How sizzling grills and spirited fans turn parking lots into parties | Canada Voices

Every weekend that the Toronto Argonauts play at home, David Brown of Barrie, Ont. loads up his pickup truck at 5:30 a.m. He places two smokers on a special mount he built and piles in 250 pounds of his specialty breakfast logs and hash browns. Then he makes the almost 90-minute drive from his home to BMO Stadium in Toronto to ensure he gets a good parking spot.

“I’m [usually] the first person in the lot,” says Brown, an Argos fan for more than 30 years who has become known as the unofficial ‘Mayor’ of the team’s tailgate.

When the crowd trickles in, he starts cooking. Brown accepts donations that he gives to CFL Fans Fights Cancer. “I essentially feed the parking lot,” he says. “I’ve always loved entertaining, and I thought, you know what, let’s cook for people, raise some money and just have a blast doing it. That’s what tailgating does – it creates connection.”

For football fans, the communal pre-game ritual goes back to the early days of the car. One history of tailgating notes that the Princeton, Yale and Harvard, which were the leading lights in U.S. college football in the early 1900s, had well-heeled alumni who could afford the newfangled horseless carriage. A 1906 account of a Harvard-Yale game in the New York Times described “small parties of automobilists eating tempting viands that had been brought in hampers spread out in picnic fashion on a tablecloth laid upon the ground.”

Tailgating culture typically includes copious amounts of barbecuing and grilling, favourite beverages and backyard games like cornhole. The festivities have become an integral part of the overall game-day experience for many fans.

“When people are setting up for our tailgates, it is the same group that stakes out the same piece of space in our parking lot week in and week out. It has become their tradition,” says Jay McNeil, president of the Calgary Stampeders and a former CFL player. “It’s not just a three-hour window in which we play the game. They make a day out of it and it’s truly an event for them.”

In many CFL cities, tailgating requires several layers of clothing, blankets and even heaters, as fans need to brave the elements until the season ends with the Grey Cup in late November.

“Thinking back to last season, our last home game, we had a blizzard leading into it,” says McNeil. “On game day, it was 10 degrees below zero and snowing. They [fans] were still there three hours prior to the game, tailgating. I love that they are that dedicated to it.”

They’re so dedicated, he says, that he and his colleagues need to work that much harder to draw people back into the stadium for kickoff. They’ve scheduled big events, like a flyover by the Royal Canadian Air Force at the start of the game, to get fans in their seats.

One U.S. survey found that nearly 9 in 10 football fans say they have had more fun tailgating than at the game itself. Many tailgaters don’t even attend the game in person, but just want to soak in the atmosphere. Tailgater crowds can number in the thousands, and in 2023 the Kansas City Chiefs hosted what was called the world’s largest tailgate as 2.5 million fans came together in-person and online for the opening game of the NFL season.

That passion has fuelled businesses like Tailgater Supply based in Richland, Washington, which sells gear from beer koozies to backpack coolers. Founder Rusty Pixton fondly remembers his tailgating days when he attended Washington State University.

“I think what gets people into it is it’s literally the best part of their week,” says Pixton. “Everybody’s working Monday through Friday, and they’ve got all these other things going on, but for those five or six hours out of the weekend in the fall they can let loose, be around friends and family, and have a common sense of community.”

That feeling is what keeps David Brown coming back to BMO Field for every Argos game. While he has only been part of the tailgate scene for a few years, he’s eager to help grow the tradition.

“There’s a select few people out in our lot who actually have been there for years doing this. They’re the diehards. They’ve really built this. I just want to be a piece of that puzzle.”