You may not have heard of Adam Goldstein before now but he is living out what many of us tailgaters have only dreamed of. This season he is traveling all over the country, seeing as many NFL games as he can and tailgating before all of them. Did we mention he is a guy from London that quit his job, sold his flat and has dedicated the last four months to seeing over 35 NFL games in a single season? His website, adamsfootballtrip.com, has documented every football game he has attended complete with tailgating details and his journey to the game. In this exclusive interview with Tailgatingideas.com, Adam Goldstein discusses how he came up with this idea, why he enjoys tailgating sometimes more than the games and why tailgating nearly nonexistent in Europe.
Tailgating Ideas: How did you come up with the idea that you were going to commit five to six months of your life and essentially go tailgating non-stop this NFL football season?
Adam Goldstein: It all started that I was at the Chicago Bears Monday Night football game a few years ago. I am a Bears fan and they were getting beat. So as a Bears fan I was getting a bit grumpy so I left the game early. When I headed out to the parking lot to get into the car I saw a melee of people sort of shouting and screaming at what looked like the back of their truck. So I went over and I saw that they had the game on a TV. Coming from an English point of view I was thinking, “you come all the way out to the game, you cook out, which is bizarre in itself, and you don’t even go into the stadium and you would rather watch it on TV.” Coming from England and our soccer background it just blew my mind.
Originally I wanted to look at the cultural impact of Monday Night Football and at the time I only thought these things happened on a Monday. I thought Monday Night Football was much celebrated, if you will, it was more of a treat. I wanted to look at each team but then I learned that not every team plays on Monday Night football each year and it would take five or six years to see every team on Monday Night Football. And being from England it would take me so long and I would always be waiting on the NFL schedule to come out. I thought to myself maybe I could just look at each team’s fan base at their tailgate. That’s really why I am doing this. I am looking at the tailgates and to look at all the off the field stuff that comes with the NFL. The community and the fact that people can cook out for hours ahead of the game starting with opposing fans. You can actually have a great time at a game regardless if you like the sport or not. I love the sport but I also love the totality of it all because of the community aspect of it as well.
Probably growing up in England in the 1980’s and especially the late 80’s, soccer was driven by hooliganism and riots. It wasn’t a good place to go with a kid nor was it a very family oriented place. My original idea was I thought no one had ever done this before, was to go to every home team at least once. The problem with my trip was it was not actually a fair experiment. Some teams I can be with for three days doing research and the majority of the Monday Night games I am in and then I am out. So I thought to look at the past three or four season of past schedules to see if I could do it as a road trip. I started to look at where the Sunday games were in relation to the Monday games and blah, blah, blah. Really I was just hoping for an easy schedule.
I didn’t find a publisher or a sponsor so when the NFL schedule came out in April, I saw I could squeeze in a Toronto game and the London game possibly a few Bears games and I was thinking of squeezing in a couple more. And then I thought am I going to do this or not? I mapped it out and figured out that I would have to do one or maybe two flights. I spoke to the NFLUK and they told me that I would see more NFL games than any fan would be able to see in one season. It was going to be a world record but I found out from Guinness that somebody had done this already. They had done 31 games in 16 weeks. I spoke to the people at Guinness Book of World Records and the only way I could break the record was if I broke his record. So I would have had to see 31 games in 15 weeks. So in order to break the record I would have had to fly a lot more and that would have knocked out the London game. So I am now not doing it to break a world record, I am doing it to look at each fan base. I am Bears fan but I am bigger NFL fan. I’ll go watch any NFL game when it is on TV in England. If I am ever in the States and there is a game nearby I’ll go and take a friend. I am fascinated by the sport. That’s kind of what fueled it. Once I realized I could drive it, the apartment went up for sale. So I took about $70,000 from it to go into this trip and I left my job. Until about two weeks ago I had also left my girlfriend in London until she came out here starting on the Monday Night game in Carolina. That was our two year anniversary. She has been with me since.
Tailgating Ideas: You made mention that you are doing this more for research on the whole NFL culture and to study each team’s fan base. Are you planning on writing a book with all this knowledge you have gathered? Planning on making a movie about this trip?
Adam Goldstein: My original plan was to write a book. I do not have an extensive media background nor do I know how to get sponsorships. I wrote to people and I tried to get sponsored. The plan was to do a documentary but being a one man band it was very difficult to film and do all the things that goes into that. I am a photographer at home as well but after the third week I realized the documentary was not going to work. If I can shoot stuff on film it will be good for posterity. Certainly, using my blog as a way to get exposure and media and to find fans and then hopefully from there find a (book) publisher. I can go to the publisher and tell them I get 1,000 hits a day on my website, I have met all these fans and people say that they would be willing to buy a book about my travels. I am not quite sure what format the book will be whether it is a coffee table book or travel writing. I haven’t really figured that out.
If you visit the blog you can see that I am very behind. My laptop broke. My camcorder broke. Once I started hitting the Thursday-Sunday-Monday games part of the schedule I am driving 800 miles a day. If I can get to a computer it is normally to try and find a tailgater that I am supposed to meet up with at the next game. I was a bit upset at first when it all happened and I am also upset that the website is so slow. There is really nothing I can about that because it is a server problem. Yeah, so it really has been a one man band and I would really like to be more up to date on the site. I am going to the games, I’m still taking pictures, and I’m still meeting fans, so I am not going to get down about it. So now it looks like it will be just a book.
