The Fall of a Fall Tradition

Welcome to the Parking Lot Circus, folks, step right up.

See the incredible Beer Bong Man drain a forty in a single gulp. Witness the amazing Barely Dressed Girls stalking past the tennis courts in tutus and stilettos at 8 a.m. Marvel at the madness of the Macho Alpha Males trying to out-cross-dress each other.

It's Saturday morning during football season, and all over campus, students are rousing themselves from dorm room beds and making their way to the far lot of the Blue Zone. The only people sleeping in are those planning to spend the day in the stacks at Bostock, or Lilly, or Teer. The partiers rise at dawn.

Forget football. This is Tailgate season.

During the past several years, tailgating--the socially-acceptable practice of drinking and eating in a parking lot before a football game--has been exalted into Tailgate, an event at which anything can happen and most things do. Frat boys really do drink gallons of beer without stopping to take a breath. Athletes dressed as cartoon characters chase each other round and round. Girls in their Sunday best or cutesy/risqué sorority t-shirts sip cans of beer from the iced trashcans of their preferred frats. And administrators and cops stand by with their arms crossed, scowling.

But this exalted pastime has recently been under threat from those same scowling administrators, and now a few of them are putting their collective foot down to prevent 1000 Duke students from ever drinking in the same place at nine in the morning again.

How did it get to be like this? How did a single event raise the excitement and devotion of so many students? Why was it allowed to go on this long--despite repeated arrests, hospitalizations, and general loutishness--and why do so many people care?

The Students' President

They also transformed the sophomore math major into a major folk hero. "College life, as we have come to know it, has come to an end," sophomore Kim Marston wrote in a letter to the editor about the website's closure, which was printed in The Chronicle. Others wore red t-shirts with Elliott's likeness emblazoned on the front above the words "Free Elliott."

And then Elliott announced his candidacy for DSG President.

Longoria was an unflappable DSG president with camera-ready hair. Elliott wore a t-shirt and a sheepish--some might say relieved--grin for his victory photograph.

Saving Tailgate, Part I

Elliott is on a call with a prime-time television news producer when I pick him up at the West Campus Bus Stop. The producer is attempting to get Elliott to organize a roundtable conversation about the lacrosse scandal--still, in mid-April, at its fever pitch--to be moderated by one of the show's anchors. Elliott says no. The producer takes a different tack.

"But Jesse said he would do whatever we wanted."

Elliott repeats his original answer.

And again: "Don't you want to be on TV?"

"No, not really, not with all of the exposure this has already received, and not during exam week. I'll call you if I think of anything." Phone closed, call over. Done. Elliott shakes his head at the producer's audacity.

"Right now all I care about is helping my school, not about satisfying a TV journalist."

Elliott has just presented a plan to save Tailgate to several top administrators. The plan calls for "resisting punitive measures through positive initiatives" such as massive amounts of food, programming and entertainment. Those positive changes will, Elliott hopes, make Tailgate a more positive event.

The plan features a new Tailgate zone: the event will take place on the parking lot and field at the back right of the Blue Zone rather than Tailgate's traditional home in the back left lot. Student groups will have to present DSG-issued Tailgate permits to park in the lot, where drinking and other Tailgate activities (more drinking) will take place. Anyone who likes can wander to the field for live entertainment and free food.

To increase student safety, no driving will be allowed in the Zone from three hours before to four hours after a football game. Students will have to adhere to the guidelines to receive permits for subsequent Tailgates.

"We want to shift responsibility to the individuals who bring the cars and provide the fuel for this whole thing," he says.

Elliott believes that with proper student efforts, there's no reason Tailgate shouldn't be able to continue in an altered--but still recognizable--form, despite a certain administrator's seeming revulsion to the idea of a highly visible Saturday morning boozefest. There is, Elliott says, a jurisdictional loophole.

"The existence of the Tailgate is based on the cooperation of the campus police and auxiliary services--parking. Neither of those fall under the purview of Student Affairs," he says.

"The University has decided that the best way to teach students to be responsible is to force them to be responsible through enacting policy," Elliott says. "It's a gut paternalism instinct."

