Got my Season Ticket Renewal today - New Blvd. Policies

[mrydel]

Mr. Orsini has addressed the issue in his blog today. It may not appease anyone but at least they are hearing the yells and replying to the uproar. I do respect that.

Again, I will be in contact with Special D,Bus, etc. to make arrangements to contribute so you can feed me.

[diamond_tom]

Where did his blog go? Is there a new link?

Thanks!

[mrydel]

Where did his blog go? Is there a new link?

Thanks!

SMUMustangs.com. There is a box on the left titled SMU athletics blog.

[mustangbill67]

Mr. Orsini has addressed the issue in his blog today. It may not appease anyone but at least they are hearing the yells and replying to the uproar. I do respect that.

Again, I will be in contact with Special D,Bus, etc. to make arrangements to contribute so you can feed me.

since I am also a moocher, please count me in if anyone wants to join together on a spot or if any existing spot holder just needs some support. I also have not received a season ticket renewal form although I have had tickets for years. I guess they only went to the Vard lessees.

[mrydel]

I also have not received a season ticket renewal form although I have had tickets for years. I guess they only went to the Vard lessees.

Nor have I. I hope they are not excluding moochers from season tickets.

[FordtoTolbert]

..do they pay for their spots on the grove at ole [deleted]?? This is silly...seems like we should do some "other things" wink wink, to be considered a top 25 program...jeeez.

[PonyCat]

..do they pay for their spots on the grove at ole [deleted]??

They pay $1,000 for the aprking spots and don't even get a reserved spot. I'd say our new deal is better.

[Special_Delivery_Smu_Fans]

At Ole Miss, the Tailgaters Never Lose

September 29, 2006



HELEN CRAIG, or Mrs. C. York Craig Jr., as she is more formally known, leveled a well-seasoned eye at me as the bluegrass band set up in the background. L. Rodney Chamblee, one of her 60 tailgating tent mates of friends and family, slipped a large bloody mary into my hand. Mrs. Craig stood under a tall blue tent rapidly filling with people and food, and underscored the eye with a smile that held the history of the South, and its hospitality, wide and deep, behind it.

“We may not win every game,” she said. “But we’ve never lost a party.”

On the great American calendar of revelry and seasonal rites, fall equals football. And pigskin equals parties: tailgating parties, in particular.

At the University of Mississippi in Oxford last Saturday, the Ole Miss Rebels, Mrs. Craig’s team, lost 27-3 to Wake Forest. But the party, a 24-hour gale-force blowout held in the Grove, 10 acres of thick oak, elm and magnolia, was a victory.

The glory of the Grove is legend at all of Ole Miss’s rival schools in the Southeastern Conference and beyond. It is the mother and mistress of outdoor ritual mayhem.

As Charles R. Frederick Jr., a folklorist at the University of Indiana, characterized it in his dissertation on the Ole Miss tailgating event, the call to “come on out Saturday and look us up” in the Grove is as basic, and born to a spot, as a human bond can get. And it is as deep as the root of a tree.

It is also as fresh and green as a leaf.

“I love it,” Molly Aiken, 19, a sophomore at Ole Miss, said on Saturday under a tent, under the trees, a party roar rising and dissipating into the whisper of a warm, humid wind above. “There’s no place like it.”

Ms. Aiken, who is from Chattanooga, Tenn., said of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, “I went to U.T. this past weekend, for the U.T.-Florida game, and I was, like, this just doesn’t compare.”

Ole Miss’s stadium accommodates 60,580 people, and devotees of the Grove argue that the Grove accommodates more. It is every kind of party you can describe, at once: cocktail party, dinner party, tailgate picnic party, fraternity and sorority rush, family reunion, political handgrab, gala and networking party-hearty — what might have inspired Willie Morris, one of Mississippi’s favorite sons, to declare Mississippi not a state, but a club.

On Saturday, David G. Sansing, a professor emeritus at Ole Miss who has written a history of the university, stood at the top of the Grove, watching the party .

“Your college days are the fondest years of your life, and those memories of those years grow rosier as time recedes,” he said. “When these alumni come back and walk through that grove, they’re not just walking over land — ground — they’re walking back through time.”

That time has changed going forward. Ole Miss was not integrated until 1962. And though there were few black families partying in the Grove on Saturday, black players dominate the Rebels’ football team.

The hand-slapping between the partyers and the players as they took the “Rebel walk” through the Grove to the stadium was hard and full of heart. A police motorcycle escort preceded them.

