Entertainment: The Season for tailgating returns to Wallace Wade

Its a tradition rife with costumes and chanting, cheers and beer. Its participants promote it as a bonding experience, an expression of school spirit and just plain fun. No, no, we're not talking about fraternity rush or even a basketball game. West residents might whine about the back of the Blue Zone when they have to park there, but head towards the most undesirable pavement this Saturday to see it transformed: We're talking about tailgating.

Pre-football game revelry known as tailgating has an uncertain place at Duke University, having moved from a campus-wide tradition to a more specialized--some might say marginalized--funfest. Tailgating suffered a particular blow last fall, when Dean of Students and Assistant Vice-President for Student Affairs Sue Wasiolek discovered kegs before the Louisville game. Fraternity members, when told to move the kegs to avoid citation, cleverly kept their kegs and drank from them by placing them in cars and running tubes out the windows. Although such problem-solving would make any PPS major proud, current and future generations of Blue-Devils-in-the-Blue-Zone drinkers will probably need to wile away their sobriety with cases and cans.

Tailgating might seem a bit wild to the newcomer--indeed, students whose siblings or parents didn't go to a football school often don't even know what it is. The beer eskies, the lawn chairs, the scent of charred meat, the lacrosse team in diapers and tutus--all contribute to a truly unique sensory cultural experience (it doesn't have to be high culture to be culture, right?). At "football schools" like Notre Dame, Penn State and Louisiana State University, parking lots are filled not with station wagons but with motor homes. At LSU, which has night games, the debauchery lasts all day. Want proof? Head to a Blue Devil tailgate against, say, ECU. They're there at 8. There are lots of them. It's not even their parking lot.

Was tailgating always like this? The general history of tailgating begins with the first college football game between Rutgers and Princeton in 1869 (yes, this is time-honored tradition, folks), with a traditional dinner before the game. In the parking lot it wasn't, and the many cans of Busch Light weren't to be added until later, but associating festivities with the time before a football game had taken an unshakable hold.

At Duke, what has become tailgating began as a series of parties before important games and dedicated weekends for Homecoming and a more raucous event called "Joe College Weekend." For the Carolina game, dormitories, quads and fraternities would throw large parties with live bands. Ever wonder where the pictures on the Annual Fund bus posters come from? Back when Duke's football was as good as its basketball and both teams' players joined KA and Kappa Sig in droves, fraternities would rent warehouses off-campus, spend a week building floats, and then parade them through Durham, leading eventually to the front of the fraternity section. Bands and parties would follow for the rest of the weekend.

Those bygone years might seem like wholesome fun (Larry Moneta, take note!), but one alum from the early 60s, preferring not be named in deference to his wife, had a slightly different reminiscence about his own Joe College Weekend, when he built a float around the theme "Joe College Goes to Uranus." Although he wished he could provide further details, he instead linked those bygone 1960s parades with the shotgunning-behind-someone's-Suburban tailgates of today with a simple statement: "By and large, it's been largely blacked out."