Gaynell Tinsley: LSU Photograph Collection, RG #A5000,
Louisiana State University Archives, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, LA.
Scott Purdy: What stands out to you, as you look back on your career, as your single best accomplishment?
Gaynell Tinsley: There’s no doubt about that: it was the Tulane ball game of ’49. As I say, Tulane had . . . Even if we beat them, they had still won the conference championship. They were a twenty-one-point favorite. And if I could have stayed home and sent the football team down there to play that game, I think I would have because that’s how bad everybody, including myself, thought we might get beat. Of course, we were hoping for better than that. But we went down there and beat them twenty-one to nothing. And they were a twenty-one-point favorite, too, to beat us. I personally think that is the best football game that any LSU team has ever played. I doubt if anybody has ever beaten the point spread by forty-two points. It was . . . Just everything went right for us. Everybody on our team had a great game. They [Tulane] didn’t have anybody that had a particularly great one. Just really as near a perfect football game as you can find.
Purdy: Were there some outstanding plays?
Tinsley: Yes. Kenny Konz returned a punt for about seventy yards. And Lee Hedges ran, I guess, about sixty-five. I mean, offhand, I don’t recall how we scored the other touchdown but then we had two long runs. I imagine if you take the film today and go through the entire film, I think that every tackle that was made . . . that we made on a Tulane player, I bet you that on every tackle there would be at least three people close enough that they could have made the tackle if the men made it. As it say, it’s just one of those days that everything you did was right.
Purdy: How do you think you get a team up to that level?
Tinsley: You don’t very often. I never did get one up to that level except that one time. And I don’t think many people have ever gotten one up to that level. They were . . . as I say they just . . . You know when you’re a twenty-one-point underdog, and you win by twenty-one and the other team doesn’t even . . . I don’t know if they ever crossed our forty-yard line. And they were . . . They were a fine football team! I mean, we weren’t even supposed to be on the field with them. I mean, there weren’t any big breaks. There just . . . We just out-played them that much from start to finish. Of course, we did get two long runs. But we didn’t have a turnover, didn’t have any of that to help us any.
-- Gaynell Tinsley, interviewed by Scott Purdy, 1993