It is no secret that LSU football is king in Baton Rouge. Ask anyone or just look around campus any Saturday of a home game. The entire campus – as well as its adjacent areas – turns into a vast parking lot for all the cars and trailers that start to roll into the city days before the sporting event. For students, the excitement of the games lasts all week. “It’s like Monday, ‘Alright, there’s a game Saturday,” then, “OK, Tuesday. Four more days,” said architecture sophomore Maria Cervini. Cervini and her friends, marketing sophomore Ashleigh Carpenter and accounting sophomore Kaitlyn Flannery, said they start preparing for the game Friday night – shopping for hamburgers and other tailgating food. Others, like kinesiology junior James Coco, spend their Friday night “hanging out with friends looking for somewhere to party.” No matter what fans do Friday night, Saturday plans are fairly similar. “If you don’t go tailgating, you don’t get the whole experience,” Cervini said, her friends agreeing. Some students take tailgating to another level. Petroleum engineering senior Jonathan Massey and his friends paint themselves for every game they manage to attend. “Tailgating, painting up and going to the game, I’d like to think of [it] as a class in itself. We literally spend like an hour a day trying to figure [the painting process] out,” Massey said. Massey said his tailgating crew meets at the parking lot for Alex Box Stadium between 5:30 and 6 a.m. The Metairie native said he spends a few hours eating breakfast and waking up before accelerating activities at around noon. Massey said the group enjoys barbecue and games of beer pong and flip cup until it’s time to “paint up” a few hours before the game. Massey said they paint themselves with multiple coats of shiny purple paint before adding shoulder stripes, names and numbers. “It’s kind of a science. You’ve got to get it good,” Massey said. Massey said the painted fans proceed to walk around the other tailgaters who give them beer, food and photograph requests for their efforts. “It’s like Mardi Gras on every Saturday,” Massey said. Painted or not, one thing all the tailgaters mentioned was the fun of hassling the opposing fans with chants of “Tiger bait,” a tradition some opposing fans don’t enjoy. “Overall, the college students, when they yell and get right in your face and are stepping on your feet … That’s rude,” said Virginia Tech fan Mary Jones. “This is about the only school we’ve ever been to that doesn’t segregate your fans from each other. Most of the other fans don’t let [opponents] mingle, so they don’t have that problem,” added Paul Jones, Mary Jones’ husband and Virginia Tech alumnus. After all the tailgating, fans finally get to enjoy the reason for the festivities – approximately three hours of LSU football in Tiger Stadium. Maybe Tiger fans find it so easy to taunt opposing fans because they are confident their team will take care of business every weekend. Even against top-10 opponent Virginia Tech, Carpenter said before the game, “We know we’re going to kick their ass.” But no matter how close the expected outcome, the student section becomes one raucous unit to support the team for a few hours. Massey, who as a high school student attended Tigers’ games with his grandfather, recalls seeing the student section on the big screens after a Tigers’ score and thinking, “I want to be a part of that.”
—-Contact Jerit Roser at [email protected]