Tailgating As a Reminder
It was in the early 80s that I happened upon my first tailgating. At the time I was a professor in the English Department at Texas A&M University. That particular year I was also serving as Assistant to the President of the university, representing the faculty in the President’s office. One of my duties—if you can call it a “duty”—was to attend the A&M home football games, helping the president and his wife extend hospitality to visitors in the president’s box, high above the stadium. The day of the game, however, always began with a walkabout in the parking lot where fans were tailgating. You could find all kinds of food being served from the backdoor panel of the fans’ pickup trucks and SUVs: bar-b-que, fried chicken, hotdogs and hamburgers, poppy seed kolaches, pecan pie. It was fun to roam from group to group, saying hello and trying to say “no” graciously to all the offers of food.
Dear friend Yvonne and I and a sculpture of the LSU tiger mascot!
This earlier experience of tailgating gave me no preparation, however—read that, no preparation–for a recent afternoon my husband, Jerele, our friend Yvonne and I spent at a Louisiana State University football game. Yvonne is an alum of LSU and on the Dean’s Advisory Board of the business school at the university. Jerele’s father attended LSU his freshman year. So it was our version of “old home week” to drive down to Baton Rouge to attend the LSU/Arizona football game, Jerele’s and my first time on the campus.
To try to describe the LSU version of tailgating is, I’m afraid, to sound preposterous. The scene was truly amazing. We drove all over the campus; and I don’t think there was a square yard anywhere that didn’t have a tent or an RV or a pickup truck or an SUV or a bunch of chairs where people tailgating. Look under the tents or on the side of the RV or in the back of the pickup truck, and you were likely to see a satellite dish or dishes beaming in other ballgames into one, two, even three televisions set up along side the food and drinks. On the tables imagine seeing everything from silver chafing dishes full of hot crab dip and silver trays of po-boy sandwiches to plastic containers of potato salad and paper trays of Cajun sausage. Imagine full bars set up on everything from portable leather bar counters to card tables. Imagine kegs and coolers and buckets of ice holding bottled water. Look for life-size tigers (the school’s mascot) blown up with air pumps weaving back and forth in the breeze in the front of tents.You get the picture.
The LSU tiger inflatable mascot!
At first I could only marvel at the novelty. After a few hours, however, of actually participating in this tailgating experience, I began to be reminded of more important things. Yvonne’s friends from her home town of Alexandria and other of her friends and acquaintances from the university were kind in including Jerele and me in their tailgating. We were welcomed as if we were LSU alums ourselves. Strangers offered us more food than we could eat. Successful business people were generous with their contacts and office numbers when Jerele and I showed interest in what they were doing. When it was time to go into the stadium, we were told that anytime we came back to an LSU game we were to consider this tailgating spot home for us. The invitation sounded genuine and heart-felt.
These pictures can’t begin to do LSU tailgaing justice
I was reminded by this LSU tailgating experience of what a gift hospitality is. To receive as well as to give. I was reminded, too, of how valuable it is to have a “structure” for connecting and relating. Tailgating as a structure invites and almost assures connecting!I left LSU wanting to be in touch with my own friends in a more consistent, hospitable way. I realized, however, that for those of us who don’t have a built-in method of holding “open house” every home football game, the “structure” for connecting and relating has to be created much more from scratch. Opportunities to visit and reconnect don’t come as part of an organized fall weekend activity in the lives of most of us. What I realized was that, if I stood any chance of experiencing in my own life the fun, the making of new acquaintances, the relating and connecting, the giving of hospitality that we had seen at LSU, I would have to set up the situations much more deliberately and consciously than I have been doing. Jerele and I would need to have more informal gatherings, more potluck suppers, more drop-in events. We would have to make offering hospitality a priority. But what a gain setting that priority would bring.
At the game 
Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld offers wisdom and practical insights to anyone whose life is in a time of transition, change, grief and loss of any kind. As an internationally recognized and accomplished consultant, and author of more than twenty books - including Tough Transitions and Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - she is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.
