New York Times profiles LSU tailgating

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November 27, 2013
Game? What Game? Let’s Tailgate
By MATT HABER

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The tents go up at dawn, or often the night before, with many revelers skipping the game entirely. L.S.U. fan culture is so all-consuming, it was depicted as a kind of primitive rite in Taylor Hackford’s 1988 film version of Frank Deford’s football novel “Everybody’s All-American.” Stories of hard drinking, elaborate food preparations and loutish behavior abound. Not for nothing did Playboy see fit to include L.S.U. among its list of top 10 party schools in October, noting the school’s “many weekends of lawless tailgating.”

But despite the fact that it was homecoming, or perhaps because of it, L.S.U.’s campus on this Saturday night seemed tame. Some attendees attributed the pall to the Tigers’ loss to Ole Miss, 27-24, the week before. Others noted that the team they were playing that day, the Paladins from tiny Furman University in Greenville, S.C., didn’t pose enough of a challenge to raise the Tigers’ collective hackles. Others blamed the presence of so many children, parents and grandparents. It’s hard to be lawless when Mom is nearby.

For other home games, L.S.U. draws spillover crowds to its 92,542-seat Tiger Stadium. On those days, Baton Rouge empties as the campus transforms into a teeming short-term encampment. On this day, there was still plenty of beer, booze and barbecue to be found amid the archipelago of tents and Winnebagos. But Paul Dykes, 56, a lifelong tailgater who runs a pharmaceuticals company in New Orleans and bragged of cooking alligator when L.S.U. plays Florida (guess the mascot) and a 50-pound pig for Arkansas (a.k.a. the Razorbacks), was serving simple supermarket platters. “We just have basic foods today,” he said apologetically.

Still, there was a primal thrill at the sight of Mike, the school’s Bengali-Siberian tiger mascot, as he was rousted from his $3 million enclosure and loaded into a Popemobile-esque trailer and paraded around.

Much like the nearly 500-pound cat, the revelers were more or less domesticated. A bus parked near Indian Mounds, a central spot on campus, had an open-air bar with a stripper pole, but no one was sitting at the stools or swinging from the pole.


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