Shameless, Elitist Nostalgia

For those of us who long for a bygone era of football fandom (an experience that is perhaps most intact at certain schools in the South, and has been altogether lost in the Ivy League), this weekend piece in the Wall Street Journal plays to all our biased nostalgia. As author Steve Garbarino notes, there is a significant difference between “old school” tailgaters and those tailgaters who derive their inspiration from Will Ferrell’s “Old School.” This sentence makes one positively itch with feelings of a paradise lost:

Gone are the days of, say, Harvard vs. Yale, when, at tailgating—or “Yale-gating”—parties men wore full-length raccoon-fur coats (beanie optional), white linen tablecloths were laid upon fold-out tables, jalopies were crammed with silver sets and champers in ice buckets, and Astroturf had yet to be invented.

A proposal for the remainder of the football season: fewer thirty racks of Keystone, more champers in ice buckets.

— Charlie Dameron