108,453

Hands, touching hands, reaching out
Touching me, touching you
Oh, sweet Caroline
Good times never seem so good
I've been inclined to believe it never would.

- Neil Diamond

108,453 spectators. That was the attendance of Saturday's college football game between Michigan Wolverines and Purdue. I've never experienced anything quite like it except at the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) back in 1999. To give you an idea of the capacity we're talking about, compare it with these numbers:

Råsunda Football Stadium: 36,000
Ullevi: 43,000
Globen: 16,000
MCG: 100,000 (definitely worth visiting too! Sweden's a joke!)

One good thing about Rickey is that I see a lot of myself in him - mainly procrastination. Maybe it's a gene thing. Even though it was t-shirt weather in the month of November (both in Montréal and Ann Arbor) on Saturday, he had to do his Marketing crap and I got to take his ticket and his Student-ID and went with his friend Padrig to watch the game. The entire city was alive and the fraternities across the road from had started pumping their music sets to max at 10am and beer was flying all over the place not too long after that. Tailgating is the pre-game event where you drink beer and eat hotdogs till the point that you become either very aggressive or indifferent to what takes place on the field during the game. In other words, it's a whole lot of beer consumption! Everywhere you looked you saw yellow or blue Michigan shirts or jerseys. There was a nervous wreck for the 30 seconds when we were standing in line for ID and ticket checks. But I guess all Indians look alike and I was let through without even the slightest flinch on the Event Staff member.

It's pretty insane; up until 11:59 I couldn't have cared less of the sport that is American Football but well into the first quarter I found myself yelling and cursing at the ref and all that. The weather was fantastic and the ambience was even better! Another funny thing was how the referees have a hand signal /body gesture for like every imaginable referee-call. In hockey there's more or less only a hand signal for the different types of penalties but these refs had so many different gestures that it wouldn't have surprised me if some of them were for "Too much commercial time!" or "Fat white man dancing on the field!"

I can't even compare it to the McGill-game we saw back in Montréal since the atmosphere consisted of families, students and people travelling in from all over the state of Michigan to watch the game. There was even a section outside the stadium for labelled, "Parents' Tailgate" - even though it looked kinda dull. A typcal game lasts about 3.5hrs and since Michigan lost I heard quite a few younger folks saying, "I'm so depressed I just wanna go home and start drinking right now." Now this is a sport I could definitely pick up but I still find NHL way more exciting. It's as if all the marching bands, cheerleaders and all the hullabaloo is a necessity for the entertainment of the crowd. Hockey as absolutely nothing of the sort and solely relies on the game itself and the occasional fights. If I recall correctly the last 5 minutes of the game took about half n hour to play because both teams were challenging every single play and the referee had to review a play for like 10 mins and it got kinda dull.

My, by far, golden moment was towards the end of the game when a quarterback kicked the ball down-field so that a defense man of Purdue caught it. Before he had any time to react with the ball he realized that 7 Wolverines had already surrounded him and was charging him and he had absolutely no time get make a pass to a teammate. He had to take the hit and boy did he. 7 buff guys smothered this guy head on and I turn to my left to see this grandma, 75+, cheering and yelling, "Yeah! Bring him down! Wohoo!"

I don't know if it's something typical for Michigan or football in general but at one point 108,452 fans (everybody but me) burst into singing Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline (only the chorus though). It's one of those times you do get a better feeling for what the American Spirit may be all about. It may just make this week's song on the blog...