Editor’s note: Saturday Down South received an advanced copy of Charles N. deGravelles’ ‘A Long, Long Run’, a biography on former LSU Heisman winner Billy Cannon. The book will release on Sept. 7.

LSU great Billy Cannon remembers standing at midfield inside the heart of Death Valley before a 1958 nationally-ranked tussle with Ole Miss, the Tigers’ most hate adversary in the SEC.

Surrounded by an estimated 70,000 fans according to Times-Picayune sportswriter Bill Keefe, Cannon chatted with fellow kick return threat Johnny Robinson in front of the first-ever sellout crowd at legendary Tiger Stadium, the concrete monstrosity in Baton Rouge that now seats 102,321.

“It’s not a rivalry because somebody says it is,” Billy said in deGravelles’ book, “or because you’ve been playing against a team for a long time. It’s a rivalry when two good teams meet and either one could walk out the winner. This was a rivalry.”

Seats were so difficult to get for the No. 1 vs. No. 6 matchup of unbeatens that “some people were swapping television sets for tickets,” according to writer Peter Finney.

Cannon, the best running back in school history, saw the hype as an entrepreneurial moment, taking what he’d learned as a boy buying tickets at a discounted rate from Peabody’s Service Station and turning a profit at face value.

According to ‘A Long, Long Run’, Cannon would stand outside Tiger Stadium as a freshman and sell tickets he either bought from teammates at a discount or ones from his own personal student-athlete complimentary allotment.

Cannon’s yearning to sell tickets for profit forced him into a disciplinary meeting with LSU’s athletic director, but it didn’t cease.

“He asked me if I had been selling tickets. ‘Yes, for about six years,’ I told him,” Cannon said. “He asked me if I was scalping them, and I told him no, that I was selling my own and those I could get at a discount from other players. ‘Well, you can’t do that here while you’re on a scholarship,’ he told me. ‘I didn’t read that anywhere,’ I said. All the while, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I’m here three weeks, and I’m going to get kicked out!’ ‘It’s an unwritten rule,’ he said. ‘Don’t do it anymore.’

That meeting with the university’s AD brings us back to Cannon’s pregame talk with Robinson prior to the Ole Miss game. Asked if he was nervous before kickoff, Cannon fired back: “Nervous?” Billy said, pointing the north end zone.

“I’m feeling great. My whole section is sold out!”

Top-ranked LSU went on to beat Ole Miss, 14-0, and win its final four games to win the program’s first AP national championship under Paul Dietzel.

The following season, Cannon won the Heisman.