BATON ROUGE, La. — Capt. Dale Dicharry, the commander of Homeland Security for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, has heard plenty of strange calls in his time in law enforcement, particularly here in south Louisiana. But this one beat all the others.
Someone had called in about a wounded animal, and the call was coming from right in his own neighborhood.
“He said, ‘A wounded moose,'” Dicharry said. “I said, ‘We ain’t got no moose around.'”
Then it struck him: That would be Kent.
Kent Broussard, Dicharry’s new neighbor, was a retiree who had just moved to Baton Rouge determined to fulfill his life’s dream: to join the Golden Band from Tigerland at LSU. And he was learning to play, of all things, the tuba.
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Dicharry tells the story in the Broussards’ living room, alongside his wife Dawn, Broussard’s wife Cheryl and fellow neighbors Lynette Wilks and Barry Searles. They all immediately leap to Kent’s defense. He wasn’t so bad at the tuba that his playing was confused with moose noises, they say. It was just that confusion was natural; nobody in the neighborhood was expecting someone to be playing a tuba at all.
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 the neighbors from his porch, marched around the streets in a weighted vest to get his stamina up and avoided the heat by playing early in the morning and late at night.
Leaf blowers might be annoying at those hours. But nobody was ever bothered by Broussard’s brass. He was bringing a little bit of Tiger Stadium into everybody’s homes.
He soon became the envy of the neighborhood. He had a lifelong goal and made it happen. 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.
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“I’ve had ’em in my head for 60 years and now I’m getting the opportunity to play them,” Broussard said of the tunes.
It’s a quintessential Louisiana tale. The Broussards were among the first Acadian families (later shortened to Cajun) 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, got an accounting degree and MBA from Southeastern Louisiana in Hammond and played trumpet in the band for two years. He went to work for Sazerac Spirits, named for a cocktail first invented in New Orleans, then was instrumental in the creation of 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 pick up and move to Baton Rouge so he could do the most Louisiana thing possible: Join the LSU band.
“You can’t get much more south Louisiana than that,” he joked.
Since the 1960s, Broussard had gone to LSU football games and loved hearing the band play. In the 1980s, when he and Cheryl started dating, he would take her to LSU games and make her stay after the game and watch the band play. So five years ago, before he retired, he emailed the band director and asked what he would have to do to join the band.
There were challenges. First, he would have to be a student. Second, competition was going to be tight, and he would have to learn to march, which most of the students had done for years in middle and high school. There would likely be too much competition on trumpet, he was told. But the world has fewer tuba players than trumpet players and the LSU band loves having a robust tuba line — after having 24 sousaphones last year, they decided to accept 32 this year. So that’s where Broussard decided to direct his energies.
“It started really 30 years ago when I made a commitment to myself that I wanted to do something that really no one else had ever done,” Broussard said. “I just love the band. And I didn’t look at it like, because of my age, I don’t think I should try out. That has really never crossed my mind. I’m young at heart.”
To practice at home, Broussard bought a $3,000 tuba off Facebook Marketplace — a friend jokingly called it a “Temu Tuba” — from a member of a mariachi band in Los Angeles who collects sousaphones, repairs them and sells them. An LSU student who helps the band repair instruments helped him assemble it and get it set up right. Dale Dicharry gave him the idea of walking around with the weighted vest. Over dinner conversations with neighbors, he would reveal his plan.
“We were all like, are you serious?” Dawn Dicharry said. Someone joked they thought they had all had too much wine. But Broussard was so enthusiastic about it that they all realized they could live vicariously through him.
“To watch that man train and persevere through this heat and do what he does on the daily has just simply been amazing,” said Lynette Wilks, who lives behind the Broussards. “My granddaughter is 11 and was out riding the bike in the neighborhood. She came in and threw the bike down. She said, ‘Lulu, there’s a man marching around in the street playing a tuba.’
“Yeah, that’s Tuba Kent,” she said.
He started out playing inside for a year. The first audition was basically a screening, just to make sure that the applicants could play. Kent had to perform assigned music and upload it to YouTube for the band directors to review. After he cleared that hurdle, he started going outside to get acclimated to the grueling summers because the LSU band practices outside every day. So he would play early in the morning or later in the evening. One morning, at about 7 a.m., Broussard said he was out marching through the streets with his tuba and two cyclists rode by. As they passed him, one looked at the other and said, “That’s not something you see every day.” Broussard shot back, “Go Tigers,” and he could hear them laughing as they rode away.
At a neighborhood event, a neighbor two doors down told the Broussards that her 12-year-old son was going to bed at about 9:15 one evening and told her he thought it was so cool that he was going to bed serenaded by one of the greatest fight songs in the country.
Kent thought it was awesome. Cheryl had another reaction: “I put him on a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. curfew,” she said, laughing.
In mid-to-late August, Broussard was invited to the band’s preseason camp, a four-day long audition where he said they “learn the LSU way of playing,” along with their marching styles and do some sight-reading of music. Mostly, he said, it was a way to make sure the culture fit was right for band members.
There are 325 members in the LSU band, including the color guard and the Golden Girls dance line, with roughly 275 members who are strictly musicians. There are always more freshmen looking to join the band than there are spots. There are no guarantees.
So the entire gang waited anxiously for the final band roster to be announced. Once they got the news, everyone went crazy. Tiger Tuba Kent was officially a Tiger.
“Barry and I grabbed us a cocktail and we ran down the street,” Dawn said. She texted Cheryl, who told her Kent wasn’t home, but everyone could come over. Then they all celebrated together in the Broussards’ home.
“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 in the world.”
Broussard became a media darling. He did TV appearances on “Good Morning America” and the SEC Network, did interviews with NPR and PBS, and appeared on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” just this week. Dawn said she was never bothered by the tuba; it was the notifications on the group chat and the neighborhood board cheering Kent on that would wake her up at night.
So Cheryl has had to share her husband with everyone. First of all, he’s taking a full class load with 13 hours as a “non-matriculated student,” or without being in a degree program. He’s only taking classes that he finds interesting. He loves American Popular Music because it explains how all the music of his life is intertwined. His classes in Louisiana History, Fundamentals of Emergency Management and Comparative Politics all work together to explain the current LSU football situation, it seems. Then he has band practice and then the games. Cheryl said she misses seeing him tend to the yard because he was so meticulous about it, but she has picked up some tips and taken care of it in his place.
“We had gone from being together all the time, which was a little too much, to all the way over here,” she said of Kent’s retirement. “I’ll see him 20 or 30 minutes, and then he’ll need to go study.”
They go to dinner on Fridays and make the most of their time. But seeing Kent get to live his dream and become an inspiration for others has been worth it. She said she has already told him it’s totally up to him and she’ll support him if he wants 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 it happen.
“I’m one of almost 400 [in the band],” Broussard said. “The overwhelming support has been humbling. Maybe I was naive about the whole situation. I think it’s a good story. Hopefully it’s kind of pushing people my age or older to say, ‘This guy’s doing something really physically and mentally challenging. He’s going back to school.’ So I’m hoping that message is resonating with some folks.”
But one place where it has already made a big difference is in the Broussards’ neighborhood. They’re just happy to be along for the ride, helping encourage their local celebrity/tuba player.
“This has just been incredible for all of us,” Wilks said.
The year hasn’t gone according to plan for the Tigers on the field. But in the stands, they’re one of the best stories of the season. And Tiger Tuba Kent likes to keep the positivity.
“Come to cheer on the band,” he said.
