'BAMA SLAMMA: Of Crimson Hues and Barbecues

Fare thee well, summer days. I hardly knew ye.

Still, it’s great to be back at Harvard for the best month of the year: October. The skies are blue, the breeze is crisp, and football is on TV—the last, of course, precluding contact with the first two.

Who cares? I’ve got cable.

Something troubling, however, stirs in the air. Whispers of tailgates and keg bans—not Elis and game-plans—dominate Harvard-Yale talk.

By limiting beer-bringing (and turning responsibility for public safety over to the flask-toting students) school and city organizers are trying to show they’re determined to tone down the tailgate. Are more regulations on the way?

Is The Fun gone from The Game?

To help understand this question and others, I recently talked to an expert in the fields of tailgating and fandom.

Warren St. John is a reporter for the New York Times and has written for the New York Observer, The New Yorker and Wired.

A Columbia grad, he enjoys Ivy League football despite the Lions’ traditional futility. A Birmingham, Ala. native, he has rooted for the Alabama Crimson Tide his entire life.

This summer, St. John’s funny and engaging first book, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania (New York: Crown, 2004) was released to favorable national reviews and wide distribution. Named after a UA victory song, it chronicles Alabama’s 1999 run to an SEC Championship, focusing less on what happened inside the stadium and more on what happened in the parking lot.

St. John’s odyssey takes place in an RV dubbed “The Hawg,” and along the way he meets Tide über-fans with names like the “Chicken Man,” the “Show Chicken Man” and the “Heart Guy.”

The Heart Guy, for example, needs a heart transplant and loses his place on the waiting list any time he travels more than two hours away from Nashville—which is a problem, since he intentionally leaves that area for each Alabama football game.

Whoops!

First, I asked St. John what makes sports fans (at least, those outside of Harvard) so crazy. Are extreme fan habits always so damaging?

“I think Step One is being self-aware,” St. John said. “You know, being honest about how you pick your team.”

Alabama fans, as is common, often create a complex justification for their loyalty. Tide priders accuse class and tradition—’Bama has 12 national titles—for triggering their obsession, when in fact most sports allegiances are tied to family and friends.

“Once you realize that,” St. John said, “you’ve achieved Step One to healthy fandom.”

So what else creates healthy fandom? What actually makes sporting events worthwhile and fun?

“Sports,” St. John told me, “are social functions. People are fans not because they want 11 guys to win. They’re fans because they want 11 guys to win with other people around them.”

The tailgate, then, is an outward manifestation of this social construction. Harvard-Yale is fun because of the competition between teams; it’s also fun because of the camaraderie at the kegs and at the barbeque outside the stadium.

In an Ivy League game that so stringently regulates itself—with no athletic scholarships or playoffs, a Harvard national championship is simply not possible—schools might be better served to reward their fans’ dedication.

“I didn’t mind any of those restrictions that tried to keep [football] honest,” St. John said of his days as a Columbia undergrad. “At the same time, the best way to make up for that is to compensate socially.”

Though he said he personally enjoys watching Ivy League football—he attended Princeton’s overtime victory over Columbia this past weekend—St. John acknowledged the Ivies’ somewhat diminished scale compared to Division I-A and the NFL.

“A savvy administrator would want to foster a social atmosphere,” he said. “That adds to the game on the field.”

Subtracting from the game on the field would be an overbearing police presence at Harvard-Yale this year, the rumored registration requirement and limitation on alcoholic beverages, and the possibility that Harvard could someday limit movement in and out of the stadium at The Game—an increasingly popular check on student tailgates around the country.

This is one particular situation in which Harvard would do well to take a tip from the Alabamas of the world.

In any case, what would Tide fans do if Alabama put restrictions on tailgating?

“I can’t imagine that happening,” St. John said. “They would riot.”

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.