Omaha’s Mardi Gras: LSU fans have made the MCWS their second home
Paul Skenes torches the plate with consecutive 100 mph fastballs to strike out the first batter of the game for the Tigers. (0:35)
OMAHA, Neb. — The package was a mystery, mailed to Louie M’s Burger Lust the week of the Men’s College World Series. It was a wooden box, taped shut, with written instructions to hang on to it for LSU fans. Louie Marcuzzo, owner of the south Omaha café famous for its Bloody Marys and, well, burgers, placed the package on a back counter, where it sat for three or four days.
This was around 2000, when the Tigers were making regular trips to Omaha and Louie’s was flush with patrons in purple and gold. When the first LSU horde arrived that week, Marcuzzo mentioned the package, and somebody claimed it. Curious, he asked what was in the box. “Ashes,” the fan said.
“A guy passed away and wanted his ashes spread around home plate at the CWS …” Marcuzzo said. “Well, I divested myself of the responsibility because I don’t know what kind of trouble they could get themselves into. But as far as I know, those ashes were spread on the field someplace.
“I thought it was weird at the time. But it’s LSU fans, so of course it’s weird.”
Marcuzzo means that in a good way. Like many bar and restaurant proprietors, he follows the NCAA regionals and super regionals with great interest every year, silently — and not so silently — rooting for LSU to make it to Omaha. The Tigers are good for business, as evidenced by the latest tally for Jello shots at Rocco’s Pizza and Cantina.
No fan base follows its team to Omaha more than LSU, said Marcuzzo’s son Jack, Burger Lust’s general manager. When LSU won its super regional last week and was headed to Omaha for the first time since 2017, the Marcuzzos doubled their liquor order and added more staff for the week.
“It seems like the consumption goes up when LSU is here,” Louie Marcuzzo said. “They eat a lot. They’re here to party and have fun.”
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Many Tigers fans make the trip to Omaha for the MCWS even when their team isn’t in the eight-team field. Chris Guillot, a 60-year-old chemical salesman who’s known for leading cheers at Alex Box Stadium, has attended all but two Men’s College World Series since 1989. He’s been to Omaha so many times that he is, in many ways, a part-time Nebraskan.
Guillot even chanted “Go Big Red” when Nebraska made it to the MCWS in the early 2000s, and calls the event Omaha’s Mardi Gras. When he was younger, he bought 50 cases of beer when he arrived in town, decided that he and his entourage needed another 10 cases, then told the checker, “You may want to load your shelves up again.”
Guillot loves mid-June in Omaha, loves the way the city embraces LSU and gets goosebumps at every super regional when the Tigers chant, “Omaha.” He said when he went to Planet Fitness the other night, the people at the gym were excited to see him because he was an LSU fan.
“The thing that’s so nice and so unique is Omaha … it’s like they wrap their arms around LSU fans,” Guillot said. “They hug us, they kiss us. Everywhere you go, you feel like a king.”
LSU’s following in Omaha is so big that every year, regardless of whether their team makes it to the MCWS, a massive 10-day tailgate is held at the soccer stadium at Creighton University. On Saturday afternoon, a few hours before the Tigers played Tennessee, hundreds of LSU fans ate crawfish and gumbo while the Stanford-Wake Forest game played on the stadium’s big screen.
The genesis of the tailgate dates back to 2002, when four guys from Louisiana were looking for a place to park their truck at Rosenblatt Stadium, the original home for the Men’s College World Series. Omahan Randy Workman waved them in and invited them to tailgate in a parking lot next to the stadium. That first tailgate was meager — one Styrofoam cooler and two packages of boudin.
Eventually, it evolved to the LSU fans transporting deep-fat fryers and black pots for jambalaya, and they’d cook for anyone who was hungry. Every year, the men look forward to early summer, just so they can eat, drink and spend time together.
Workman became such good friends with the LSU clan that a couple of times a year, he and his wife Joan travel to Louisiana to spend time with the men he met in the parking lot 20 years ago.
“I’ve been to Death Valley for a football game against Alabama,” Workman said. “I’ve been fishing and hunting with them and they’ve come up here to fish and hunt.
“We’re like family.”
When the MCWS moved from Rosenblatt to downtown in 2011, the friends needed a new place to tailgate. One Omahan in the group is a Creighton donor, and arranged for the tailgates to take place at Creighton, which is less than a mile to Charles Schwab Field.
Brandon McCarville, Creighton’s assistant athletic director for facility operations and events, declined to name the donor. McCarville, a Bluejays fan first, hasn’t seen his team in the MCWS since 1991, but he does not hide his affection for his second-favorite college baseball team. “Go Tigers,” he said.
“LSU fans kind of go along with Nebraska nice,” McCarville said. “They love to give you a smile and say hello. There’s definitely a kindness aspect that is very close with Nebraska and Louisiana.”
The LSU tailgate occupied half of the concourse at the soccer stadium Saturday; the other half was reserved for a party for Creighton’s dental school. As McCarville spoke, one of the LSU cooks handed a pan of crawfish to a group of people in the dental party. “Wow,” one of them said as they walked away with the food.
The party would eventually move to Charles Schwab Field, where the Tigers claimed a 6-3 win. And for another day, LSU fans basked in their summer home.