Fare thee well, summer days. I hardly knew ye.

Still, it’s great to be back at Harvard for the best month of the year: October. The skies are blue, the breeze is crisp, and football is on TV—the last, of course, precluding contact with the first two.

Who cares? I’ve got cable.

Something troubling, however, stirs in the air. Whispers of tailgates and keg bans—not Elis and game-plans—dominate Harvard-Yale talk.

By limiting beer-bringing (and turning responsibility for public safety over to the flask-toting students) school and city organizers are trying to show they’re determined to tone down the tailgate. Are more regulations on the way?

Is The Fun gone from The Game?

To help understand this question and others, I recently talked to an expert in the fields of tailgating and fandom.

Warren St. John is a reporter for the New York Times and has written for the New York Observer, The New Yorker and Wired.

A Columbia grad, he enjoys Ivy League football despite the Lions’ traditional futility. A Birmingham, Ala. native, he has rooted for the Alabama Crimson Tide his entire life.

This summer, St. John’s funny and engaging first book, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania (New York: Crown, 2004) was released to favorable national reviews and wide distribution. Named after a UA victory song, it chronicles Alabama’s 1999 run to an SEC Championship, focusing less on what happened inside the stadium and more on what happened in the parking lot.

St. John’s odyssey takes place in an RV dubbed “The Hawg,” and along the way he meets Tide über-fans with names like the “Chicken Man,” the “Show Chicken Man” and the “Heart Guy.”

The Heart Guy, for example, needs a heart transplant and loses his place on the waiting list any time he travels more than two hours away from Nashville—which is a problem, since he intentionally leaves that area for each Alabama football game.

Whoops!

First, I asked St. John what makes sports fans (at least, those outside of Harvard) so crazy. Are extreme fan habits always so damaging?

“I think Step One is being self-aware,” St. John said. “You know, being honest about how you pick your team.”