In the SEC, tailgating is almost as important as the actual football. This season, it’s in jeopardy.
This thought must be a peerless bummer in tailgate Shangri-La: the University of Mississippi.
There hasn’t come any announcement from Ole Miss, that Sydney Opera House of tailgating, and there’s ample reason for reasonable procrastination like they’re doing at Georgia, where athletic director Greg McGarity took a wait-and-see on Wednesday by telling reporters, “We’re not even out of August yet, so we’ve got plenty of time.” But in a league which plans to play a conference-only football schedule beginning Sept. 26, and for the Ole Miss people who arrange their autumn Saturdays around the rhythms of the 10-acre mirth mass called The Grove, there’s already cause to wince.
“Well, it’s not very fun,” began Colton Benford, an Ole Miss graduate who runs Tailgate Group, a company that furnishes every element of a tailgate from securing the patch of ground to filling the coolers for those who wish to revel without exhaustive preparation. He said he had fielded “five or six calls in the past 24 hours” from people saying, “‘Can we book this?’ ‘Can we go here?’ I say, ‘No, let’s not book anything yet because I don’t want to send your money back in two weeks.”
For those uninitiated, the tradition of tailgating around football stadiums on Saturday mornings during pregame hours has blossomed from something that used to seem genteel to something that does seem booming. Entire tent cities pop up. Grills and smorgasbords appear. Alcohol goes undiscouraged. Anyone walking through the makeshift town before the LSU-Alabama game in Tuscaloosa last November, for one example, would have felt a Woodstock minus most of the hippies. Occasionally, as at The Grove, one might spot china and chandeliers.
The photo came from LSU’s usual, gigantic tailgate sprawl of last Oct. 12, when the visitors actually were (Florida) Gators.
At Ole Miss, The Grove stands embedded both amid the oaks and elms and magnolias but also so deeply in the bloodstreams that one of the all-time tailgating titans, Jan Waddell of Tupelo, Miss., used the words “retired from” on Wednesday. She told how she and her husband, Lamar Waddell, had opted to take a breather after 2019. For years they had organized a colossus of a tailgate, and Lamar had spent all days on Fridays intricately packing the car, and the couple would arrive on Saturdays before dawn.
Sometimes, from departure at home to arrival at home, more than 24 hours would elapse. They loved it but reached one of those points when people sit and say whew.
Said Benford, “We have people every year, and probably every week, say, ‘Oh, man, this is so great.’ ‘This is the best day of the year!’ ‘Thank you so much.’ ‘We’re so grateful.’ And I think, Wow, and we just spent five minutes setting up a tent and chairs.”
In terms of social distancing, social distancing is entirely not the point. “It’s ten acres that is all that’s still good in the Deep South, meaning manners, charm, looks, clothes, food, drink, football,” Benford said. “Just the whole experience is heavenly to people who love college football and love to be social and have a good time.” He finds it “really sad to think people aren’t going to have the experience,” but said, “But you put things in perspective and it’s not worth it if one percent of the people showing up are going to pass away.”
His business began in 2011, his junior year at Ole Miss. Around mid-decade, it expanded. It’s up to six states, other schools, one of which has an associate athletic director who expressly asked Benford to try to make things resemble, as much as possible, The Grove.
But around the third weekend of last February, Benford began to wonder. He noticed the novel coronavirus breakout in Italy, and reasoned it would find its way through the flight paths across the Atlantic. “I just was hopelessly thinking that maybe I was wrong,” he said.
Like many in the many veins of life, he wishes the whole year will supply an enhanced gratefulness. If things can only improve, he said, “In 2021, there’s going to be a lot of pent-up demand. And next fall, there’s going to be a lot of fun because people will be so grateful for it.”
Meanwhile, it would prove fitting if Ole Miss became the last holdout in the gathering cancellation drift. After all, if one wished to encapsulate loathsome old 2020, one could do worse than a snapshot of a barren Grove.