"It's a funny scene for Duke when you can show up at a parking lot at 8 a.m. and run into the kid who sits next to you in orgo wearing a panda costume. It's kind of relaxing. Kids love it." --Ben Rubinfeld, senior

The Administrator

I meet with Larry Moneta during reading period. Outside, students are studying for exams on the Chapel quad, but inside his office is cool and inviting.

It's easy enough to get an appointment--Elliott says he sat down with Moneta at least twice a month in his year as a columnist, meaning that Wolf entered into his tenure as DSG president with an already established relationship with one of the most senior administrators at the University.

Moneta welcomes me into his office and sits, not behind his desk, but in one of the chairs he has clustered on the other end of his spacious office.

"I'm not going to talk about Tailgate," he says.

This seems problematic. I distinctly remember telling Moneta's assistant I wanted to interview him for an article about Tailgate when I scheduled the appointment.

"I'll talk about the culture surrounding Tailgate, just not any of the policies."

That's better. So what does the administration have against Tailgate culture?

"We've tried for two years to make Tailgate work," he says, "but the twenty percent [of participants] who are inevitably going to abuse alcohol ruin the event" through drunk driving, hospitalizations and physical violence."

Certainly, alcohol hospitalizations and arrests are troubling, but could result from underage drinking anywhere, not just from underage drinking in a parking lot.

"It also troubles me that tailgating has nothing to do with football. It's supposed to be a pre-football, spirit building event. In our case, what tailgating has become is another quasi-LDOC [Last Day of Classes]. It's just another excuse for the old keg on the quad, except that it's BYOB to the extreme."

A common complaint arises whenever students discuss President Nannerl Keohane's outlawing kegs on the Quad, the crackdown on fraternity parties on campus and the looming end of Tailgate. It goes something like this:

"Duke just wants to push drinking off campus so it won't be liable for anything that goes wrong. So instead of drinking safely on campus, students drink unsafely off campus, where they're wide open to the greater dangers of drunk driving and sexual assault."

Variations on the theme portray certain members of the administration as dunces, manipulative wizards or even more far-fetched conspiracy theory characters.

Despite the whiny nature of students who relinquish responsibility for the personal choice to drink, there does seem to be a ring of truth in the refrain. Restricting venues for students to imbibe on campus leads students to seek other outlets for that most timeless collegiate pursuit. What does Moneta think of girls walking home from Ninth Street alone at three in the morning, or students piling into their falsely confident friend's car after a party night at Shooter's, perhaps because they couldn't drink at Duke?

"I'm not going to own irresponsible decisions," he says. "I have no intention of taking the fun out of Duke. I just can't quite accommodate the kind of fun that many students would argue has been the history of Duke."

The History of Duke

Gone are the days when the Budweiser truck pulled up alongside Few Quad to roll out kegs. The Hideaway--a grubby student bar below the Great Hall--locked its liquor cabinet in 2001. The Oak Room soon followed, closing its doors in 2003. The Washington Duke initiated a policy of requiring two forms of identification. A wave of police enforcement activity and probationary warnings in Spring 2005 effectively put an end to the humid halls and ice luges of selective living group parties in dorm sections.

Then, in Fall 2005, 194 people were cited by undercover ALE agents at bars, stores and off-campus house parties during the first weekend of the semester. Duke purchased 12 of the houses where most of the off-campus drinking occurred, signing away years of Saturday night house parties and Sunday morning brunch stories with a flourish of the pen. And the end of Tailgate? For some, it's the last straw.

"There's nothing at Duke, Duke isn't fun, Duke sucks," says senior Eric Baumann, a former member of the baseball team. "Tailgate was the best part about Duke."

These days, "Old Duke" exists only as a legend. Yet in a school with a history spanning only 82 years, how long did "Old Duke" last?

Tailgating used to be a community activity: students mingled with Duke fans, enjoying cold beers and lazy barbecues in the Blue Zone before games. It was like tailgating at any other football game anywhere else in the country, with the exception of a smaller, semi-private student tailgate section populated by lacrosse and baseball team members.

"The tailgate would have been the alumni and the families of the football players," says Jake Henry, who graduated in 1996 and continued to earn a Ph.D in engineering in 1999. "Every now and then you'd hear of someone who took their car up there and had friends over, but it wasn't at all as organized as you have now."

