So this Saturday the cities of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins will be collectively descended upon by the certifiable logistical nightmare that is the Rocky Mountain Showdown – Colorado’s premier college football game pitting the Colorado Buffaloes against the Colorado State Rams.
Rest assured that I have absolutely no interest in breaking down the X’s and O’s of this upcoming contest, as I (much like the Denver sports media) lack the knowledge to discuss this game in clear, provocative, or enlightening terms. However, I feel that I’d be more than a bit upset with myself if I didn’t publicly (and really, what’s more public than hubbuzz?) state that the City of Denver is making an egregious error in judgment by setting the kickoff time for the Showdown at 10am. Actually, let me rephrase that: The City of Denver is REPEATING and egregious error in judgment by setting the kickoff time for the showdown at 10am.
Stemming back to the late 1990’s, the Denver Police had found themselves having a really difficult time controlling the deliciously debauched tailgating that goes on every year before the Showdown, so in 2002 the City decided to take a few proactive measures to curb all of the underage drinking that tends to arise alongside collegiate athletics. They set the kickoff time for 11am thinking that people wouldn’t show up early enough to get drunk before the game, and they removed almost all of the port-o-johns from the outside of the stadium (leaving six, I repeat a grand total of SIX) in the hopes that bathroom seeking undergrads would go into the stadium to relieve themselves at which point they’d realize that they couldn’t go back to the parking lot unless they wanted to forfeit their ticket to the game.
What resulted was an absolute, unequivocal, and entirely predictable mess. Most of the students from CU and CSU actually made it down to tailgate a good 2 or 3 hours before kickoff, which gave them plenty of time to get absolutely hammered – something which mixed well with their collegiate mindset, but didn’t mix well at all with the fact that they’d registered about an hour and a half of sleep the night before. The kids that slept in a bit were even worse off though, as they arrived at the game with only a half an hour remaining before kickoff, which directly led to them frantically guzzling bottom-shelf booze like prohibition had just been repealed. Preposterous. Before you knew it, students were vomiting in their cars, on their cars, on their friends, and all over the parking lot. And then there were the kids who needed to use the bathroom: The lines at the port-o-johns were so long (clearly an unforeseeable side effect of providing six port-o-johns to 70,000 people) that waiting to use one of them became almost entirely unpractical, as you were more likely to ruin a pair of your pants than to make it to the front of the line. So… well, I don’t need to tell you where this is going.
Suffice it to say, with all of the vomit, urine, and yes, feces floating around Invesco field on that day, it felt a little bit like me and my friends were tailgating on the banks of the Ganges River. Every now and again some passed out body would go floating by too, which really completed the effect in my eyes. Yuck x10.
So that, my friends, is the story of what happened when the city set an 11am kickoff time for the Showdown (by the way, I don’t think there’s ever been a more deliriously sloppy crowd than the one that made it inside of the gates on that day – I’m pretty sure the plan couldn’t have backfired more). This year kickoff it set for an hour earlier than it was on that fateful day back in 2002… I only hope they bring a few extra restrooms, otherwise I’m going to advise my friends to tie plastic bags around their shoes if they’re planning to tailgate. As far as I’m concerned though, I’m watching the game on TV at home, where the bathroom to human ratio is always a cozy 3/1. Oh indoor plumbing, how I love you so…
Fin
