Trip Racap: 2008 CFN Board Meeting

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2008, 4:30 PM
CONCOURSE B AT MIDWAY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

It’s been a long day already. En route to the 2008 CFN Board Meeting, I’ve gotten caught in morning rush hour traffic in the Twin Cities, driven across a Wisconsin that is now eight different shades of drab gray, and roared through a driving rainstorm on the Northwest Tollway that reduced visibility to almost nothing. By the time I zap a text to ElTigreRex and 847Badgerfan, who are already in Nashville, I’m ready for a drink. However, those two gentlemen have already beaten me to the punch. A few minutes after I message them, Badge calls me back and informs me that I need to take a cab to the hotel, because they have been drinking all day and neither is sober enough to drive to the airport and get me. Ah, the Board Meeting has begun!

A bit of backstory here. It was determined at last year’s extravaganza in Austin, Texas that the next Board Meeting should take place in SEC country. A couple of weeks after that, the executive decision came down that this Board Meeting would take place in Nash-vegas (as the place is often referred to on SEC message boards). Since several of us (or friends of ours) had been there for bowl games, it was agreed that this would be a great place for it.

My flight from Midway to Nashville had a rough climbout due to said rainstorm, but once we got out of the soup, it was a smooth flight. This was the shortest flight that I had taken in at least three years. Being used to 3½ hour hauls to and from the West Coast (and last year’s 6-hour drag to Austin), it was surprising to start descending almost as soon as we got to cruise altitude. The Nashville airport is an easy airport to get through, but I found it to be a dump.

Since the Nashville street grid isn’t set at right angles relative to a north-south, my sense of direction was all discombobulated, and as such I was totally lost on the cab ride to the hotel. I was staying in the same room as TigerKing, and he met me in the lobby to get the hotel keys. Once I dumped my stuff off, we took a cab back downtown. We had a cabbie who was telling jokes that weren’t very tasteful in light of Tuesday’s election, and that’s not even close to describing how this cab ride went.

We met Badge in the lobby of his hotel, and end up eating dinner at an Irish pub. Badge and TigerKing have managed to drink the bar out of Johnny Walker Black, and in punishment we have to suffer through two guys trying to cover various country standards. They ended with a horrendous treatment of the Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel.” Since we were all quite tired, we decided to withdraw to our hotels for the evening.

Next morning, Badge comes by our hotel with the minivan he rented to shuttle people around in. We head out to the airport to pick up MikeTheTiger and BurntEyes. After that, we head over towards the Vanderbilt campus to scout out places to drink the next day. Since it’s not 11 AM yet, none of the watering holes are open yet. We end up stopping at a place called the Corner Pub that is showing some signs of life. It was only 10:40, but the barmaid agreed to serve us drinks. It was here that most of the gang finally trickled in. UTErin, razorchique, theumrebel, buckeyecraazy, Gatorama, and DavidG all rolled in while we were at the Corner.

Shortly before 3, the party moved over to barbecue restaurant, across 5th Street from the hockey arena. Badge had arranged for us to take over one corner of their outside. This is where SunDevilFroggy, MarqHusker, and his wife came and joined the party. As for the food here, I was not overly impressed by their barbecue. I know that most Southern barbecue is pork-based compared with the Texas beef, but my biggest problem was that it was tough as nails. I’ve eaten good barbecued pork ribs (oddly enough from a joint on the eastside of Seattle), and these were not one of them. Usually pork ribs have a much higher meat-to-bone ratio than beef ribs, but these did not.

It was at this point that Badge pounded on the table and called the 2008 Board Meeting to order. The only thing that he did was order us to drink. Seeing that we had been doing that for some time already, the call ended up being more a “Bottoms up!” command than anything else.

We stayed here until nightfall, which is when the gang briefly retired to their hotels to change clothes and possibly eat supper. After a couple of hours, we met up at The Big Bang, a dueling piano bar on Broadway. I’d never been to one of these places, and it was pretty crazy. It was loud, raucous, bawdy, and an all-out blast. All things considered, the first day of the meeting went pretty well.