Instead, fraternity and sorority mixers drove the game day celebrations. Any given Saturday, beer-fueled barbecues filled the dorms and spilled out onto the Quad outside fraternity sections.

"We were allowed to do most of our stuff on campus," says Henry, a member of Sigma Nu. "We did have standards, and the students had agreed as a part of the social policy to agree with those in exchange for having the ability to do that."

But with the crackdown on alcohol distribution, students began to see tailgating in a different light.

"As the campus tightened on the ability for considerable underage drinking and large-scale gatherings, tailgating became an opportunity," Moneta explains. "It just became a magnet for more people."

Although there were more students attending tailgate, visitors and families with children were still admitted to the same section of the parking lot. Widespread vandalism and a record of students using inappropriate language around children led administrators to ban visitors' cars from the far lot, turning tailgating into a student-only activity. Moneta shakes his head as he recalls the decision.

"Well, that in and of itself gave birth to the mob event."

Three years ago--when today's seniors were freshmen--Tailgate with a capital T picked up steam.

Christine Mullis, Trinity '04, experienced Tailgate's ascent from just another weekend event to the event of the week. She started attending the Saturday morning party during her sophomore year.

"The first time I went, it was definitely a raging party, and the last time I went, it was definitely a raging party," she says, noting that certain groups--primarily the lacrosse team--were visibly enthusiastic about promoting the party. "But it did grow. By the time I was a senior you'd go out there and see everybody."

Every weekend, Mullis and her girlfriends combed through thrift shops to outdo their own costumes from previous weeks. One week it was crazy disco outfits; the next, giant hoop skirts.

While the costumes were entertaining (she laughs, remembering someone dressed as Sponge Bob, as well as some other, less printable costumes), Christine says the best part about Tailgate was the chance to mingle and meet unexpected people.

"It was the only place you could go where there was common ground--everything else was a frat party," she says. "I met more people outside of my traditional social circle at Tailgate than anywhere else. Since anyone can show up, various social divisions are less

obvious."

"Last year, on alumni weekend, there was the return of the Chip Challenge. An alum came back, and, as he used to, he challenged anybody around to try to chug two forties quicker than he could chug two bottles of wine. He said he'd give $20 to anybody who could beat him, and nobody has." --Andrey Washington, senior

The Social Lob

There is an arc to life at Duke, a slow, social lob that nearly everyone follows.

It goes like this: Freshman year, we make friends with people on our halls or floors in East Campus dorms. Sophomore year heralds a period of assimilation into more clearly defined groups--sororities, fraternities, selective living groups, sports teams, housing blocks, majors. Junior year, when the fog of study abroad reminiscence clears, we reconnect with our Duke friends. Then, during senior year, we're less willing to waste precious free time with acquaintances who have the potential to become friends--we're too busy counting every moment with those we've come to know best before the zero hour of graduation.

Over and over, the one thing students say is worth saving about Tailgate is its open character. The back of the Blue Zone--big enough for everyone--is the ultimate mixer.

"There are few activities where literally the entire campus comes together. People almost always form around Greek organizations or athletic teams, but you can count on one hand the number of times we have parties for the whole school," Elliott says.

Some students, like senior Andrey Washington, already refer to the event in the past tense, making it easy to imagine that soon, Tailgate will be discussed in the same hushed, reverential tone previously reserved for conversations about kegs on the Quad.

"[Tailgate] was the only real time that the entire undergraduate population could socialize in a pretty fun setting on campus," says Washington, an officer in the off-campus fraternity formerly known as SAE. "Through last year, that was really the only time when kids from all four years could go, be on campus and party together. All other parties are really small or exclusive. I found it to be the best setting for getting to know kids from wherever."

But Washington is in one of the fraternities whose enthusiasm powers Tailgate--the event may seem less welcoming to unaffiliated students, or to those who fall outside the dominant social mainstream.

"If you talk to alumni, they'll talk lovingly about kegs on the Quad as a real integrator," Moneta says. "But there were always people who weren't included and who were invisible on this campus.. The mainstream events were large enough for the perception that 'this' was Duke."

