Imagine one hundred thousand plus people yelling “We Are Penn State!” at the tops of their collective lungs. Imagine each word being punctuated by the stomping of two hundred thousand feet on the stadium floor! Imagine an additional 60 or 70 thousand tailgaters’ outside the stadium doing the exact same thing. In a word it is, surreal. In three words it is; Penn State football!
I’ve never been a fan of football I’m not really a sports fan at all. But here I am in State College home of the Penn State Nittany Lions. And lets not forget that State College is deeply ensconced in the Steeler Nation! The only entity more important than football is hunting (something else I don’t partake in) and the two entities run a pretty close race.
To add to the fun, it seems that all the Penn State sports teams are called the Nittany Lions unless they are the Nittany Lady Lions. Which means you have to know which sports season you are in to know if people are talking about basketball, football, volley ball or wrestling.
Every now and again our marketing manager manages to get extra tickets to sporting events. To be fair she holds a draw for the extra tickets. Two years ago I won four tickets to a Penn State game. My wife who has been here since 1986 had also never been to a game. We figured what the heck? The stadium holds over one hundred thousand people and is only used for Penn State football home games which are held roughly six times a year. The stadium has bench seating and they cram as many people onto those benches as possible. So we decided to be greedy and hold onto the extra two tickets to give us a little more breathing room butt space.
Before this tale even begins I’m giving away the ending. Not only was this my first game, it was also my last. Yes, I had that much fun.
First was the parking. We didn’t get to park near the stadium, season ticket holders who pay thousands of dollars don’t get to park next to the stadium. We didn’t even get to park in the fields across from the stadium (that is where season ticket holders get to park if the ‘donation’ they made to become season ticket holders was large enough) suffice it to say that after the fields there are more fields, to the left of those fields there is a little dirt road. At the end of the dirt road there are more fields, we got to park in those fields. And we had the privilege of paying twenty dollars to park in that field. Many of the people parked in our field didn’t even go to the game, they were tailgaters. In our field the tailgaters had lawn chairs and coolers full of beer and the occasional radio. As we walked the 2 miles to the stadium the class of tailgaters got a little higher. Some of these tailgaters were parked in campers that were more expensive then our house, they featured outdoor kitchens and 42 inch plasma TV’s which slid out from the side of the RV for outdoor watching. Some had custom paint jobs in blue and white (Penn State Colour’s) and bumper stickers with witty sayings proving that God loves Penn State, the proof being that God made the sky blue and the clouds white.
Finally we made it to the game. We actually had pretty good seats the problem was getting to them. The two miles to the stadium wasn’t punishment enough, now we had to fight our way up miles of ramps and stairs. There was a time or two I didn’t think I was going to make it. I’m not sure how my wife survived. Our seats were not really seats nor were they benches. It was more like sitting on a railroad tie only not as comfortable. The good news is you don’t get to sit on them very often, every time something exciting happened everyone stood up so you couldn’t see anything anyway. Good thing for us we had the bees keeping us busy so we were not too concerned about what was happening on the field.
We did have fun shouting, “We Are…Penn State!” We had fun doing the wave, first at normal speed, then at super fast speed, then in slow motion and my wife enjoyed the occasional “Whooo Hooo” She didn’t know what it was all about but every now again, on the big screen the words, “Whoooo Hoooo popped up and everyone yelled them at the same time in perfect karaoke style. But even that didn’t hold our attention very long. At half time we called it a day and made the long trek back to the car.
In the end it was a good day. The Nittany Lions won, we know this because we did watch the last quarter of the game, at home, in the air conditioning, with beer in hand, sitting on our recliners half asleep in front of our 42 inch flat screen TV. And while we didn’t have the bees to entertain us, the six cats did an excellent job.
In writing this blog I started to wonder how Penn State got its simple slogan. And simple though it may be, the story is why everyone involved in Penn State should be proud.
Wally Triplett an African-American halfback played for Penn State in the 1940’s when much of varsity football was still segrated. In 1948, Penn State was invited to play at the Cotton Bowl, and there were rumblings of having meetings to discuss if Penn State should send their African American players to the game. Steve Suhey the team captain put an end to any meetings before they could start. “We are Penn State” he said, “There will be no meetings”. The full team traveled to Texas, and Triplett scored the game tying touchdown.
For those of you locals that read this blog, next time you are at a game, or tailgating or enjoying the game from home and everyone starts screaming WE ARE…PENN STATE! Remember Wally Triplett and Steve Suhey, stand up stomp your feet and yell at the top of your lungs with all the pride you can muster, because WE ARE!…PENN STATE!
EDIT: After posting this I found this video on youtube. A two minute ‘documentary‘ on a typical gameday in State College. (note the stairs, those are only some of them).
PanningForGold 