As you can imagine, coming to my first Duke Tailgate was a bit jarring for me. The official dress code was not distributed to the French and Francophone Studies department, thereby causing me to ruin the pair of Diesel jeans for which I scrimped and saved for more than a month.
I may just be bitter about the jeans, but Tailgate is an embarrassment to our institution.
I could whine about Tailgate as a demonstration of a dearth of intellectualism at Duke, and I probably wouldn't be wrong. Tailgate is not an activity that falls neatly under the "work hard, play hard" brand that defines undergraduates at Duke. If anything, Tailgate reflects a "work hard, play dumb" attitude. The only reservation I have in using that phrase as the Tailgate mantra is that it is an insult to dumb people.
There is nothing playful in dressing like a stripper or a prostitute (ne vous inquietez pas, my women's studies friends, these words are gender-neutral, as most men look like sorry excuses for Chippendales employees). And lest we forget, but for falling under the auspices of collegiate living, waking up at 8 a.m. to drink beer for several hours qualifies as alcoholism. A very bad case of alcoholism.
But what the hell, right? College kids will be college kids, and it does me no good to admonish The Chronicle's readership for going all out in having fun to counterbalance a long week of studies and extracurricular activity. There's something to be said for the common bonding experience that can be achieved solely through literally soaking your hair in beer as you grind through a sweaty mass of your peers. Year in, year out, the Duke Student Government president spends his or her entire year saving Tailgate or letting students know he or she saved Tailgate, so it's obviously something that students just plain love to do.
No, Tailgate is an embarrassment to our University not because the partying is dumb in a vacuum, but rather, because it is an embarrassment to our football team.
Where I come from, a tailgate is a social gathering in which meat is barbecued, beer is drunk in moderation and clothes reflecting allegiance to a sports team are donned. Generally, they precede a major sporting event not simply as a formality, but because tailgate only serves as a preamble to that sporting event.
Duke's undergraduate population rises from peaceful slumber at the crack of dawn, ambles by bus or on foot to a spot quite distant from its dormitories and endures showers of beer, sweat and tears. If this is what we go through to get to Tailgate, how disheartening must it be to the football team to see a drought of supporters in the student section immediately afterwards? We can wake up and walk a great distance to drink, but we can't, generally speaking, stay up and walk a short distance to support our team.
I get the sense that the Duke Tailgate is a ritual designed as a vague copy of real tailgates, only for fans who have lost interest in their team altogether. Even if you do come to the game after Tailgate, you come sloshed and dressed like a fairy princess (again, gender-neutral). We are not the Duke Fairy Princesses, we are the Duke Blue Devils.
Consider, as a thought experiment, if we treated our basketball games as we treat our football games. After several hours of parties, what I estimate to be 30 percent of pregame-goers would tilt and wobble into Cameron Indoor Stadium. Jon Scheyer and Kyle Singler, though certain they saw some thousand-odd students in Krzyzewskiville (a word inebriation would prevent most attendees from correctly spelling), would scratch their heads in confusion as they gazed upon the half-empty bleachers.
You would never in a million years attend a basketball game drunk, nor would you skip a basketball game because you have to reward yourself with a hard earned cool-off period between morning and evening drinking.
Unless we collectively decide we're ready to ditch the façade of tailgate as a precursor to football games and start simply drinking in the Blue Zone on Saturday mornings all year long, it's high time we pay some respect to our football team and clean up our act.
Charlotte Simmons is scared of Spiders.
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