If you can boot an empty Coors can 30 feet through inflatable goalposts without knocking the ash from your cigar or the sauce from your lamb chop, there’s a name for you.
You might be a tailgater.
If you start to drool when a parking-lot roasted pig is pulled off the rack – wearing sunglasses and a Kansas City Chiefs hat on its scrumptious head – it’s time to face facts.
You might be a tailgater.
If your grill has a license plate declaring you a “R8DR H8TR,” if your wife straightens her orange wig before screaming, “Romo’s a traitor!,” if your RV is so crammed with party people it leaves a crater, guess what?
You just might be a tailgater.
And today, you can come home again – back to your family in face paint, back to that oil-stained, suds-soaked, flag-draped swath of asphalt next to Invesco Field at Mile High where thousands of your football kin flock and shock at least 10 times a year.
Broncos vs. Jets: merely a sideshow. Gas vs. charcoal: the only battle that matters.
The same game-day ritual will color parking lots in 15 NFL cities this afternoon.
In Denver, the home team can bust out new uniforms, toss up a new stadium or replace John with Brian, then Brian with Jake. None of life’s little ripples, the tailgaters say, can disturb their happy haze of bratwurst smoke, can dilute their Sunday stew of orange vests, horse-head hats and blue leather chaps. The parking-lot people say they’ve held their edge as top NFL tailgaters for several generations.
“We’ve never lost it!” said Becky McKernan, the de facto queen of the Broncos’ pregame scene. After all, she’s married to a retired airline mechanic named Tim McKernan … sorry, that’s Tim’s weekday persona. Everybody in the parking lot has a weekday persona. On Sundays, he’s called the Barrel Man, a burly zealot who has worn his orange barrel – and little else – to Broncos games since 1977.
But at this giddy picnic, Mc Kernan is just another guy in orange boots, Broncos earring in his left lobe, No. 00 orange jersey draped over his torso, lasagna smudge on his belly: yeah, he blends.
Health issues in 2003 sent McKernan to the disabled list for a few months. Now, doctors ask him to wear the barrel for just two quarters.
“Sometimes,” he said with a wink, “we stretch it a little bit.”
True, most tailgating habits won’t dazzle the surgeon general. Cholesterol is not one of the scores being discussed.
“Yeah, we’ll eat up,” Broncos fan Tom Sullivan said with a cheekful of lamb chop while chipping a beer can through inflatable uprights with his foot. “This belly wasn’t created on not eating, that’s for sure.”
In the parking lot, six-packs are found in coolers, not on stomachs. Empty cocktail glasses are barely tolerated.
“I give my good friends the tequila,” host Bucky Gross said at a nearby party. “Well, the guys who I know won’t sue me.”
Of course, many tailgaters don’t even know their fellow partyers’ last names. They couldn’t tell you their home numbers or their day jobs either. You’re ID’d by your parking lot letter – and your rooting interest.
“Where else can you see a guy in a tie talking to a guy in a nose ring, both standing over a grill and smiling?” asked Joe Cahn, a former New Orleans cooking school owner who now spends his life driving his motor home from NFL city to NFL city. He nibbled ribs in Denver on Sept. 26 before the Chiefs game.
“If Norman Rockwell was alive today,” Cahn said, “he would depict the parking lot as the great American community.”
In other words: This is bigger than the aroma of hot dogs and the clappy beat of “Rocky Mountain Way.” This is a sweet escape from a faceless, twitchy world of e-mails, security codes and commuter lanes, Cahn said. This is a rare chance to set up camp in a simpler America – no agendas, no deadlines, no worries.
“In the real world, we don’t want to know our neighbors; they don’t want to know us. We’re so security-conscious, if a stranger approaches, we turn our head and walk away,” Cahn said. “But in the parking lot, it’s like we’re walking through thousands of backyards.”
That’s probably why tailgating has sprawled beyond its traditional football roots to rock concerts, NASCAR races, high school games, even bat swarms. People in Austin, Texas, gather to grill and swill while watching Mexican free-tail bats fly from beneath a city bridge.
“They serve bat burgers,” said John Largent, who has attended the party.
Bat meat?
“Well, you have to sauté it just so,” he said, joking.
Largent heads the American Tailgaters Association, based in San Antonio and numbering nearly 100,000 members. Yes, tailgaters have their own advocacy group, one that promotes the lifestyle. There also are tailgating recipe books, tailgating trading cards and websites offering the best in gas-powered blenders, beer tubs and flagpoles.
“It doesn’t matter if you have a hatchback and a hibachi or a half-million-dollar RV – everybody is the same,” Largent said. “People want to share their food and beer. It’s the great American party.”
In Denver, the game-day party starts at 8 a.m. – when Invesco workers open lots C and M for a limited number of first-come, first-served tailgating stalls. The cost: $30 or an existing stadium parking pass.
All told, Invesco offers more than 7,000 parking spaces. Gates on the rest of the cash and permit-only lots open five hours before kickoff.
Before a recent Broncos game, a five-minute stroll from West Colfax Avenue north to Dick Connor Avenue offered a taste of good cheer and good ribs.
In lot M, south of the Colfax viaduct, Brad Buckalew’s table teemed with Tupperwared mounds of baked beans, potato salad and lamb chops. His cooler overflowed with cans of beer icy enough to make your hand ache. He themes each menu: clam chowder for the New England Patriots, pork for the Washington Redskins, fajitas for the San Diego Chargers.
After heckling a passing Chiefs fan, Buckalew announced his grub for the Baltimore Ravens game Dec. 11: “Road kill! Isn’t that what ravens eat?”
A short walk north to lot C found Rex the dog being groomed for kickoff. In front of a motor home affixed with a “Bronco Country” banner, Rex’s owners spray-painted an orange “#80” on the English pointer’s back, then added a streak of blue to his wispy tail.
“We do whatever it takes,” Pepi Schlingman said between shakes of the paint can, “to help the Broncos win.”
At the party next door, Jay and Valerie Hocking churned frozen drinks in a gas-powered blender painted with orange flames. Back in Pueblo, they transplanted a chunk of Mile High Stadium turf in their front yard, ringing it with orange marigolds. Before the game, Valerie served lasagna in an orange and blue apron while Jay readied his orange top hat and orange top coat for the trip inside. The Hockings appear on a Campbell’s Chunky Chili trading card depicting America’s top tailgaters.
A bit farther north, Gross filled beer pitchers from his bus-mounted kegerator and prepared to carve a 150-pound pig – 1 pound for each of his 150 guests. Most were clients of Lampson International, his Commerce City crane-rental company.
“Take a peek in that oven,” Gross said quietly. “She’s got on a Chiefs hat and sunglasses.”
Just then, Jason Rosenbaum rolled up in a golf cart topped with a giant Broncos helmet. He was bedecked in the white and black stripes of an NFL official. A yellow flag flopped in his back pocket.
“They call me The Ref,” he said, leaning against a 6-foot- high face mask that presumably served as the cart’s windshield.
With just a hint of a smirk, Rosenbaum explained that the Broncos employ him to cruise the lots each week and choose a “most valuable tailgater.” Winners get a trophy topped with a golden barbecue grill cover. They also receive six game tickets and three parking passes.
“People stuff food in my face – fish wraps, dips, chips,” Rosenbaum said. “Everything has been going in my mouth.”
And there’s just no escape from that. Even when your golf cart has a giant face mask.
Staff writer Bill Briggs can be reached at 303-820-1720 or bbriggs@denverpost.com.
