swag
09-13-2009, 06:55 AM
I couldn't decide whether to put this in the Chris Rose thread or in the Saints thread, so I just started a new one instead.
I love this one.
Saints tailgaters thrive in a hostile barbecuing environment
by Chris Rose, Columnist, The Times-Picayune
Sunday September 13, 2009, 3:30 AM
Whoever designed the Superdome sure knew how to build a football stadium; at 30 years old, it remains a one-of-a-kind, world-class facility.. But they didn't know jack about tailgating.
By plopping the Dome smack in the middle of downtown, they left out of the grand scheme a design feature imperative to any building that wants to call itself a stadium: a huge, sprawling, asphalt horizon stretching into vast and endless rows of automobiles where the faithful gather together on Game Day to partake of one of the nation's most sacred and hallowed rituals.
Key word here being: together.
The Dome's location, instead, has spread us about in random lots throughout the Central Business District and underneath the behemoth tributaries of Interstate 10, where we are fenced in and forced to hand over $30 to some skeezy-looking guy who may or may not actually work for the owners of the plot of land where you just parked.
They even went so far as to create the most blasphemous and buzzkilling component of 20th-century stadium architecture: a multi-level parking lot adjacent to the stadium.
Whose idea was that? Parking indoors for a football game?
Of course, the fact that it's enclosed hasn't stopped everybody from trying: About 10 years ago a guy fired up a grill in the lot under the Dome and, naturally, a glowing coal rolled out of it and onto the ground and into a most-inconveniently located puddle of oil which then ignited and spread under a van, which was quickly consumed by roaring flames.
True story. And new rule: No grilling indoors.
It is our loss, then, that the Superdome and its adjoining patchwork of hodgepodge, crazy-quilt streets, parking lots and weed-strewn concrete jungles lack that centrally-located encampment of communal goodwill and celebration where the common folk can percolate amongst fellow members of the tribe and fly their colors, bleed black and gold, proclaim their fealty to Drew Brees, take the oath of loyalty, swell to twice their normal proportions with pride and beer and just generally shine.
Who friggin' dat, baby.
Strange, because in many NFL cities, the indigenous tailgate culture actually defines the fan base. For instance, when you think of Green Bay, you think of the NFL's high holy shrine -- Lambeau Field -- where tens of thousands of burly, bearded men named Olaf, Olsen and Hansen, dressed out in garments made of elk, moose and rubber, kick at their 4 by4 tires, inhale Pabst, cheese curds and brats and discuss, for the 12,000th time, the unrivaled greatness of one Mr. Brett Favre.
Until he went to Minnesota, that is.
My friend Bob, who recently moved to New Orleans from Kansas City, raved to me about Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the NFL Chiefs, and its giant pre-game, Epicurean love-fest.
"It's the barbecue capital of the U.S., dude!" he told me. "After hours and hours of food-preparation in the parking lot, suddenly there's this huge haze of smoke over the crowds. People wander around and are always happy to share their spoils with you. It's unparalleled!"
Unparalleled.
Can you stand it?
I brought Bob to the Miami preseason game last week and we wandered the radius of the Dome before the game, taking in the sights and sounds. I asked him what he thought of the scene.
"Disjointed" was his reply.
And it's true. It's hard to imagine any stadium anywhere in the country whose design is less hospitable to the traditional American tailgate scenario: Bose speakers rattling "Bon Jovi's Greatest Hits" in the back seat, guys tossing a football around the parking lot, laying out the condiments on the front bumper of the old Impala, sitting on the hood of a car with your arm around your best girl, drinking an ice-cold brew and thanking the Good Lord for having the good sense and wisdom, on that Seventh Day, to invent football before he finally took his rest.
Can I hear an Amen.
Time and tradition tell us that those hours before a football game -- those precious, crucial hours that can only be compared to Christmas morning, waiting to open gifts, waiting for that whistle to blow, waiting for the game to start, ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL?!! -- are best spent with the masses.
This is no time to be alone.
But can you imagine if New Orleans actually did have one of those big parking lots for Saints fans to tailgate in? If 70,000 people came rolling into one lot with their trunks filled with Webers, Igloos, Abitas and 12 kegs of attitude?
The implications are staggering. It's Mardi Gras times two thousand. It's bat-guano crazy.
There would probably be casualties. (In fact, maybe that's why they did it the way they did: To protect us from ourselves.) And, besides, no one would ever go to the games if we all got together beforehand.
I mean, why would you, if you could spend a beautiful fall afternoon outdoors in the company of 70,000 folks, each of whom considers him or herself the finest host, best cook and most prodigious drinker in all of creation and they will go to great extremes to prove all three of these points before inviting you to their home for red beans, to show you their new fleur-de-lis tattoo and then take you fishing at their camp in Grand Isle?