On the way back to the hotel, someone suggested that we stop through the Waffle House that is a hundred yards from the hotel. I’m riding with LilDawg, BuckeyeCraazy, and UTErin, and they’re looking at me as if I ought to find the number of this place so we can call in a to-go order. I tell them that I’ve never been in a Waffle House before in my life, and I haven’t a clue what to order. So they order their food, and by the time that they pass the phone to me, we’re pulling into the parking lot. Wonderful timing. They convince me to get an order of grits to try and eat. We end up eating our breakfast haul in Erin and BC’s room. LilDawg insists that the grits are the best thing since sliced bread, but I found them to be more efficient as brick mortar than as breakfast food.

Saturday morning dawned with continental breakfast at the hotel, then everyone converging on the Vanderbilt campus. We got parked about 10:30, and several of us walked into the campus to find a bookstore so we could get some souvenir swag. The campus of Vanderbilt University is a gorgeous little gem in the middle of Nashville. Both Badge and I commented that it was very similar to Northwestern University in Evanston (small but, and then a massive, modern hospital).

We had been recommended to a joint called Sam’s Place for watching the day’s games. A friend of Burny had recommended it, and it did not disappoint. The place opened at 11:00, and before long it became college football central. Other than our bunch, I counted at least a dozen different school colors in there, just for the early games. Sadly, unlike in the Buck Owens song, there were no waitresses named Hattie from Cincinnati or Rita, who hailed from Pasadena.

The 18 of us took over a corner of the front veranda, pushing tables together in a large L formation. At first, the waitress who was working our section of the restaurant was worried about us making our $10 minimum. We assured her that she would not be disappointed. The food and beer quickly started flowing while we digested the early games. Gator and I focused on the 91st Little Brown Jug, while everyone else paid attention to their games. If their team was on, they watched it, but most of the freelancers were watching the wild gunfight-at-the-OK-Corral that was Kentucky-Georgia. For a neutral observer, it must have been an interesting thing to see 18 different people screaming and yelling at different screens at the same time, trying to figure out which was which.

At this point, I should also mention that the city was overflowing with Florida Gator fans. I had at least six of them on my plane down from Chicago on Thursday. The actual makeup of the crowd at Sam’s was very heavy Florida Gator, with the other colors sprinkled among them, much like chunks of ice in a giant blue Slurpee.

The early games ended, and it appeared there was a bit of a “shift change,” if you will. Folks from the early teams left, and fans from the late games came in. Included in this bunch were a few Penn State fans in the back of the restaurant, and a decent-sized contingent of bammers at the other end of the veranda. As the game went on, someone in the group of bammers kept letting off these high-pitched, grating, fingernails-on-the-blackboard style screams whenever anything happened to Bama. Razorchique thought that it was a guy for a little while, only to find that the guilty part was a small, 5-foot-nothing beanpole of a girl.

We took our group picture when all three of the 2:30 games were at halftime, and then things got REAL interesting in the second half. Penn State had their chances to draw away from Iowa, but the chickens played some tough D. For one afternoon, all the SEC folks in the bar became really big Iowa Hawkeye fans. Also, for some reason that I could not fathom, all the Florida fans in the bar were cheering for Bama.

The crowd exploded when Iowa hit their FG, but Badge and I laughed our butts off when the Idiots Out Wandering Around students charged the field with one second left, setting up what could have been a big choke job. But give the Hawks credit, they were able to avoid a The Play-like return. They’re going to be a tough out the rest of the way.

The seminal moment of the weekend took place late in regulation of LSU-Alabama, after PSU-Iowa had ended. All of us at the CFN table were cheering like mad for LSU, partially because MikeDeTiger was in our midst, and mostly because the shrieking bammer from the other end of the veranda was getting REALLY annoying at this point. Anyway, John Parker Wilson broke off a 40-something yard touchdown run. The Florida and Bama fans were going nuts, with plenty of shrieking. The more eagle-eyed observers among us had noticed that the Bama backfield was littered with yellow penalty markers. Sure enough, it was a holding penalty that wiped the touchdown, and caused our table to go just as ballistic. The blocked field goal at the end of regulation drew a similar reaction.

