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
