Something For Louisiana To Cheer For

LSU Tigers Give Hurricane-Ravaged Gulf Coast A Time Out From Reality

(CBS)  Even in this bracket-busting tournament of Cinderella stories, it isn't hard to spot the team from Louisiana.

Not when your center is Glen Davis, a six-foot-nine 310-pound wrecking ball nicknamed "Big Baby," CBS News correspondent Jim Acosta reports.

"It gives everybody a good feeling," Davis said. "I got to go cut the nets down right quick."

The Tigers have done more than just win basketball games. They're giving their hard-luck home state a time out from reality. They let Hurricane Katrina evacuee actually forgot for a moment that he had lost it all.

"I thought I was at home for a moment. I forgot about the trailer park," Al Young told Acosta.

And home is at the heart of this team. Nearly all of the players grew up around Baton Rouge.

"These are crawfish down here in Baton Rouge, La.," a teammember said.

They know how to eat crawfish. And they also feel the state's heartache. After Katrina, they showed up at this campus arena after it was turned into a medical facility.

"Our players volunteered and stayed up half the nights setting up cots and doing whatever was necessary," said John Brady, LSU's head coach.

Times like that don't make basketball players. They make men. But Katrina wasn't the first challenge for this team.

As Glen Davis' mother told CBS News, her larger-than-life son is a survivor.

"I had a drug addiction and my kids went through a hard time," Tonya Davis said.

Collis Temple, the first African American to play basketball at LSU, raised Davis, along with his other sons. "Big Baby" became a brother to Temple's son Garrett. Today, the two are teammates.

The pair have been called "brothers in baseball."

"I would probably venture to say they are brothers in life," Collis Temple said.

"It has a different meaning to it when you can experience something like this with a guy you grew up with," Davis said.

A team tested off the court has given an entire state a reason to cheer.