Saving Tailgate, Part II

It's past midnight in the middle of June when Elliott calls. He's eating dinner, trying to catch up after a busy day, and he wants to tell me about his breakfast meeting with Provost Peter Lange.

"The word tailgate is a dirty word. There's tailgating, which happens at all universities, and then there's Tailgate, which defines what Duke does," he says. "They're wary of any single event, so even if we gain more or less something just as fun--or even something similar--the administration would prefer that we not call it tailgate."

That seems like quibbling over semantics. Will they or won't they?

"Tailgate as we know it is dead. And that's been made very clear.. You can tailgate, you just can't reserve a section of the Blue Zone for you and a thousand of your friends to get shit-faced," Elliott says.

What, if anything, will replace the large-scale gathering formerly known as Tailgate?

"We have to look at what you can reasonably be allowed to do, and then what you can reasonably be allowed to do at nine in the morning," he says. "But we've come to the conclusion that lemonade on the plaza is not a reasonable alternative."

"The guys would always do ridiculous pranks, like slide down the hill in a trashcan. Some of the craziest things I've ever seen were when I sobered up for a moment and realized how dirty and disgusting I was, and in my moment of clarity would see five girls peeing around a bush.. I never went to any tailgate where something ridiculous didn't happen." --Christine Mullis, Trinity '04

The Image Problem

I land in Charlotte for the July 4 weekend and my mother takes me straight from the airport to the farmer's market. We walk down the dusty aisle, sampling this farm's watermelon and that farm's canteloupe, looking for the best baskets of peaches. The girl who takes those peaches and dumps them from the basket into a bag is wearing a t-shirt that reads, "Duke University TAIL-G8R." I ask her if she goes to Duke.

"Not yet," she says.

"When will you?"

"A couple years."

"But you've heard about Tailgate?" She nods. "What have you heard about it?" She smiles.

"That it's crazy."

That very fact--the idea that this "crazy" Tailgate thing is something people outside the University know about Duke--presents a few highly-publicized problems for the administration. A sampling from the Crime Briefs archive is instructive:

1) Student arrested for cocaine possession: Duke University Police Department officers observed junior Paul Musselwhite [Trinity '06] in the Blue Zone parking lot with a white powder-like substance Nov. 20 at 2:06 p.m. The substance tested positive for cocaine. The student was placed under arrest and transported to the Magistrate's Office. He was charged with felony possession of cocaine and placed under a $2,000 secure bond.

2) Tailgater winds up in ER: DUPD officers responded to a fight-in-progress call from the Blue Zone parking lot at 3:27 p.m. Nov. 20. The fighting was over when officers arrived. They found a Duke student with a bloody face who had been assaulted and injured during the fight. The victim had been hit in the face and had a tooth knocked out.

And that's just one weekend.

Even when the parking lot is empty, the Tailgate spirit spills over into other arenas. Administrators initiated new policies mandating that Tailgate end at kickoff and preventing students from moving their cars until at least halftime during Fall 2005. When students were kicked out of the Blue Zone after last year's second Tailgate, four Duke seniors were arrested at a party at the Belmont pool. Other students at the pool said the police officers used unnecessary force while arresting the students, going so far as to slam one student to the ground, bloodying his face.

But still, despite the regulations, the college students wanted to embarrass themselves and, by proxy, their institution.

Lange says he has no problem with students drinking--many adults drink, he says, and so drinking is an activity that should be enjoyed by those students who can behave like adults. It's the destruction that's the problem, and Lange says the University should not enable thuggishness.

"Tailgate, as we have constructed it, is an opportunity for students to drink heavily, sometimes in excess, on a Saturday morning," he says. "The University should not be responsible for the creation of circumstances and major opportunities under which it becomes much less likely that students will manage their own behavior." Lange says he does not support Elliott's proposals.

The administration has effectively told students they cannot drink themselves halfway to death in broad daylight on University property. The record of fights, injuries, hospitalizations, arrests and ghastly behavior seems to justify their decision, and no amount of earnest negotiation by staid, respectable members of student government will change that. We gave you a chance to behave like adults, they seemed to say, and what you must face are the consequences of behaving like idiots. Very sorry.

