In Tuesday’s Daily Happen, Teddy tried to make you aware on some bogus, namby-pamby day of significance. Nothing like a made up holiday — Pi Day — to get the blood flowing, eh?

Speaking of blood flowing, I’m here to make you aware of a real-deal important date. Tomorrow is the Ides of March, so beware … especially if your name is “Julius” or “Caesar.”

March 15 is the legendary Ides of March. Well, actually, it isn’t really, but more about that later. You might not think the Ides of March is a big deal, but try telling that to the Roman Republic. The whole Western Civilization got a major upgrade after this date in history, but you go ahead and have your little Pi Day and think that means something.

If you were hanging around Rome in 44 BC on this date, it’s probably going to be a day that has stuck with you for the last 2,062 years.

The Romans had some kind of screwed up calendar back then — don’t try to figure it out — but the Ides marked the midpoint of the month. They had some big stuff going on; they sacrificed a sheep to the deity Jupiter and was also a day that all debts were supposed to be settled. (If Sparta didn’t cover the 3.5-point line, they didn’t give you any extra time to come up with the cash. On a related note, the sheep weren’t to thrilled about it either.)

Caesar was the Big Cheese back then, but he’d hacked off enough people (including a few of his BFFs) that things were getting a little dicey. Legend (and Shakespeare) have it that a seer tried to warn him in advance that some bad stuff was going to go down by the Ides of March. “Beware the Ides of March,” is Billy S.’s famous line. Caesar got a little cocky and saw his boy on the way to a Senate meeting and said “I’ve got your Ides of March right here, pal.”

Bad move. Next thing you know, somebody stuck a shiv in J.C. and that was that. So long Roman Republic, but they filed Chapter 11 and came back as the Roman Empire and stuck around for a few hundred more years.

It’s perfectly acceptable to have some kind of get-together on the Ides of March to celebrate. Maybe a toga party and come-dressed-as-your-favorite Caesar conspirator. Just be careful of who is handling the knives.

March 8 was the 30th anniversary of the passing of Don Redden, Ouachita High star and captain of the 1986 LSU basketball team that, as an 11-seed, made such a memorable run to the Final Four. One day soon during the NCAA Tournament, DesignatedWriters has a story about that very thing.

Don passed away on a Tuesday morning — March 8, 1988. He just never really woke up. The cause, determined days later, was an undetected heart condition that proved fatal. Hard to believe it’s been 30 years.

That 1988 LSU basketball season was a strange one. A sad one, I guess is the word. In was a weird year, which I know because I covered the 1987-88 Tigers for the New Orleans Times-Picayune

The year before, fueled by that old Dale Brown Magic and some pretty good and confident players from the 1986 team, the 86-87 team had become the only 14-loss team ever to advance to the Elite Eight. This is still the case. I covered this team from December through its end in Cincinnati in the Midwest Regional Finals. You might remember that eventual national champion Indiana beat the Tigers in that close game in Cincinnati to make it to the Final Four. It was the game when Hoosiers head coach Bobby Knight pounded the scorer’s table and knocked a telephone wacky (back when there were regular phones) in front of a priest, although I forget why the priest was sitting at the scorer’s table. Anyway, heaven help…

The 1987-88 team still had Ricky Blanton and Fess Irvin and Jose Vargas, but two-time consensus All-America guard Chris Jackson was a year from showing up; Shaq and Stanley Roberts wouldn’t get there until 1989-90. But the 87-88 team battled and made it to the NCAA Tournament.

How they did it—and this from a guy who watched every game—I’m not sure. Were they a sentimental pick by the committee to even get into the tournament? Probably not. This was a tough team, that faced some circumstances other teams didn’t have to deal with.

Don died the week the SEC Tournament was to take place — in Baton Rouge. But nine Tuesdays before—Jan. 5, 1988 — Pete Maravich,, the Greatest Tiger Of Them All, had passed away while playing pickup basketball in Pasadena. The cause: undetected heart condition. Maravich was, naturally, Redden’s basketball hero.

LSU was in Nashville that Tuesday night to take on Vanderbilt Wednesday. (The SEC played a lot of Wednesday, Saturday games back then, by the way. Seems odd now….) Vandy was ranked 15th in the country; LSU wasn’t even thinking about being ranked. What I remember about that game was that an emerging country music superstar, Vince Gill — I might have been the only Louisiana guy at the time to know how good he was — sang the national anthem. They called his name, he came down from about 12 rows up in the stands, in jeans and a nice Vandy sweatshirt, nailed the anthem at midcourt, then went back up there to sit with his buddies in seats right around the time line. Made me love him more.

It was a slow and ugly game, but LSU surprisingly won, 51-39.

I hadn’t thought about this in years, but it just popped into my head: an elevator door opened and Willie Nelson go on and Kris Kristofferson got on and a lady or two go on and we all got off in the lobby and they walked away to somewhere, I suppose to write another monster hit song about lost love and heartbreak. And I went off to write about the same thing, which was the rest of the LSU season.

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