While LSU pays Brian Kelly millions, Baton Rouge residents -- and even LSU students and employees -- scrape by.
Chris Toombs dries dishes at his mother's home, where he lives in Baton Rouge. BATON ROUGE — Sitting alone in the dimly lit kitchen, Chris Toombs cradles his bedraggled iPhone, searching for holiday gifts for his three children. Books, electronics, clothes.
sitting here two weeks before Christmas, on the verge of asking his mother to buy Christmas gifts for his kids, Chris exists on one side of a vast wealth gap that divides his employer, his city, his country.Alice shrugs, saying she doesn’t mind helping. Kelly, dining with LSU board of supervisors member Collis Temple Jr., shook Chris’s hand. For a brief moment, these denizens of two vastly different realities were occupying the same space, breathing the same air, speaking to each other as equals.
“Black folk didn’t give a f--- about LSU, man,” Temple says. “The attitude was: These people are racists, and they were not interested in accepting or allowing Black people to attend their school. And that stuck.” When he came home during breaks, Baton Rouge was changing. White neighbors had fled Hermitage, the neighborhood in south Baton Rouge where Alice has lived since Chris was 5. New construction was advancing the city’s sprawl.and paid him $1.2 million per year, at the time a massive sum. He turned the Tigers into a sensation, and in 2003, LSU won its first national championship in 45 years. The program drew thousands of visitors and tens of millions of dollars into the region.
Late afternoon as LSU’s fall semester concludes, Chris is strolling down West Chimes Street when he recognizes a face from one of his many past lives. Chris was at Grambling when Alice lost her job and the supposed friends stopped providing favors and returning calls. Chris says he sold drugs and got arrested for shoplifting, so he quit school, came home and enrolled at Southern. He met a young woman in a psychology class, and when she became pregnant, Chris worked at the state senate and tended bar.
“You can sell out your people, but you can never get them back,” Geno McLaughlin, an activist and longtime friend, recalls saying. “Thank God he lost.”
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