Legacy

The music blares and lingers, throbbing within a haze of booze, sweat and testosterone. Intermittent yells from passers-by punctuate the thudding bass. Tailgaters wind through a maze of folding chairs, churning grass and garbage to a rich and sloppy blend beneath portable canopies. They orbit a makeshift mini-bar — the centerpiece of the tented realm — illuminated under strands of LSU helmet lights draped overhead. Laughter ripples and conversation hums as drinks and stomachs are filled.

A sea of purple and gold rocks beneath the canopy.

The sun sinks westward and the crowd thickens, teased by the glare of stadium lights. The chiming Campanile feeds adrenaline into the bloodstream like an IV, stronger than 50 proof. Excitement pulsates from the stereo to the rims of plastic cups.

Death Valley awaits, and Dr. Fraser E. Landreneau, the football team’s neurosurgeon and tailgater extraordinaire, is ready.

His game day haunt at Parking lot J is a tailgater’s paradise. Here, for more than 50 years, professionals, students, family and friends have sucked down the aroma of game day in decadent and frenzied gulps. The man who keeps the tradition going every Saturday is not your average Tiger fan. Landreneau is a man of passionate extremes.

“When he’s [working], he loves what he does. When he’s off, it goes the totally opposite way,” his wife Amy said. “He has a lot of fun”

Fraser Landreneau describes the limbo between hours at the hospital and time off as a “work hard, play hard” lifestyle. From immaculate scrubs to loyal purple and gold, his passion for the Tigers endures in and out of the operating room.

On Saturday, when the smell of beer and jambalaya mingle with the savory spirit of football season, Landreneau rallies his wife and his three children, Claire, 11; Caroline, 9; and Alexander, 6; for game day.

Nestled on the south side of the Indian Mounds, Landreneau’s tailgate is a network of history and sentimental ties. Landreneau’s father claimed the turf in early ’50s, before the football team’s first national championship. They have been tailgating in the same spot ever since.

Nurses and doctors from the Neuro-Medical Center Hospital, camouflaged by game day garb, stroll casually alongside Tiger fans from Eunice and members of the Lambda Chi fraternity — testimonies to Landreneau’s home roots and Greek legacy.

Fran Diam, University alumna and Tri-Delta, has known Landreneau since their Greek days as LSU undergrads. Diam, one of Landreneau’s nurses at the NeuroMedical center, has witnessed grateful patients and what she describes as a “unique bedside manor,” fostering relationships with patients and concerned family.

“He’s brilliant, yet he’s a home-town country boy,” Diam said. “His heart is as big as his brain. He’s as sweet as he is smart.”

His office is unlike the sterile hub of surrounding examination rooms and nurse’s stations. An array horns and skulls are mounted on the wall: sable antelope, a warthog, elk and deer. An alligator cranium smirks on the bookshelf. A single human skull grins nonchalantly from its perch atop thick volumes. However, “the next patient’s” skull is his favorite.

Landreneau doesn’t have a desk. He considers his office a place to “chill out,” a relaxing sanctum for his own cranium when not probing someone else’s. Smooth brown crackled leather seats are overshadowed by a bookcase that spans the wall, dappled by trinkets from former patients.

“It’s an office to visit so it’s not very obstructive when you sit across,” Landreneau said.

Though he has a workstation outside of the office, he enjoys relaxed and uninhibited consultations with patients.

Family photos peek intermittently between medical journals and books on military history. On the top shelf, a bust of Mike the Tiger adds an air of veneration to the room, a gift from a patient Landreneau had cured from a malignant brain tumor.

A granite bowl engraved “Fraser E. Landreneau, M.D. Chief Resident of Neurosurgery,” announces his graduation from LSU medical school in 1999.

Landreneau spent three years as an undergrad at the University. After four years at LSU’s medical school in Shreveport, Landreneau completed his six-year residency at the University of Texas in Dallas.

“It was kind of frightening,” Landreneau said. “I remember calling my football coach the first day of med school.”

Landreneau’s high school football coach Joe Nagata was a former LSU running back and Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame inductee.

“What you think you are going to accomplish and experience might not be identical to what you wanted,” Landreneau said, who originally wanted to perform hand surgery.