But here's the thing: They built a stadium with no tailgate lot and what did we do? We came downtown to tailgate.
Given every reason and opportunity to take the pre-game party somewhere else -- the 10,000 or so bars in the French Quarter come to mind -- Saints fans did what New Orleanians do best, which is to ignore the obvious and practical reasons not to do something and then just go ahead and do it anyway, and I'm pretty sure there's a Lower 9th Ward rebuilding analogy in here somewhere.
Because that's how we roll.
Just because we don't have some huge-ass parking lot (but we do have Huge Ass Beers!), we refuse to be deprived of our duty to drink too much too early in the day and start hugging people we don't know and believing -- really, truly, actually believing -- that this is the year the Saints go to the Super Bowl.
The whole downtown scene around here on Game Day Sundays is like "Field of Dreams" in reverse: Don't build it, and they will come.
We might not have a proper place to party but that doesn't mean we're not going to. It's kind of like that scene from Dr. Seuss' "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" when the villagers in Whoville wake up Christmas morning to find that everything is missing but every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, was singing, without any presents at all!
The Grinch hadn't stopped Christmas from coming. Somehow or other, it came just the same.
OK, this is just a football game, it's not Christmas, and nobody stole anything; they simply forgot to build the damn parking lot. But we still come out. We still come together. And suddenly that weedy lot under the I-10 doesn't seem so nasty a place to hang out once it smells like grilled andouille and somebody kicks up the Neville Brothers on a ghetto blaster.
That's the ticket, man. Welcome to Who Datville.
Nothing like it in the known world. The Who Dat Nation, the people of Louisiana and southern Mississippi have shown time and again our perseverance and creativity when we find that something is lacking in our lives -- like, say, our homes and possessions. So our "tailgate party" is not very easy to define or to photograph and it doesn't play so good on TV because everybody is all over the place, on neutral grounds and behind buildings and up the sun-bleached lots of Poydras Street.
And some folks are even at a "real" tailgate party, right there on top of the parking garage, and it would sure look like a lot of people if they were all partying in one place but never mind that because you can walk up to any one of them -- any damn one of them -- and you will find the finest hosts, the best cooks and the most prodigious drinkers in all of creation. On any Sunday. In Who Datville.
I love this one.
Saints tailgaters thrive in a hostile barbecuing environment
by Chris Rose, Columnist, The Times-Picayune
Sunday September 13, 2009, 3:30 AM
Whoever designed the Superdome sure knew how to build a football stadium; at 30 years old, it remains a one-of-a-kind, world-class facility.. But they didn't know jack about tailgating.
By plopping the Dome smack in the middle of downtown, they left out of the grand scheme a design feature imperative to any building that wants to call itself a stadium: a huge, sprawling, asphalt horizon stretching into vast and endless rows of automobiles where the faithful gather together on Game Day to partake of one of the nation's most sacred and hallowed rituals.
Key word here being: together.
The Dome's location, instead, has spread us about in random lots throughout the Central Business District and underneath the behemoth tributaries of Interstate 10, where we are fenced in and forced to hand over $30 to some skeezy-looking guy who may or may not actually work for the owners of the plot of land where you just parked.
They even went so far as to create the most blasphemous and buzzkilling component of 20th-century stadium architecture: a multi-level parking lot adjacent to the stadium.
Whose idea was that? Parking indoors for a football game?
Of course, the fact that it's enclosed hasn't stopped everybody from trying: About 10 years ago a guy fired up a grill in the lot under the Dome and, naturally, a glowing coal rolled out of it and onto the ground and into a most-inconveniently located puddle of oil which then ignited and spread under a van, which was quickly consumed by roaring flames.
True story. And new rule: No grilling indoors.
It is our loss, then, that the Superdome and its adjoining patchwork of hodgepodge, crazy-quilt streets, parking lots and weed-strewn concrete jungles lack that centrally-located encampment of communal goodwill and celebration where the common folk can percolate amongst fellow members of the tribe and fly their colors, bleed black and gold, proclaim their fealty to Drew Brees, take the oath of loyalty, swell to twice their normal proportions with pride and beer and just generally shine.
Who friggin' dat, baby.
Strange, because in many NFL cities, the indigenous tailgate culture actually defines the fan base. For instance, when you think of Green Bay, you think of the NFL's high holy shrine -- Lambeau Field -- where tens of thousands of burly, bearded men named Olaf, Olsen and Hansen, dressed out in garments made of elk, moose and rubber, kick at their 4 by4 tires, inhale Pabst, cheese curds and brats and discuss, for the 12,000th time, the unrivaled greatness of one Mr. Brett Favre.