THERE are seven home-game weekends at Ole Miss. And people in the Grove have how to have a good time down cold — they can stretch the party over three days, from Friday night into Sunday morning. It is pimento cheese sandwiches and silver trays, candelabra and fried chicken tenders, button-down shirts, rep ties and khaki shorts, pearls, expensive sunglasses and flip-flops in your purse for when your high heels become history.

As Ms. Aiken explained, you show up in a new dress for each weekend, and you wear your hair curly if it’s going to rain. Rain, like the thunderstorm that cracked the sky open late on Saturday, only throws fuel on the fire. When a bolt of lightning touched down at the edge of the Grove, blasting the trees with thunder, the crowd went crazy with approval.

The party is technically a picnic. Originally an informal tailgating get-together when most serious pregame socializing took place at Ole Miss’s fraternity and sorority houses, by the 50’s the Grove started to become its own pregame tradition.

Cars have been kept out since a rainstorm in 1990 that reduced the Grove to a rutted swamp, and tents replaced them. With the tents began a dance of real estate that kicked off the rules and regulations, and like a ball in play, the interpretations of them, that characterizes the party in the Grove today.

The Grove Society, an alumni organization, posts a strict schedule for the event, which dictates that set-up will start at Friday midnight.

Last Friday, at 11 p.m., the 15 university police officers assigned to orchestrate the arrival of people, pickups and vans unloading equipment at the road next to the Grove watched a gang of 60 picnickers, restless for territory and armed with tent poles and folding tables and chairs, sprint into the dark woods and disappear like a band of merry men into Sherwood Forest. White tents popped up like mushrooms, and the party was on.

Source:
http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/travel/escapes/29grove.html?pagewanted=1&n=Top%2FFeatures%2FTravel%2FDestinations%2FUnited%20States%2FMississippi

[ts]

If you join the Mustang booster club (last year started at 50.00) that gives you access to come to the booster tailgate site across from Perkins Chapel. Meals at each game average between 8-15.00 for all you can eat. Visit with the parents of the mighty MUSTANGS.
If interested use the link below to contact the football boosters.
[email protected]

[BrianTinBigD]

If only our AD was Top 50 and our FB coach was Top 75 then we might be able to get people to show up for games and pay this insane fee to park on the BLVD and lay claim to our little piece of tailgating heaven. I think I will just eat at Plucker's, Campisi's, Snuffer's, or Texadelphia before the game.

[BrianTinBigD]

Mr. Orsini has addressed the issue in his blog today. It may not appease anyone but at least they are hearing the yells and replying to the uproar. I do respect that.

Again, I will be in contact with Special D,Bus, etc. to make arrangements to contribute so you can feed me.

Love the filtered Blog that Steve O has so it appears that only the SMU AD office bloggers positive comments get posted.

[PonyCat]

Love the filtered Blog that Steve O has so it appears that only the SMU AD office bloggers positive comments get posted.

Huh?

[smu diamond m]

Love the filtered Blog that Steve O has so it appears that only the SMU AD office bloggers positive comments get posted.

Huh?

There is an option on most blogs (and I assume the AD's blog) that you can review comments before they are actually posted on the blog story. That way you control what is left as commentary.

[mrydel]

Brain's response is there today.

[LawSchoolPony]

This is the first I have heard of the new Blvd. policies, and I am NOT happy with what I've seen. (Side note - we have had season tix for 3 years now, and have not received any renewal notice yet, or notice of the new policies - does SMU not want my family to renew our tickets?!?!?).

My first reaction to this is: ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME.

Does SMU want to kill the Blvd? Luckily for my family, I am graduating from the law school and we won't have to bother w/ the ridiculous red tape we went through last year to tailgate, but this is just sad. We had planned on at least tailgating for the Tech game and definitely Homecoming, but how are you supposed to do this if they only sell season-long tailgating spots!?!?!?! What about people who can't make every game?!?!?!

I don't understand all this talk about "top 25 program" blah blah blah. Ole Miss and the Grove are the #1 pre-game festivity in the nation for tailgating according to ESPN - why doesn't SMU model their Blvd. policies after the best at the Grove?

VERY disappointing. After reading this, we are DEFINITELY not bringing our tent this year for the season (never mind that we brought out at least 25-30 people each week) and I can comfortably say we won't do any tailgating now. Geez...