Before Notre Dame and USC clashed in South Bend Saturday night in their annual football rivalry, students and fans there celebrated all day long in one of the biggest tailgate parties in the nation, equal parts pagan rite of autumn and religious crusade.
This was not news.
Defeating the spoiled infidels from Southern California when they journey to South Bend is a huge priority for the Fighting Irish, all the greater because the Trojans in recent years seem to win more often than not.
So the feasting and drinking (which began the night before) lasted all day long. A special mass was held on campus. Alumni flooded into town from all corners of the country. And scalpers scored huge profits selling at a premium the last few available tickets. Though I didn’t know that in the beginning, when I first began to look for a ticket of my own.
It was about three hours before the scheduled kickoff — as the Notre Dame players dressed in their school blazers emerged from the library with its huge mural of “Touchdown Jesus” overhead to walk through a cheering gauntlet formed by the student body in the team’s traditional walk through the “Knute Rockne Gate” of the stadium — it was then I noticed several individuals on the periphery holding up one or two fingers without any enthusiasm.
So I asked one, an older gentleman who was holding up one finger, if that meant he had one ticket to sell. No, he said. It meant there was one ticket he wanted to buy — so he could get into the game himself.
I asked him how much he expected to pay. It was hard to say, he said. Sometimes someone in a party can’t attend the game and someone else in the same party has an extra ticket and they just give it away. But scalpers sell tickets too and they try to get as much as they can.
“Until just before game time, and then their prices begin to drop.”
So I decided to try it too. As I was walking toward the main entrance, I lifted up one finger. Very quickly two large men floated up alongside me.
“How much are you willing to pay,” one said.
“Well, I was kind of hoping you would just give me a ticket, ” I said. “I’ve come all the way from Alaska.”
“Then you really must want to buy one bad,” he said. “How much are you willing to pay?”
I pulled out my wallet and looked inside. “I have $20 in cash,” I said.
Then with what I think was a derisive snort he stuck the ticket he was holding back in his shirt pocket and he and his associate began walking away.
I called after them: “I could write you a check and pay a little bit more…”
“Hah!” he said.
Later I walked up to an even older fellow with a white beard (reminscient I thought of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw) who was holding up a single finger and asked him how much he expected to pay.
It would be nice to get a ticket for free, he said, but not long ago, for a lesser game against Purdue, he paid $150. Then, when he took the ticket to the gate the person at the turnstile scanned the ticket, looked him in the eye and told him it had been reported as stolen.
“So, don’t buy any tickets from the South Bend scum,” he said. “Look for someone from USC. And make sure the ticket you buy has the laser mark on it. Some of these South Bend scum are printing tickets that look like the real thing, but they won’t take them at the gate…”
The finger I was still holding up was beginning to waver some — especially after I learned that I wouldn’t be allowed in with the daypack full of camera gear I was wearing. I would have to check it at the gate, and I wasn’t too keen about doing that.
“How much can you pay,” a voice behind me said.
I turned around to face a young guy who appeared to be a local.
“How much will you sell it to me for?” I asked.
“I’ll take $100,” he said.
“How about $50?” I said, even though I knew I didn’t have that much.
“Fifty dollars!” he said. “Boy, you must be out of your mind! This isn’t Purdue. This is Notre Dame and USC!”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
It most certainly was.
Travels with Harley 