In 2008 some may remember that I took a sojourn to South Dakota to work as an assistant strength coach for the University of South Dakota as they transitioned from Division II to FCS level in all sports. Interestingly, I did not pay much attention on the drive out there as to the time of year – the first weekend in August. I had no idea why a Super 8 would cost almost $200 for a night until someone mentioned that the Sturgis rally was happening soon and that I was caught in a classic supply & demand trap. A lot of people heading to Sturgis and not that many rooms in Missoula.
It was after I returned in October, though, that I learned a tradition I had grown accustomed to had died while I was gone: Duck Sports Authority tailgates. Hey had been hosted by my friend Daryl for several years, but had seemed to fade away for a variety of reasons. It was kind of too late to do much about it that season, but I spoke with AJ Jacobsen and he said he would love to have someone start hosting them again.
As a kid and even when I first bought season tickets and would walk through with my brother on gamedays, we always wondered about doing our own tailgates. This was my chance. It was rather fortuitous timing that the season I began is when Oregon football really started to take off. Slowly I started to add things to the tailgates until there were points where we needed two spots. For those first two seasons of hosting, it seemed we were never short of people willing to share space with us as we tailgated inside the Autzen parking lot.
There are a couple of very interesting memories from those first two seasons. The first was the Stanford game in 2010. GameDay was there and I drove down with two of our sons and my wife getting to Eugene at like 4:00 AM. She mostly napped in the Blazer while I went to the GameDay set with Braden. The university allowed us to park in the lot at 7:00 AM so I began a slow cooked fresh made jambalaya which turned out really good. That was a fun day.
The other memory was the same season as a drunk fan saw my hood up (I was using a battery charged inverter to run my electric stuff including the television) and decided to slam it – even though the prop rod was holding it up. Destroyed the hood but my quick-thinking brother chased him down and got his information. He ended up paying back the damages.
In 2011 we got displaced as the ‘General Admission’ Autzen parking went away. But thanks to a very generous benefactor, I get usually two parking passes for the stadium during the year. I might get more like five this season, but I know for sure that the first two games we will be tailgating in the Autzen parking lot.
It is going to be hot this Saturday, so for food we are going to pre-make all of the fixings for nachos and do a sort of build-your-own nachos spread.
A few years ago I found an inverter that runs on a charge that will allow my television to run for an entire tailgate without going dead, so we have no generator and still watch football all day. While I call this a DSA tailgate, pretty much everyone is welcome to come and join the festivities. Even if you do not want to eat the food or have a beer, feel free to stop by and say hello. I will be in the stadium in space 6543 – there is a map at the bottom that shows exactly where.
Each week during the season I will talk about some of my favorite tailgates (including the one from the picture in this article sometime later this season).
