Go to Tailgate

Before I arrived at Duke for my freshman year, I received an issue of Towerview in the mail in which the cover story—entitled “The Fall of a Fall Tradition”—decried the death of Tailgate.

One month later, I was pleased to discover that it was anything but dead.

Let’s get this straight: others schools may have tailgates, but no one else has Tailgate. Tailgate can only be described as that four-hour early-morning ecstasy where problems melt away like a jello shot in a warm mouth; where your best friends wake you up with a Busch Light in bed and you all shotgun in the bathroom to the kachick! kachick! of snapped-open beer tabs echoing off the linoleum, and then you shotgun again; where you take out your predetermined outfit, put it on bleary-eyed and then walk, grinning with beer-in-hand, to the Blue Zone to witness the rumpus erupting; where there is a Technicolor mass of students decked out in costumes so gloriously audacious it’s like Halloween in the land of Oz; where the smell of meat grilling fills the air and everywhere lighters spark for cigarettes, and everyone has those ubiquitous neon-band sunglasses; where the maniacs take long pulls from handles of Aristocrat as if they were filled with water, not vodka; where your chem TA is dressed in a chicken suit and promptly pours beer on you but you get her back as cameras click pictures all around; where different songs from disparate speakers blend together, the sounds of pleasure-filled yells and music commingling and the minutes pass quickly like a few beautiful seconds and your drunkenness increases to the holiest of heights as “Shout” blasts from the nearest sound system and a keg’s worth of beer showers down upon you like a baptism and on the roof of the car the dance-floor of people slowly rises, repeating the mantra “a little bit louder now, a little bit louder now” and all of a sudden—BAM!—the party bursts to its feet howling with joy as the beer falls onto your lips and you realize, “this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my entire life.”

Unfortunately, there are people who do not share this philosophy. I am OK with this. What I am not OK with is anti-Tailgate sentiment. If you don’t like Tailgate, stick to your Saturday-night checkers games in Brown, and stay away from the Blue Zone on game day. I realize that by writing this column I am contradicting myself, but hear me out: I am intending this to be the last word on Tailgate. Once this column runs, people will stop arguing about Tailgate, and simply enjoy the magic of it.

 The problem began with a column written by “Charlotte Simmons” for “Monday, Monday” entitled “Failgate.” “Tailgate is an embarrassment to our institution,” the column read.

The column was then commented upon in a series of letters to the editor. “Though I may have been inebriated, I failed to see one person without a giant smile pasted on their beer-soaked faces throughout the four hours of revelry,” Al Samost wrote in his Sept. 9 response to “Failgate.”

IFC even ran a full-page ad Oct. 7 in which its members apologized for the raucous, awesome fun they had at Tailgate (“This is unacceptable,” it read). Even this commentary prompted two letters that ran on the back pages. The first was sent in Oct. 9 by Tom Burr, who wrote, “The problem with Tailgate is not can-throwing, nor is it standing on cars. The problem with Tailgate is Tailgate.”

Then, in his response to both IFC and Tom Burr, David Mlaver took a more level-headed approach in his Oct. 12 letter: “How silly is it to apologize publicly for people sitting in the back of a truck as if it were some kind of sin?”