The Giant Purple People Eater wasn’t exactly what Landreneau wanted, but it was premiered early to celebrate the highly anticipated Florida football game. It’s the newest addition to Landreneau’s tailgate — an old, gutted Coca-Cola truck, painted purple and gold, and converted into a bar.

Complete with yellow stools, a tile floor and an Abita Purple Haze beer tap hangs off the back, the truck was completed in time for the Oct. 24 football game against Auburn.

Landreneau is “famous” among his tailgating posse for running down the Hill behind the band before the game. According to his wife, Landreneau doesn’t need alcohol to enjoy himself.

For bigger games, Landreneau and tailgating families leave their children at home, as many of the games take on themes. For the Florida game one year, Landreneau dipped donut holes in green powdered sugar, serving “gator balls” to tailgaters. In another game against South Carolina, members of his tailgate drank White Russians with pieces of banana in them that tailgaters called “cock juice.”

“The whole thing is kind of raunchy,” Landreneau said.

Landraneau performs an average of 430 surgeries a year. Neurosurgery, a sub-specialization of surgery, addresses diseases of the brain, spinal chord and coverings such as the skull or spine.

“Any diseases in there are for me to handle,” Landreneau said, who, on a given day, sees patients with carpel tunnel, back problems, tumors and atypical headaches.

“I try to secure a safe position around the brain or nerves, remove any offending element such as tumor or aneurism, or remove compression on a spinal nerve,” Landreneu said.

Landreneau wakes up at 4 a.m. almost every day and works out at 5 a.m. Only needing two-to-four hours of sleep at night, Landreneau never drinks coffee. He has passed the trait to his children.

“It kills me. I’m your normal eight-hour girl,” Landreneau’s wife said, “I put my children to bed at 10 [p.m., and] they’re awake by two [a.m.].”

After his morning workout, Landreneau showers, heads to the NeuroMedical Center and changes into scrubs. By 6:30 a.m., he begins his rounds.

“I don’t think anyone can get dressed faster than surgeons or whores,” Landreneau said.

He moves from surgery to daily patient consultations. While performing surgery, he probes through delicate membranes and folds of brain tissue, cutting out the malignant and repairing the damaged — tinkering with segments of spine until 5 p.m.

Landreneau enjoys the power, but doesn’t allow it to consume him.

“I don’t brag,” he said. “I go home and tell the wife and get over it.”

Landreneau tore his Achilles tendon in 2007 while playing tennis — an injury he considers to be a definitive moment in his life.

“I thought someone had shot me, so I yelled ‘get down, get down,’” Landreneau said. “The muscle had gotten scrunched up by the knee.

“I was an average neurosurgeon until that morning.”

During his six months out of commission, Landreneau invented a crutch to enable him to perform surgeries while incapacitated.

“One thing led to another,” Landreneau said, who began designing and patenting surgical tools.

“You can’t go down like Achilles — you’ve got to reinvent yourself,” Landreneau said. “I had extra energy. I couldn’t be stagnant.”

Alongside neurosurgeons Horace Mitchell and Kelly Scrantz, Landreneau founded MLS Surgical Design, which has sold medical instruments to hospitals in Florida and New York. Among their inventions are a pedicle driver, a nerve root retractor and a postural inner spine stabilizer construct — tools to enhance comfort and efficiency in surgery.

“We’re trying to expand,” Landreneau said. “We’re trying to hire people in Baton Rouge to work for research and development.”

Landreneau wrote two screenplays: One about the childhood Revolutionary War spy that exposed Benedict Arnold, while the second described the “seven-year suicide” of his brother, Mike Landreneau, a former LSU football player who recently died of a heart attack.

He comes from a family of medical professionals and LSU graduates. His father, R.E. Landreneau Jr., is a general surgeon and graduate of LSU’s medical school. His oldest brother, a heart surgeon, is the head of surgery in Pittsburgh, while his youngest brother, mentioned above, earned his doctorate in transplant surgery.

According to Landreneau, medicine paves the way for morality in science.

“You can’t use your skills for money or power, otherwise you’ll be a Sith. Similar to a Jedi — you must use your power for good,” Landreneau said.

Photos by Sahir Khan