A Tailgating Hero

I'll preface this post with a brief recap of the BOX beer can golf championship: The 2009 tournament ended in much the same way the inaugural 2008 tournament played out, with a premature finish directly caused by extreme levels of intoxication -- making a full round of 18 on any day impossible... I wouldn't accept anything more respectable than this from the golfers that descended onto the links (the glass pit that we call a yard) this weekend.

Back to the post at hand. . . As many of you know and several more of you experienced first hand, BOX held a tailgate for the spring football game this Saturday. I, for one, usually experience tailgate withdrawals all of second semester, so I was ecstatic at the prospect of waking up at 5:30 once again to get drunk and perhaps stumble down the street to celebrate our beloved Wolverines and make an embarassment of myself in front of some alumni and elders at the Big House.

Certainly, I enjoy every second of every minute of every football Saturday morn, from the field goal kicking, to the keg laps, to the matress jumping, and so on. But if I had to choose favorite parts of the tailgate, the time period from about 5:00 a.m. until 6:30 a.m would be a personal favorite. There's just something awesome about actually being excited when your alarm clock wakes you up from last night's binge drinking affair, because you know that you're about to go have one of the best times of your life. And there's something exciting about turning on "Gettysburg" for the first time, and, as Notorious PLC eloquently puts it, "drink some bourbon and watch our American heroes in action". Another great thing about our 5:30 start time is that only the die-hards show up this early. Again, there's something special about sharing that first morning cocktail with the extreme of the extreme tailgating enthusiasts.

While I pride myself on being one of these die-hards (and I salute everyone who was there early on Saturday and always is during the fall), I know none of us can match the audacity of one true hero who arrived here at 5:30 a.m. this Saturday. It pains me a bit to write this, because the man whom I speak of happens to be one of those Spartans from the wretches of East Lansing, but I have to give him respect where respect is due. Notorious PLC's friend Al drove all the way from State and arrived here at 5:30; I'm no math major, but I think that this means he must have left there at no later than 4:30 in the morning. . . to come to his rival's spring football game, in which we play ourselves. People who live here sometimes don't even get up that early, even if the music is blaring in their ears. I can't imagine this tailgating hero had any interest in the game, so let's just assume that he came to do some drinking. THAT is a tailgating hero in my book.