After the end of overtime, we all closed our tabs, and then the group split up. Big kudos to the waitress. How she kept our drinks filled and the tabs straightened out is beyond me. Most folks went to another bar, but some of us decided to see if we could actually get into the game without forking over an arm and a leg. Several contacts assured us that it wouldn’t be any trouble. The walk to the stadium was kind of surreal. Normally, with the game a short time away from kicking off, there’s a lot more buzz and foot traffic around the campus. There wasn’t much of anything happening until you were three blocks from the stadium. We hawked tickets for $40, and went in, hoping that we could meet up at some point. The five of us that went in were SDF, MDT, LilDawg, BuckeyeCraazy, and myself.

Vanderbilt Stadium is by far the smallest stadium in the SEC, and may well be the smallest football stadium in any BCS conference east of the Rockies. I’ve been to a few stadiums in different portions of the country, and I have to tell you that this was the worst college football stadium I’ve ever been in. Even Reser Stadium at Oregon State, which has a similar capacity, is vastly superior to Vandy. Most of the places I’ve been would eat this joint for lunch and still have room for dessert. When we got in there, the stadium was well over half full of Gator fans. I am aware that football is a distant afterthought on the brainpower campuses, but I didn’t think it was that bad.

Either way, this was the first time I’d seen an SEC game in person. A basketball-sized pep band from Florida was there, and they were keeping the crowd well into it. On the field, the Gators were doing whatever they wanted to whenever they wanted to. The offense looked like a well-oiled machine that was FAST. The Gators didn’t start in their own territory until after the second quarter, which meant that all the action was in front of us in the early goings.

The five of us got back together early in the second quarter, and we quickly found ourselves surrounded by kindred folks who wore a similar spread of gear that we had (We had tOSU, Miami Ohio, and a couple of others around us). They thought it was really cool how we all post on a message board and get together once a year.

The game was lousy, and the only thing that kept us in there as long as we did (we stayed to the end of the 3rd when Urban Meyer pulled Tim Tebow and Co.) was the funnel cakes the ladies ordered at halftime. BuckeyeCraazy’s peacoat ended up covered with powdered sugar, since she happened to be on the downwind end of all the funnel cakes.

Once we got out of the stadium, we started calling around to see where everyone went. It turns out that most folks had gone back to the hotel, with a few going back to bed. We stopped at a Quick-Sack for some beer, and joined the gang that was at our Holiday Inn Express. We watched the postgame from USC-Cal and Texas Tech-Oklahoma, drank more beer, and discussed where we might want to take this flying circus next year.

On Sunday morning, the people who were staying at our hotel, plus SDF and MDT who cabbed it over from their hotel, invaded the Waffle House that was a hundred yards from our hotel. I’m a big fan of the waffles and hash browns, but the biscuits and gravy were ice cold. We bid our adieus outside here, which is always tough, but we know that we’ll do it again before too long.

Granted, I’ve only been to two of these things, but I’m always a bit sad when I leave events like this. I’ve had a really crappy-ass year, but I know that for one weekend every year, everything can be right with the world.

The drive from Midway Airport in Chicago back to Minnesota was long but uneventful. I will let you guys in on one thing I do every time I drive across the border from Wisconsin to Minnesota. As part of a college song podcast, I have “Varsity” on my iPod. I play “Varsity,” then go right to the Rouser with the full opening fanfare. I’ve timed it such that when they get to the start of the Rouser, I’m crossing the river bridge into civilization/Minnesota. On a related note, I also play “Hail Minnesota” whenever I leave the state. Go figure.

I’ve got two more college football games on my slate, this week in Madison for the Axe game, then the last Gopher game ever in the Metrodome the following Saturday. I’ll catch you then.

GR