| | | Editor's Note: Geoffrey Norman is working on a book about college football in the state of Florida. Each week during the 2001 season, he will send a letter to Page 2, in which he will try to make sense of the personalities, events and peculiar culture that make up Sunshine State football.
Dear Page 2:
About a half-mile from the stadium, I picked up the first, faint scent of meat cooking over an open fire; a smell so deeply embedded in our genetic memory that what follows is pure reflex. Your mouth begins to water the same way that hairs would stand up on the back of your neck if you were walking on a dark path and heard an animal growl. We may do our roaming on the Internet and survive off pizza in this epoch, but the cave is still deep inside us, like a cyst.
Tailgate parties and cooking are common to the football experience, and I suppose people bring wicker baskets full of cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches to the Harvard-Yale game. And in California, they no doubt chow down on sushi and chardonnay before USC-UCLA. On game day here in Tallahassee, Fla., they cook meat and you wonder if there is still a surviving pig anywhere in the Panhandle of Florida. The fragrant scent of pork fat, dripping from a slab of ribs onto a bed of hot coals, is everywhere, causing something like an olfactory overload.
|  | | Freshman quarterback Chris Rix still has a lot to learn. |
I'd eaten my usual Waffle House breakfast -- a pair, over easy, grits, sausage and biscuits -- two or three hours earlier, but when I walked into that first cloud of thick, moist meat smoke, I was hungry all over again. I wanted to squat on my haunches and gnaw some ribs until the bones were clean and glistening.
But first ... the game.
It was homecoming for Florida State. North Carolina State was in town, and they had a good, if unranked team, coached by Chuck Amato, who had been one of Bobby Bowden's assistants for 18 years. The feeling among the faithful was that the Wolfpack would be a good, challenging tuneup for Florida, which was one week away. FSU had been coming on strong since the humiliating loss to North Carolina back in September and, a month later, the first loss at home since back when the other George Bush was president, both times to Miami.
Since then, FSU had handled Maryland at home and Clemson on the road. Both good teams. Freshman quarterback Chris Rix had been maturing in full view, making better reads and picking his spots to run, instead of just pulling the ball down and going for it at the first sign of trouble. He still had to work on sliding instead of dropping a shoulder and taking the hit. But, hey, you'd rather have a quarterback who has to be taught to slide than one who comes to it instinctively. The feeling was -- Rix might be a kid, but he was also a man.
It was the defense -- normally a given -- that gave the Seminoles fans qualms. When the world is spinning properly on its axis, Mickey Andrews' unit can be counted on to bail out the offense when it isn't in synch. But the defense had been giving up yardage and points in unprecedented bunches. But they were young, too, the thinking went, and Mickey would bring them around. If they played N.C. State hard, then they might be able to go down to Gainesville, Fla., on the 17th and hold the Gators to something reasonable -- 400 yards and 30 points, say -- keeping Rix and the offense in the game.
Football fans put on optimism when they paint their faces and dress in the school colors.
Anyway, Bobby Bowden had just celebrated his 72nd birthday and FSU was back -- barely -- in the Top 10, the Seminoles' customary address. The portents were all favorable in the mind of the faithful. The game would take care of itself, and they were in town to party.
The hardcores had arrived the night before, in RVs, and set up in lots that were designed to accommodate them in return for their contributions to the Seminole Boosters. The best lots went to the Golden Chiefs and Silver Chiefs, some of whom drove RVs that priced out at more than $1 million. The Tomahawks parked in a lot across the street. Their machines were, in general, more modest. But they didn't give away anything in spirit.
"We have more fun over here," one man told me. "Those folks will be sneaking over to get in on our parties."
More RVs arrived on Saturday morning, along with thousands of cars and a few pickups. Awnings were put up. Chairs unfolded. Coolers unloaded. Fires were built.
And by midmorning, the EPA could have probably issued a citation for air pollution.
The cooking was done on all kinds of rigs. You saw enough of those tubby Weber Grills to think you ought to find out who made them and buy a few shares of stock. But people who cooked on Webers, with store-bought Brickman charcoal, were playing in the minors of this game.
The really boss grills were too big to fit into the back of a Suburban, along with the coolers and the folding aluminum chairs with canvas in the Seminoles colors. These monsters had to be towed, on their own trailers.
