Giants Fan Returns to the Road

Football and barbecue. Only in America.

For the last five years I have traveled, usually with my old college friend Dave, in search of the best of both. Dave and I are Giants fans from opposite ends of the New York megalopolis, he from central New Jersey, me from southwestern Connecticut. He’s one of my best friends, but significantly, he’s my Giants buddy and BBQ compatriot.

We had Giants season tickets for the 1999 and 2000 seasons, which gave us a chance to see some amazing Giants games – remember Big Blue’s 41-0 slaughter of the Vikings in the NFC Championship Game? We also used those times to perfect the art of tailgating. There is very little that has walked or swum that did not find its way to our grill. Bison burgers. Shark steaks. Turtle soup. Scallops and bacon (which makes for a spectacular grease fire, for all my fellow pyros out there!). Even mulled cider spiked with Captain Morgan.

There is nothing, however, like perfectly slow-cooked barbecue. I’m talking about ribs and chicken thighs cooked in the vicinity of low-temperature wood smoke for hours until that nice pink ring develops just below the surface – and the meat’s flesh breaks down to a wonderful, buttery texture. That’s barbecue.

I first fell in love with this most uniquely American style of cooking in college, when I spent what little disposable income I had at the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, a Syracuse rib joint with snarky attitude and food so good that upon being told that the waiting time for a table was 2 hours and 45 minutes, I would instantly respond, “Cool. I’ll be at the bar.” It wouldn’t even occur to me to leave.

Barbecue, of course, is not indigenous to the Northeast. Great “Q” is tough to find in the New York metro area and nearly impossible to find in Boston. The best of it is located in America’s heartland.

Just like real football tradition.

Dave and I had two memorable seasons of attending all of the Giants’ home games. They were also two very tiring seasons. Getting up at 7 a.m. on a Sunday, often after the type of Saturday night a single guy in his 20s typically spends, to prep food and pack a cooler and a grill and various layers of clothes and chairs and a table and a football and driving 75 minutes to the Meadowlands for a few hours of cooking and drinking and sweating while chasing down a football, followed by the game, followed by possibly a few more hours of tailgating or a few hours of gridlock or BOTH! Then getting home at 8 and unpacking everything. Then doing it again a week or two later, eight times in four months. It’s absurdly fun, but more than a little exhausting.

I know I speak for Dave when I say that I would do it again in a heartbeat – for face value. But in 2001, with the economy in a downturn and both of us trying to rein in our spending, we decided two years was enough for us of paying a premium – albeit a fair one – for tickets. Since then we have gone to a game here and a game there when tickets have become available at face value.

We also started developing an appreciation for Giants road trips. Through connections of friends, we ventured to Philadelphia, Baltimore and New England for Giants games – all losses.

But in 2004, Dave had a more ambitious idea. He’d been dying to see Green Bay’s legendary Lambeau Field. The Giants played there that year. I needed no convincing.

And, I’m glad to say, Dave needed no convincing when I suggested that a good way to spend the Saturday before the Giants-Packers game would be to go to a big-time college game. A Big Ten game. Wisconsin-Illinois at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison.

If you’ve never been to a major college football game, you need to do so. Immediately. The atmosphere surrounding one of these games blows the NFL experience away. Don’t believe me? Try it. Go to one of each in a single weekend. For me, the only reason I could even get excited about Sunday’s game after the electricity of Saturday’s is because the Giants were playing.

This was confirmed each of the next three years. We headed to Texas in 2005, and saw an exciting Giants-Cowboys game featuring an Eli Manning fourth-quarter comeback to force overtime. Yet my primary memories of that weekend involve Bevo, “Texas Fight” and Vince Young leading the soon-to-be national champion Longhorns to a rout of Colorado in Austin – after a stop in some little Texas town for some roadside barbecue, of course.

Likewise the following years. Giants victories in the sterile, corporate environs of the Georgia Dome and Ford Field are happy memories, yet they leave less of an impression than the giddy, raucous Alabama and Ole Miss fans among whom we sat at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, or the Ohio State and Michigan marching bands, who showed us at the Big House that those schools’ famous rivalry is steeped not just in hatred of one another as in respect by playing the other school’s fight song.

This year, however, there will be no college game for us – but there will be no post-modern NFL stadium, either. Instead, we’ll be at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, and I anticipate this may be the last place left outside Green Bay where the aura of the game, and the tailgate, will rival that of a college clash.

And it will bring us back to our barbecue roots. Kansas City is the mecca of barbecue, and home of this weekend’s American Royal Barbecue contest. I’ve wanted to go to one of these for years, and it’s about to happen. I already have contacted a BBQ contest entrant known as “Mr. Bones” and asked to be included on their VIP list for the big “Friday Night Party.” Beer will flow and football will be discussed – I think – as the crew practices "smoking" in advance of Saturday night's main event, to be judged late Sunday morning.

By Sunday, we’ll know more about ribs and brisket than we ever thought possible, and maybe we’ll put some of that knowledge to work at the Arrowhead tailgate.

In short, it will be a weekend-long tribute to meat and football. Tell me that isn’t every man’s dream.