All That’s Left Now Is the Cat’s Meow : Mascots: The old Bengal tiger at LSU has been replaced by a cub. The jaguar at Southern University doesn’t show for games anymore.

A 7-pound, 4-month-old Bengal tiger cub was paraded around Pete Maravich Assembly Center at Louisiana State University Wednesday night at the basketball game between Alabama and Louisiana State.

The baby cat was a stand-in for LSU’s famous mascot, Mike IV, a 475-pound Bengal tiger.

LSU fans used to go berserk when Mike IV was pulled around the gym or football field, a microphone in his wheeled cage amplifying his mighty roar.

But Mike IV is over the hill.

“At a recent game, the tiger was lying on his back when we wheeled him around,” sighed Sheldon Biven, the tiger’s veterinarian. “He didn’t look like he was breathing. There was no roar from him that day. I thought he had died.”

So the 16-year-old tiger will be moved from his campus enclosure this summer to the Baton Rouge Zoo, there to spend his remaining years.

And there was no roar from Mike V--only a meek meow--as the new little cat was officially introduced at Wednesday’s game. But little cats grow into big cats and, someday soon, Mike V’s roars will have the basketball cats roaring along at the Maravich Center.

This capital city is home to two of the most unusual school mascots in the country, the Bengal tiger at LSU, and a jaguar, Lacumba, at Southern University, the cross-town school.

Both campuses have huge, expensive and expansive enclosures for their cats.

“Some schools have a live owl or a live duck,” said Greg Lafleur, 31, a former LSU tight end who played professional football for the St. Louis Cardinals and Baltimore Colts and is now the school’s event and promotion coordinator. “Here at Baton Rouge, we have these big, strong, sleek wild cats.”

Mike IV made his final appearance at a sports event on Jan. 20, when LSU and Notre Dame played basketball at the Superdome.

Over at Southern University, Lacumba the jaguar, like Mike the Bengal tiger, is getting old and crotchety. She’s 20 this year.

“Lacumba doesn’t come out for the games anymore,” said Carl (Doc) Williams Jr., 52, SU’s athletic trainer. “We can’t coax her from her enclosure into a cage.

“It’s too bad. We would parade Lacumba around the football field and basketball court in a cage and the kids would howl and yell. They all love Lacumba.”

At the moment, though, there are no plans to replace Lacumba with a younger jaguar.

LSU acquired its first live tiger as a mascot in 1936. It was named Mike for Mike Chambers, a trainer at the school. That first tiger lived 20 years on campus.

Mike II lasted only through the 1957 football season, then caught pneumonia and died.

Students then collected $1,500 to buy Mike III from the Seattle Zoo. He died in 1976.

“By then LSU’s tiger had become one of the best known university mascots in America,” recalled Biven, 50, director of Lab Animal Medicine at LSU’s school of veterinary medicine. “We had letters, telegrams and phone calls of condolence from coast to coast when Mike III died.”

Mike IV was a gift to the university from August A. Busch III, of the St. Louis brewery-baseball family. Mike IV was born in 1974 at Busch Gardens in Tampa, Fla., and became the school mascot when he was 2.

“I can remember when the first Bengal tiger came on campus in 1936,” said Katherine Herget Huckabay, 90, class of 1921, one of LSU’s greatest fans. “It has been tigermania at LSU ever since. Everybody goes wild when they wheel that tiger around the gym or around the football stadium. Absolutely wild.”

It is the same at Southern U. with Lacumba. Students gave the animal, the school’s first live mascot, her name.

“She was purchased by students in 1970 from the Baton Rouge Zoo for $600,” recalled trainer Williams. “My wife, Helen, led the drive to purchase the animal. We got Lacumba as a baby and kept her in our back yard the first few months.”

Basketball and football players stop by the jaguar’s cage for good luck before every game.

The same thing happens at LSU.

And on each campus hardly a minute passes during the school day that students, faculty and athletes aren’t gathered around the cats’ cages.