Where I Come From: Coliseum Tailgating Traditions

Thanks Joey for reminding me about L.B. and ruining my day!

Earlier this year I was walking around campus in uniform before a game with my roommate. This is a good strategy because when you are in a band uniform, everyone wants to give you beer, or cookies, or beer and cookies. This roommate also doesn’t drink, which meant more for me! People also want to take pictures with you when you’re all decked out, which is fun. We were walking past Tommy Trojan when a family came out of the crowd and asked us to pose with this couple in front of the statue. We posed for the picture, and the second I stepped down the guy gets down on his knee and proposed to the girl right there on Tommy Trojan—I guess the picture was the ploy to get her up there. She said yes, so I’m pretty sure I’m going to be in that picture over their fireplace for the rest of their lives.

Only at USC!

P.S. I love La Barca but I must be the only guy in LA who doesn’t dig the Pantry. Maybe I’m not ordering the right thing.

Get there early and hang out with the Old Guard, graze on a bountiful spread, all the beer you can handle then high five the team as they walk through. As decadent as it gets.
Hey, is your dad Dr. Mark Kaufman?

I guess I sort of had four phases of tailgating at games.

Back when I was a little kid in the early 90s, I used to go to games with my dad, my grandpa and usually a couple of their friends. We’d find a spot under these big trees west of the Coliseum and just north of the northernmost parking lot (it’s right by where that park is with the playground equipment today). The old tradition was to roll out a big cooler of Diet Pepsis, spend about a half hour eating lunch and reading the game program (we almost always had sandwiches and chips). About an hour and a half before the game, my dad and I would take a walk around the Coliseum, maybe go pick up our tickets at one of the old booths, or if we really had time and it was a big game, we’d walk up to campus. We’d always go in a half hour before kickoff, and we usually found our seats just as the band was getting ready to come out of the tunnel. I can remember as a little kid leaving the Coliseum after each game and driving back up to my grandpa’s house with a cooler of leftover lukewarm Diet Pepsis (which as a little kid I chugged anyway) while listening to the postgame show.

Later on toward the mid 90s, my grandpa started to slow down and come to games less often… or if he did, he’d just want to sit and relax. I’d walk around more with my dad. We’d spend more time on campus, and two hours before game time we would always go see the pregame show at Heritage Hall. My grandpa would go in to the big Associates picnics or Alumni picnics, but my dad and I weren’t bigwig donors so we’d hang around outside. Sometimes some of the guys running the bars in the picnics would feel sorry for us and hand us a coke through the fence.

In the late 90s my grandpa finally stopped coming to games altogether except for President’s parties. I guess by this point he had donated a fair bit, so whenever he’d go to those, my grandma would go along. My dad and I were completely on our own by that point, so we’d sometimes just grab a burger and wander the campus.

When I was in school, gameday tradition was pretty solid. If the old ghetto Carls Jr. or Wolfgang Puck’s was open, it was gameday lunch with my buddies, and then we’d have to go down to stand in the two hour line to get into games. Student section lines were absolutely insane. There was no tailgating in ‘04 for us. You got in line and for a couple games, you stayed there, smashed like sardines thanks to the Coliseum’s ineptitude. There were a few angry DT editorials about that stuff. Anyone else remember that?

I only get to go out for a game every year or two now (but I do go to every road game out here in Arizona), but nowadays my dad and I will wander up Figueroa before the game and spend most of our time on campus. We’ve gone to Viztango and a couple other places.

The best memories I have, though, are of being a little kid, sitting on a blanket west of the Coliseum, paging through every single page of the game program and hearing the sound of the band as it got closer and closer to the Coliseum.