Until he went to Minnesota, that is.
My friend Bob, who recently moved to New Orleans from Kansas City, raved to me about Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the NFL Chiefs, and its giant pre-game, Epicurean love-fest.
"It's the barbecue capital of the U.S., dude!" he told me. "After hours and hours of food-preparation in the parking lot, suddenly there's this huge haze of smoke over the crowds. People wander around and are always happy to share their spoils with you. It's unparalleled!"
Unparalleled.
Can you stand it?
I brought Bob to the Miami preseason game last week and we wandered the radius of the Dome before the game, taking in the sights and sounds. I asked him what he thought of the scene.
"Disjointed" was his reply.
And it's true. It's hard to imagine any stadium anywhere in the country whose design is less hospitable to the traditional American tailgate scenario: Bose speakers rattling "Bon Jovi's Greatest Hits" in the back seat, guys tossing a football around the parking lot, laying out the condiments on the front bumper of the old Impala, sitting on the hood of a car with your arm around your best girl, drinking an ice-cold brew and thanking the Good Lord for having the good sense and wisdom, on that Seventh Day, to invent football before he finally took his rest.
Can I hear an Amen.
Time and tradition tell us that those hours before a football game -- those precious, crucial hours that can only be compared to Christmas morning, waiting to open gifts, waiting for that whistle to blow, waiting for the game to start, ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL?!! -- are best spent with the masses.
This is no time to be alone.
But can you imagine if New Orleans actually did have one of those big parking lots for Saints fans to tailgate in? If 70,000 people came rolling into one lot with their trunks filled with Webers, Igloos, Abitas and 12 kegs of attitude?
The implications are staggering. It's Mardi Gras times two thousand. It's bat-guano crazy.
There would probably be casualties. (In fact, maybe that's why they did it the way they did: To protect us from ourselves.) And, besides, no one would ever go to the games if we all got together beforehand.
I mean, why would you, if you could spend a beautiful fall afternoon outdoors in the company of 70,000 folks, each of whom considers him or herself the finest host, best cook and most prodigious drinker in all of creation and they will go to great extremes to prove all three of these points before inviting you to their home for red beans, to show you their new fleur-de-lis tattoo and then take you fishing at their camp in Grand Isle?
But here's the thing: They built a stadium with no tailgate lot and what did we do? We came downtown to tailgate.
Given every reason and opportunity to take the pre-game party somewhere else -- the 10,000 or so bars in the French Quarter come to mind -- Saints fans did what New Orleanians do best, which is to ignore the obvious and practical reasons not to do something and then just go ahead and do it anyway, and I'm pretty sure there's a Lower 9th Ward rebuilding analogy in here somewhere.
Because that's how we roll.
Just because we don't have some huge-ass parking lot (but we do have Huge Ass Beers!), we refuse to be deprived of our duty to drink too much too early in the day and start hugging people we don't know and believing -- really, truly, actually believing -- that this is the year the Saints go to the Super Bowl.
The whole downtown scene around here on Game Day Sundays is like "Field of Dreams" in reverse: Don't build it, and they will come.
We might not have a proper place to party but that doesn't mean we're not going to. It's kind of like that scene from Dr. Seuss' "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" when the villagers in Whoville wake up Christmas morning to find that everything is missing but every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, was singing, without any presents at all!
The Grinch hadn't stopped Christmas from coming. Somehow or other, it came just the same.
OK, this is just a football game, it's not Christmas, and nobody stole anything; they simply forgot to build the damn parking lot. But we still come out. We still come together. And suddenly that weedy lot under the I-10 doesn't seem so nasty a place to hang out once it smells like grilled andouille and somebody kicks up the Neville Brothers on a ghetto blaster.
That's the ticket, man. Welcome to Who Datville.
Nothing like it in the known world. The Who Dat Nation, the people of Louisiana and southern Mississippi have shown time and again our perseverance and creativity when we find that something is lacking in our lives -- like, say, our homes and possessions. So our "tailgate party" is not very easy to define or to photograph and it doesn't play so good on TV because everybody is all over the place, on neutral grounds and behind buildings and up the sun-bleached lots of Poydras Street.
And some folks are even at a "real" tailgate party, right there on top of the parking garage, and it would sure look like a lot of people if they were all partying in one place but never mind that because you can walk up to any one of them -- any damn one of them -- and you will find the finest hosts, the best cooks and the most prodigious drinkers in all of creation. On any Sunday. In Who Datville.