‘Are you serious?’: How the LSU band got a 66 year-old tuba player

BATON ROUGE, La. — Captain Dale Dicharry, homeland security commander for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, has heard many strange calls during his career in law enforcement, especially here in south Louisiana. But this one beat all the others.

Someone had called about an injured animal, and the call came from his own neighborhood.

“He said, ‘A wounded moose,’” Dicharry said. “I said, ‘We don’t have any moose around.'”

Then an idea came to his mind: it would be Kent.

Kent Broussard, Dicharry’s new neighbor, was a retiree who had just moved to Baton Rouge, determined to realize his lifelong dream: joining the Tigerland Golden Band at LSU. And he learned to play, among other things, the tuba.

Dicharry tells the story in the Broussards’ living room, alongside his wife Dawn, Broussard’s wife Cheryl, and neighbors Lynette Wilks and Barry Searles. They all immediately jump to Kent’s defense. He was not so bad at the tuba that his playing was confused with the sounds of the moose, it is said. It was just that the confusion was natural; no one in the neighborhood expected anyone to play the tuba.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. But it turns out it takes this neighborhood, on the southern edge of Baton Rouge, to raise a 66-year-old tuba player. It was here that Broussard serenaded neighbors from his front porch, walked the streets wearing a weighted vest to increase his endurance, and avoided the heat by playing early in the morning and late at night.

Leaf blowers can be annoying at these times. But no one was ever bothered by Broussard’s brass. He brought a little bit of Tiger Stadium into everyone’s homes.

He quickly became the envy of the neighborhood. He had a lifelong goal and he achieved it. He is now a member of the LSU band, playing the fight songs on Saturday nights at Tiger Stadium. Welcome to the Tiger Tuba Kent Fan Club.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kent Broussard (@tigertubakent)

“I’ve had them in my head for 60 years and now I have the opportunity to play them,” Broussard said of these pieces.

It’s a typical Louisiana tale. The Broussards were among the first Acadian (later shortened to Cajun) families to settle in Louisiana two centuries ago, arriving from France via Canada where they were expelled after rebelling against the British. Kent Broussard, born in Cajun country in Lafayette, earned an accounting degree and an MBA from Southeast Louisiana in Hammond and played trumpet in the band for two years. He went to work for Sazerac Spirits, named after a cocktail first invented in New Orleans, and then was instrumental in establishing the Sazerac House on the city’s Canal Street. He and Cheryl lived in LaPlace, along the Mississippi River, but after two floods and Kent’s retirement, they decided to move to Baton Rouge so he could do the most Louisiana thing possible: join the LSU band.

“We can’t go any further into south Louisiana,” he joked.

Since the 1960s, Broussard had attended LSU football games and loved hearing the band play. In the 1980s, when he and Cheryl first started dating, he would take her to LSU games and have her stay after the game and watch the band play. Five years ago, before he retired, he emailed the band director and asked what he should do to join the band.

There were challenges. First he would have to be a student. Second, the competition was going to be close and he would have to learn to walk, which most students had been doing for years in middle and high school. There would probably be too much competition on the trumpet, he was told. But the world has fewer tuba players than trumpeters, and the LSU band loves having a sturdy tuba line: After having 24 sousaphones last year, they decided to take on 32 this year. So that’s where Broussard decided to direct his energies.

“It started 30 years ago when I committed to doing something no one else had ever done,” Broussard said. “I love the band. And I didn’t look at it as, because of my age, I don’t think I should try. It never really crossed my mind. I’m young at heart.”

To practice at home, Broussard bought a $3,000 tuba on Facebook Marketplace — a friend jokingly called it “Temu Tuba” — from a member of a Los Angeles mariachi group who collects sousaphones, repairs them and sells them. An LSU student who helps the band repair the instruments helped them assemble and set them up correctly. Dale Dicharry gave him the idea of ​​walking around with the weighted vest. At a dinner with neighbors, he revealed his plan.

“We were all like, are you serious?” » Said Dawn Dicharry. Someone joked that they had all drank too much wine. But Broussard was so enthusiastic that they all realized they could live vicariously through him.