"Basically, the goal of costumes is to look as stupid as you can. Sometimes, we'd have themes. The lax team, one time they had a wrestling theme where they dressed like pro wrestlers. One time, I wore an 'I am drunk' shirt with a huge clown 'fro, high orange socks and some Converse shoes. I don't really remember what was going on half of the time. One of the guys wore a one piece little grandmother's swimsuit with a wig and a little doll in a little stroller. One guy dressed up as Hamburgler and started throwing actual McDonald's cheeseburgers around. He probably threw about $60 worth of cheeseburgers." --Eric Baumann, senior

Tailgate after Lacrosse-Gate

Baseball and lacrosse team members raised Tailgate to its zenith of popularity. They brought the booze that fueled the party, arrived the earliest, stayed the latest, wore the most outrageous costumes. And as the lacrosse team kept winning games, more people followed the victorious athletes to the event that they had built.

So when an exotic dancer raised allegations of gang rape against members of the lacrosse team in mid-March, it was no surprise that the national media and university bigwigs turned their gaze to the players' drinking culture. President Richard Brodhead convened five committees to report on aspects of the scandal, including one ad hoc committee to report on the lacrosse team.

The committee's report describes Tailgate as "the signature event demonstrating the lacrosse team's excessive behavior."

"Bad alcohol-related behavior seems to be reinforced rather than mitigated by the group," it reads. "The most persistent concern of administrators. was with their prominent role in the fall Tailgate events, not the team's extensive disciplinary record."

According to the report, as early as two years ago, administrators met with athletic department staff and Duke University police to discuss how to control "outrageous excessive behavior" at Tailgate. Their preferred solution involved the leadership of the lacrosse and baseball teams, whose members are credited in the report as being Tailgate's "most lusty participants."

Baumann, the baseball team's leading homerun hitter until he was cut from the team in October 2005, cites Tailgate as one of the reasons he chose to play at Duke. But newly-hired baseball coach Sean McNally, Trinity '94, wanted the team to gain a greater sense of discipline.

"He told us that if we went to the tailgates he'd ban us from the team," Baumann says.

The lacrosse players were allowed to continue attending without restriction until midway through the Fall 2005 semester, when coach Mike Pressler began requiring his players to meet him at the flagpole outside the football stadium 15 minutes before kickoff. The players had to stay at the game at least through the first half. The report says administrators hoped that other students would follow the lacrosse players out of the Blue Zone lot when they left for the flagpole.

The students did not follow.

The lacrosse scandal was the death knell for Tailgate--it provided administrators with an example of unchecked student behavior going wrong, and with more motivation to ban an already reviled event.

"I think it has redoubled a resolve which has already existed. There was a fairly firm commitment that tailgate as we have known it in the last few years was not a positive event and should not be continued.. And of course the events of the Spring only deepened people's convictions to stick to their guns," Lange says.

President Richard Brodhead has said he only learned of the alleged rape from a brief in The Chronicle on March 20th. In the case of Tailgate, the record of abuse and destruction is already well-known: the arrests, the assaults, the public drunkenness, the drunk driving, the vandalism, the eyesores.. The administration simply cannot allow any more unanticipated negative attention to fall upon Duke, and for that reason, Tailgate is over.

"Sometimes, the memories of not remembering Tailgate are great. Usually, the memories of Tailgate are better." --Andrey Washington

Saving Tailgate, Part III

One night in June, after a party, a bar and a pizza place, I'm lying in the dark when my phone chirps to life. I open it and see a two-word text sent at 1:14 a.m.: "You awake?"

It's Elliott. I text him back and he calls me, sounding frustrated as he explains how everything--Tailgate, the plan, the relationship with Moneta--has run off the rails.

"My reading of the situation is that the administration doesn't want to participate in Tailgate, and DSG doesn't want to participate or condone ending Tailgate, which leaves open the possibility for havoc.

"At this point I can only say that we've done all we can do. I'm really not optimistic. A certain someone believes he's able to stop all underage drinking."

With this admission, Elliott is effectively canceling his plan--all seven pages of proposals, tweaks, guarantees, safeguards. And now, the story is right back where it was during the rumor stage: Tailgate is dead. Long live the Plaza.

"I'm not optimistic."

"You sound depressed."

"I am. I really am."