"I had this one made," one man told me proudly. The maker's logo was stamped on the grill. "Redneck Microwaves," located in Coon Bottom, Fla.
"That's a joke, right," I said.
"Better not say that to the fellow who made it."
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Yeah, well ... this here is FSU. Every now and then, we might lose the game. But we always win the party. ” |
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— Florida State tailgater |
The apparatus (calling the thing a grill would diminish it) was made from an old fuel tank that had been cut along the bias with a welding torch and then cleaned out by fire. The two halves had been hinged and smaller doors had been cut in the top half. Handles were added, along with a firebox at one end, smokestacks, vents, thermometers, and other odds and ends until the thing looked like it belonged inside an old steam locomotive. It was mounted on a trailer that was sturdy enough to haul a bass boat and had leaf springs over each wheel so that it wouldn't get beaten up on the highway. It was a thing of nearly primal beauty.
The man had built a small fire with billets of split white oak. He had aged the wood three years and said he thought that ought to be enough. I asked him if he ever used charcoal, or gas, and he looked at me like I had suggested that maybe it was time Bobby Bowden hung it up.
"I'd sooner get carry out from Arby's," he said.
The fire had burned down to where he liked it, so he opened the lid and began laying slabs of ribs on the rack. He shoveled a few coals under the meat. Just enough to make it sizzle and crisp it a little before the heat from the firebox did the real cooking. This would take six or seven hours. He worked very patiently and slowly and I didn't ask him any questions while he was at his devotionals.
When he'd finished carefully painting the ribs with some kind of sauce, he put a dozen whole chickens on the rack.
"Those are for the vegetarians," he explained while he painted them with the same sauce.
When I asked him what was in the sauce, he said, "Secret. You never ask a man about his sauce."
He closed the lid and said he wouldn't open it again, except to put a little more sauce on the meat, until after the game.
"So what do you do until then?"
"This," he said, and raised his arm to show me the beer he was holding in his nonbasting hand.
By this time, the ribs were already sizzling, and I decided to move on.
I wandered around the various lots and up into the area where RVers don't have to belong to the Boosters and can just homestead. The menu, at every big grill I found, was pretty much the same. Ribs and chicken. Secret sauce on the outside of the meat; cold beer on the inside of the grill man. I considered skipping the game and just hanging around outside the stadium, where I could plunder grills and nobody would miss a single slab of ribs when they came back full of victory and beer.
But I had been invited to sit in one of the skyboxes, and this was the South, where you don't turn down that sort of gracious invitation. I told myself not to eat any of the catered food. I wanted to have my game face on when I toured those same grills, sometime around 8 that evening.
Well, you know what happened. Chuck Amato had his team ready to play. Scored first and had FSU playing catch-up all afternoon. Rix played a great game, though he still didn't have the sliding thing down. FSU ran the ball OK. But the team showed its immaturity by being called for too many men on the field on an N.C. State punt late in the game and the defense never showed the old, dominating ferocity that FSU fans took, almost, as their patrimony. With some 10 minutes to go in the game, and down by a field goal, they let N.C. State hold the ball for eight minutes on a drive that ended with a field goal. This meant Rix and the offense had to get a touchdown in two minutes. They got down close, but the last pass from Rix was a little strong to the corner of the end zone.
Amato wept at midfield after the game while FSU fans left the stadium stunned.
But there was still all that meat.
|  | | Chuck Amato, left, got the last laugh on old pal Bobby Bowden last Saturday. |
I found one of the men I'd talked to about the grilling arts earlier in the day. He was down but certainly not out. I was late for the venison tenderloin, but there were still plenty of ribs -- and plenty of people lined up to eat them -- along with the chicken. The meat was so tender it came away under the slightest pressure from your teeth -- none of that cave man ripping and gnawing -- and the taste of the secret seasoning and the last drops of liquefied fat seemed to explode on your tongue. In a minute or two I had cleaned four or five.
"Go on back," he said, "and get you some more."
I took a pass. Not because I wasn't hungry, but because there were so many other people in line and so few ribs left from a pile that had seemed excessive in the morning.
As I was dropping the bones in the garbage, I said it was too bad about the game.
"Yeah, well ..." the man said, "this here is FSU. Every now and then, we might lose the game. But we always win the party."
Sincerely,
Geoffrey Norman
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