“To see this man train and persevere through this heat and do what he does every day has been just incredible,” said Lynette Wilks, who lives behind the Broussards. “My granddaughter is 11 and was riding her bike in the neighborhood. She came in and threw the bike away. She said, ‘Lulu, there’s a man walking down the street playing a tuba.’

“Yeah, it’s Tuba Kent,” she said.

He started playing indoors for a year. The first audition was basically a screening, just to make sure the contestants could perform. Kent was required to perform the assigned music and upload it to YouTube for band directors to review. After overcoming that obstacle, he began getting outside to acclimate to the grueling summers, as the LSU group practices outside every day. So he played early in the morning or later in the evening. One morning, around 7 a.m., Broussard said he was walking down the streets with his snorkel and two cyclists passed in front of him. As they passed him, one looked at each other and said, “That’s not something you see every day.” Broussard replied, “Go Tigers,” and he could hear them laughing as they walked away.

At a neighborhood event, a neighbor two doors down told the Broussards that his 12-year-old son was going to bed around 9:15 one night and told him he thought it was so cool that he was going to bed to one of the biggest fight songs in the country.

Kent thought it was great. Cheryl had another reaction: “I gave him a curfew from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.,” she said with a laugh.

In mid-August, Broussard was invited to the band’s preseason camp, a four-day audition in which, he said, they “learned the LSU way of playing” as well as their marching styles and sight-reading music. Above all, he said, it was a way to ensure the culture was right for the group’s members.

The LSU band has 325 members, including the color guard and the Golden Girls dance line, with approximately 275 strictly musical members. There are always more freshmen looking to join than there are spots. There are no guarantees.

So the whole gang was impatiently waiting for the final group roster to be announced. As soon as they heard the news, everyone went crazy. Tiger Tuba Kent was officially a Tiger.

“Barry and I had a cocktail and ran down the street,” Dawn said. She texted Cheryl, who told her Kent wasn’t home, but anyone could come over. Then they all celebrated together at the Broussard house.

“It makes us all feel good,” Searles said. “You get to a certain age and then you feel like you’re done, but we really don’t feel like we’re done. So it feels good to be accepted into the world.”

Broussard became a media darling. He has made television appearances on “Good Morning America” ​​and the SEC Network, done interviews with NPR and PBS and appeared on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” this week. Dawn said she was never bothered by the tuba; it’s the notifications about the group chat and the neighborhood board cheering for Kent that will wake her up at night.

So Cheryl had to share her husband with everyone. First, he takes a full course load with 13 hours as a “non-matriculated student” or without completing a degree program. He only takes classes that he finds interesting. He loves American popular music because it explains how intertwined all the music in his life is. His lessons in Louisiana history, emergency management fundamentals, and comparative politics all work together to explain the current state of LSU football, it seems. Then he practices with the group and then the games. Cheryl said she missed seeing him tend to the garden because he was so meticulous about it, but she picked up some tips and took care of it for him.

“We had gone from being together all the time, which was a little too much, to here,” she said of Kent’s retirement. “I’ll see him in 20 or 30 minutes, and then he has to go study.”

They go to dinner on Friday and make the most of their time. But seeing Kent live his dream and become an inspiration to others was worth it. She said she had already told him that it was entirely up to him and that she would support him if he wanted to do it again next year.

Every time they show Broussard’s image on the video board at Tiger Stadium, the crowd erupts. Dawn, Barry, and Lynette cried the first time they saw this happen.

“I am one of nearly 400 [in the band]” said Broussard. “The overwhelming support has been humbling. Maybe I was naive about the whole situation. I think it’s a good story. I hope this inspires people my age or older to say, “This guy is doing something really physically and mentally difficult. He goes back to school. So I hope this message resonates with some people. »

But there is one place where it has already made a big difference: it is in the Broussard neighborhood. They are just happy to join in on the ride and help cheer on their local celebrity/tuba player.

“It’s been just amazing for all of us,” Wilks said.

The year did not go as planned for the Tigers on the field. But in the stands, it’s one of the best stories of the season. And Tiger Tuba Kent likes to keep the positivity.

“Come cheer on the group,” he said.