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By
Todd
Heustess The
2006 Outsports Tailgate Tour got off to a great start Sept.
16 in Columbus, Ohio, where I saw the No. 1 team in the
country dispatch intrastate rival Cincinnati, 37-7. More
importantly, I was drinking from a keg at 9 a.m. with a
couple hundred of my newest friends while proudly flying a
rainbow flag at a school-sanctioned tailgate party.
Tailgating in Columbus starts
early and ends late, with the major emphasis on beer.
There’s food of course (lots of brats and hot dogs) but
Buckeye fans like their beer, domestic and imported, lagers
and lite and consume it by the gallon before and after the
game. An ungodly noon start did not deter the masses as the
parking lots around the stadium and campus were packed and
partying by 8 am.
Ohio State and Ohio Stadium
have always held a special allure for me. As long as I’ve
followed college football, I’ve wanted to go to a game at
the giant horseshoe on the banks of the Oletangy River. At
the 2002 Outback Bowl in Tampa, where Ohio State played my
alma mater South Carolina I met a number of Buckeye fans
while tailgating at 7 a.m. (for an 11 a.m. game) and enjoyed
their stories of game day traditions and festivities for OSU
home games.
Last spring, I was contacted
by Tim Leonard, the Membership Chair of the OSU GLBT Alumni
Society (www.osuglbt.org)
who had read some of my tailgate stories on Outsports and he
invited me to come to Columbus for the annual tailgate party
sponsored by the GLBT Alumni society. Their annual party was
set the Sept. 16 game against Cincinnati, so I booked my
ticket and headed to O-H-I-O.
The OSU GLBT Alumni Society
is one of the most active alumni groups at OSU and they are
very sports-minded. According to Jack Miner, the board
president, they have one large-scale tailgate per year in
Columbus, sponsor game watching parties throughout the year
(all sports, not just football) and they sponsor an
away-game trip as well, this year’s away trip being the
Northwestern game in Chicago.
The tailgate party I attended
was the fifth annual party sponsored by the Alumni party and
it was their biggest yet, with more than 200 people
attending, a performance by the Capitol Pride Band, many
tables of great food, and of course a keg, which was tapped
out by 10:30 a.m. The crowd was mixed, way more women than I
have seen at previous Tailgate Tour stops, probably 65% men
to 35% women and the age range was pretty wide, going from 6
to 70.
There were also a handful of
straights there, friends of GLBT Alumni. Some of the
attendees brought their children (there were gay and
straight parents there) and there were a couple of current
OSU students. Mostly it was guys and gals ages 25-40, all
out, and all big-time sports fans, very knowledgeable about
college football. The Columbus AIDS Walk was that morning
and many of the tailgaters who arrived to the party after 10
had participated in the Walk and walkers that raised more
than $500 getting Tailgate Party and game tickets.
I asked Jack why the group
didn’t sponsor a tailgate at every game, since it appeared
to me that they would easily have a great turnout given the
passion and dedication the group shows towards football.
Jack explained to me that the University had cracked down on
tailgating the last few years, really enforcing open
container laws in the tailgate areas around the stadium.
In order for anyone or a
group to have a keg or serve liquor at a tailgate party on
campus they need permits, alcohol and event permits from the
school and police. In addition, the GLBT Alumni Society
annual tailgate party includes tickets to the game, a hot
commodity at a school where there is no public sales of
football tickets and years-long waiting lists for season
tickets. The school gives each alumni group a block of
tickets to one game per year and the Cincinnati game was the
game for 2006. From what Alumni Society members told me, OSU
also has an active student GLBT presence as well, but
unfortunately classes had not started at OSU when I was
there so the student presence was greatly reduced.
I also asked Jack if they had
ever had any problems with having such a visible
gay-attended Tailgate Party, since the rainbow flag was
prominently displayed on top of their tent. It reminded me
of the Alums and fans in Austin who get together for Texas
games and fly their rainbow Bevo flag deep in the heart of
Texas. Jack said that they have never had a problem at home
or away games when they have tailgated together as a group.
I was paying close attention
to the recognition and reactions of the other fans as they
walked by and I don’t think anyone really even paid
attention to the group until the Capitol Pride Band starting
playing the OSU fight song and other traditional game day
songs and then everyone just got caught up in the spirit of
the moment. The older fans didn’t seem to pick up on
anything, while the younger ones did (especially those that
looked like current students) and didn’t seem fazed at all.
As with the tailgate party in Austin I was on the lookout
for hecklers and problem makers and nothing happened. The
OSU group blended in to the game day atmosphere as easily as
the Texas crew did.
Ohio Stadium was every bit as
impressive as I imagined it would be, though it’s not really
a horseshoe any more. The renovations to the stadium that
were completed in 2002 added permanent sections to the South
end zone, effectively closing the horseshoe while increasing
the (official) capacity to just under 102,000 making it the
fourth-largest college stadium in the country. The historic
façade reminded me of the L.A. Coliseum or the old Soldier
Field in Chicago. The game itself was tight in the first
half, with OSU pulling away in the second half, looking
every bit the top team in the nation. The defense was
especially impressive holding Cincy to minus-4 yards in
rushing.
After the game we wandered
around taking in the post-game scene. What surprised me was
that two hours after the game, very few people had left to
go home, the tailgating was still in full swing. The early
start partly explained this but people I talked to said that
unless it was a night game, OSU fans generally view the
post-game tailgate as, if nor more important than the
pre-game tailgate. What also surprised me was the number of
kegs I saw in cars and SUVs. It seemed like every other car
had a keg in or next to it and at almost every stop someone
insisted on handing me a cup of freshly tapped beer. I’m
still having visions of the rivers of beer flowing through
Columbus and my veins. Columbus rocks and Go Bucks! |
