s words will narrate a pregame video on the scoreboard.
His final, ominous words — “It’s Saturday night in Death Valley” — will send fans into a frenzy.
Borné called it a “mystical experience” once the sun sets on Tiger Stadium.
He knows people will read this and call him crazy.
But, he said, “The people have been in and felt it, they know what I’m talking about.”
“Even to this day, it’s bigger, it’s brighter, it’s louder,” he said. “There’s this undercurrent of Halloween that almost drifts over the stadium from the West — almost like that fog when I was a kid.”
