This is kind of a weird article, and the description of uchicago football tailgates is odd - are parents and students often intoxicated at these events? I didn’t even know we HAD tailgates for football games at Chicago… are these rowdy affairs?
I read that yesterday and thought the same thing.
I’ve attended tailgates over the years, since 2013. Low key gatherings, primarily family and friends of current players and football alumni who gather along the fence outside Stagg Field on E. 56th a couple hours before gametime. A few EZ-ups, potluck and sometimes catered food, and yes byob alcohol, but I have never seen anyone get roudy.
Tailgaters on 56th Street? Rowdy, drunken and shouting racist epithets? Say it ain’t so. Everything in that story seems designed to confirm R. M. Hutchins’ view that football has no place on the campus of a serious institution.
It appears to be parents who are the main problem. They had better behave or they won’t be invited to tailgate with the frats anymore LOL.
I was there the day of the incident, but did not witness it firsthand. After 4 years of dedication and hard work, the player was getting limited gametime his senior season. Why, only the coaching staff knows. Happens in all sports, not just football. The situation is such a shame for all. I feel for the player, a good kid, for the family, and also UChicago lost a talented O-coordinator who orchestrated an exciting football season - the QB that year broke school and league records.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once described the “infectious turbulence” of football. He thought something in the nature of the activity on the field unloosed restraints in those watching it. That, for him, was part of its charm. I take his point about the unloosening part but don’t see much charm in it. Civilization is built on restraint. There was precious little of it in evidence in that incident. And now comes another form of turbulence in these law suits. All these things are derivative of an activity in which big guys knock each other down while onlookers cheer and guzzle. What does any of that have to do with education?
This is the first time in two years I’ve heard of tailgating outside Stagg. I would not be surprised if alums outnumber current students at these things.
“All these things are derivative of an activity in which big guys knock each other down while onlookers cheer and guzzle.”
Are you referring to football or the lawsuit?
Sumo wrestling might have wandered into my analogy. Or was I think of Hemingway claiming to be in the ring slugging it out with Tolstoy? Something very near to that happened once at an ostensibly non-sporting U of C event featuring three novelists. One of them, Wright Morris, sitting at the end of a table opposite another one, Anthony West, became so incensed by West’s maudlin outpouring about a lost love, that he, Morris, a hard-boiled sort of guy, delivered the devastating riposte that he believed he had “just witnessed an outbreak of Romantic Agony”. West’s head snapped back as if his chin had been on the receiving end of an uppercut, and it went on from there. Football can be rough, but nothing beats two thin-skinned artists having at each other. Without helmets. Lawyers can be like that too. Also scholars, I’m told.
UChicago has a football team?
Sounds more like youth soccer.