You do not have to find Ray Lyell in the Coliseum parking lot before a Titans game to know he’s there. He will find you. Before you see him, you’ll hear him coming, boat horn honking, raucous Cajun music blaring from his on-board speakers, punctuated by an occasional Louisienne “Ai-eeeee!”
Ray is a champion tailgater. He has a big wooden plaque from Jack Daniel’s to prove it. The plaque is mounted prominently on the front of the three-wheeled, golf cart-like contraption that Ray steers up and down the rows of the east parking lot, where he serves as something of a tailgating Paul Revere for many sedentary picnickers. His clarion call is simple: “The game is coming. It’s time to get excited.”
“My motto is to have as much fun as you can before the end of the fourth quarter,” says Lyell, who “lucked into” two secondhand PSLs in 1999 and has been tailgating ever since. “Because it’s all over before you know it.”
This season, Lyell has taken his credo even more to heart. “I turned 60 last Jan. 31,” he says. “On Jan. 30, I found out I had lung cancer.” Fortunately, he adds, surgeons were able to remove all of the disease (and about a third of one lung in the process). He’s still dealing with emphysema. But the Web site designer and former musician, who says he once opened shows for Waylon Jennings, remains more determined than ever to embody carpe diem, or at least to seize eight Sundays every fall.
Ray and his crew of fellow parking lot revelers set up their tailgate—a large flatbed trailer painted in the blue and red of the Houston/Tennessee Oilers, with an enormous grill bolted to it—on the stadium’s east side. But Ray, who sports a long gray ponytail to accompany his neatly trimmed gray beard, doesn’t stay long in one place.
For much of the morning, he putts around in his homemade cart, the covered dome of which sports the name of the Web domain that he established, www.TitansTailgaters.com. The two-seat cart, which might have earned respectful whistles from Rube Goldberg, is equipped with both pedals and a motor, a steering mechanism that looks like it was cannibalized from a hang glider, a video camera and monitor, an air horn and a stereo system that announces Ray’s impending arrival with blues, Cajun or classic rock tunes, depending on his mood.
Last Sunday, three hours before the Titans kicked off against Houston, Ray fortified himself with another of his concoctions, a small, slurpable tub of Jell-O, dyed a bright Columbia blue and spiked with Jack Daniel’s. (It goes down a little weird but settles quite comfortably.) Then he inserted a zydeco CD and took off with a guest.
Every time he passed fellow tailgaters, Ray honked his horn and flashed his infectious smile. And everywhere he was greeted with waves, wide grins, hoisted drinks and women dancing to “Don’t Mess With My Toot-Toot,” which seemed to be Ray’s favorite tune.
Once, when he noticed a young boy whose head was uncovered, Ray stopped, reached back into a long wooden box behind the driver’s seat of his rig, and pulled out a red TitansTailgaters cap. There were more where that came from, along with corresponding T-shirts in all sizes. “Every time I give one away, it feels like I’ve just gotten $100,” he says. “You make a lot of friends out here. You get 65,000 people together for a good time, and you can’t beat it. If we had a football game to go to every day, we’d have a better world.”
Judging from Ray’s cart, you can appreciate why the Jack Daniel’s people crowned him as the local champion last year in their Great American Tailgate Search. For the contest, which extends to the parking lots in every NFL city, Ray’s team began preparing months in advance. “They created a façade of Jack Daniel’s office,” remembers Lynne Tolley, a great-great-grandniece of Mr. Jack and one of the traveling judges in the tailgate search. “They had a pantomime show with dancers in green fatigues, a guy in a gorilla costume and Ray pretending to play a Styrofoam baby grand piano. It was incredible.”
As the Nashville winner, Ray received an oak plaque bearing a crossed fork and spatula, which he displays on the front of his cart. Had the Titans defeated Oakland in the AFC Championship game, he and five friends would have received an all-expense-paid trip to the Super Bowl, where they would have squared off in a pregame tailgate championship with the local winners from Tampa.
The Great American Tailgate Search is testimony to the growth in popularity—and elaborateness—of NFL parking lot parties. “Just in the past couple of years, we’ve seen a lot more tailgaters here,” says Ray. But even his tailgate extravaganza would get a good run for its money from some of the weekly productions elsewhere. Go to Minnesota or Green Bay in December, and you’ll find tailgaters soaking in hot tubs they towed to the stadium on trailers. In Philadelphia, one group set up an entire prefab living room, complete with walls, sofas and TVs. In Oakland, the party starts around 4 a.m. and resembles nothing so much as carnaval time in Rio.
As reigning champion, Ray was ineligible to compete in this year’s contest. But he served as one of the judges when Tolley and other Jack Daniel’s representatives brought their Tailgate Search to Nashville last Sunday. They found one party with an entire buffet—fried catfish, sausage balls, fruit dip, fondue—all created with liberal touches of Old No. 7 whiskey. In Lot A, they found a group with their own live bluegrass band and a middle-aged gamer dressed as Mr. Jack. The winners, from Pulaski, were a team “captained” by Jeff Bain and Steve Spivey, who literally went whole hog with a roast pig, goalposts, directional signs to Houston (“west till you smell it, then south till you step in it”) and other points, and stick-on buttons that read, “Texans Don’t Know Jack.”
Half an hour before kickoff, Ray helped present the championship plaque, made from a Jack Daniel’s barrelhead, to the new winners. But as he boarded his cart and picked out a new CD, he shared a secret: “We’re going to win next year. Guaranteed.” He wouldn’t reveal exactly what he had planned, but he had it all figured out.
How It Looks from the La-Z-Boy
Titans 17, Panthers 13
Georgia 42, Vanderbilt 14
Ole Miss 38, Alabama 35
Auburn 27, Mississippi State 10
Arkansas 24, Florida 20
LSU 24, South Carolina 17
Kentucky 30, Ohio 20
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