My other idea once I am done with the book maybe when I go back to London, maybe next year, is to open up an NFL themed restaurant. I’d like to have a dish from each team and paraphernalia from each team. I thought I might have stadium seats in there instead of tables and chairs where people can come in and watch games on the big screen. Anything that I can do to get people more into the games. NFLUK knows about me and from their publicity I am kind of a walking advert for them. One of the main things is to not necessarily seduce people into the sport. If people don’t like the sport there is really not much I can do about it. That is for the players to be more exciting. But what I can do is expose them to the tailgating lifestyle and the community aspects of the NFL. Because it is a fun event, that is how I can get more people into the sport.
Tailgating Ideas: How does a guy that grew up and currently lives in London become a Chicago Bears fan?
Adam Goldstein: When I was five years old you see things on TV and it must have caught. The Bears won the Super Bowl then and it must have caught my eye. I don’t know what specifically caught my eye but I became a Bears fan as a five year old. My dad got more into it because I was interested in it. I took him to an exhibition game at Wembley Stadium in 1990, the Raiders vs. the Saints.
As I said, in the late 80’s, soccer was very hooligan driven. It was not something people went to. I went to a soccer game when I was eight to a very minor team and there was something like a 1,000 man stampede riot. I just didn’t feel comfortable. Everyone I know it was all soccer, soccer, soccer. I guess liking football made me just a bit different. It was exotic and it was fun. Looking back now, what got me interested was the fact that American sports, predominantly American football, have a lot of bright colors and it is larger than life. The helmets, the gear, the cheerleaders of course. (laughs) It certainly is an event. That’s not the case in England. With soccer you arrive five minutes before the game, you try to avoid a fight, you don’t talk to anyone and that is pretty much about it. I think part of it is that soccer is such a crappy non-event. I think it has changed a bit now. I’d like to see soccer take on more aspects of the NFL to some extent. I’d like to see soccer adopt the tailgating and the community aspect of it. That’s how I got into it.
I play flag football in England when I am home. We had it on traditional TV, channel 4, and now it is on Sky Sports. If you have satellite you can get an abundance of games. You can get two 1 pm games, two 4 pm games and the Sunday Night games. So it is pretty good in that you can choose a couple of games you want to see. It is growing. We had two London teams and I played in a college league and now I play flag football. I’ve always enjoyed the community aspect of it all, the tailgating. Whenever I have traveled and seen Bears fans I would introduce myself as a Bears fan. Looking back on it, it is not like I chose them it is more that the city chose me. I had not relation, no ties to Chicago prior to that. In 2002 I worked here in the summer and I loved it. I’ve seen three Bears games this year and we have won all three. So I am hoping that if the Bears go to the playoffs it would be nice if the Bears sent me. We’ll see. We’ll see.
Tailgating Ideas: Tailgating and tailgate parties are pretty much a uniquely American event and lifestyle. Sure there are people that tailgate in Canada but predominantly it is a truly American activity. Why do you think tailgating has not caught on in Europe and especially England?
Adam Goldstein: There are a number of reasons. I think Americans are addicted to their cars. People drive to the games, even in the downtown areas. We (Europeans) don’t. We have a very reliable and efficient public transportation system. In soccer that is certainly one of the ways they can separate the fans from each other. If it is a big rivalry they will have to separate buses and trains for home and away fans. They have to separate them all the way from the beginning of the game all the way to after the game. The public transport makes it like that. If you treat people like children they are going to act like children.
Most of our teams started off from local roots like as a pub team with small stadiums. They have since grown and grown. We don’t have teams like the Carolina Panthers that just appear there with a huge stadium. That wouldn’t happen in England. It would be much more organic. Most stadiums are embedded in residential communities much like Wrigley Field in Chicago. You couldn’t have large car parks or any of those things. There just isn’t the room. I also think that people aren’t into making that much of an effort in terms of getting the grill out or anything like that. It has got to come down to not enough open space.
We did have at the London game a so-called “official tailgate”, which was food made by sponsoring companies. There was a lot of space that could have been used for car parking but you are not allowed to have an open barbecue. It wasn’t a great tailgate because Wembley is not in a very desirable part of London. It’s not downtown. It is really the only thing in that area. All these fans came to this local tailgate and it was just crammed. It was 80,000 people in a small tailgate. Everything had a line out of it and everything was hard to navigate. It was a bit annoying because of its “officialness”. There is nothing else to do in the area. There are no local bars. In Toronto, they had an official tailgate, it was formal, but there were other places you could check out. The Wembley one they needed to rethink it a bit.
I do think it is probably because of space. Americans do like their SUVs and their cars. The fact that you can tailgate and mix home fans with away fans, I’d like to see more of that at soccer games. What I would also like to do is change the stereotype of American Football. A lot of fans think it is a boring game with a lot of starting and stopping. They think it is rugby with pads. It is a lot more tactical than that. I am trying to get people to go to the games to show people that during the stoppages there is always something to look at. They have something on the giant screen or the mascot is running around. A lot of the things I see at games have been featured on the NFLUK or football related websites. I would like to see it expand to a bit more mainstream, not for my own ego, but for the people that don’t know about it. A lot of time I am writing to people in England who have been to games and know all about it. I’d like to expose the game or the tailgate to those who haven’t got a clue. I was in the national newspaper, the Sun, one of the tabloids, when I was back in London for the London game. People did come up to me that Saturday night before the game and mention that they recognize me.
Tailgating Ideas: Did you know anything about tailgating or the lifestyle that is tailgating before you ventured out on this trip?
Adam Goldstein: Not really. I only had a week to prepare for this trip. I left my job and had a week to find a car and really get organized. I tried to work as much I could to save as much as I could. I knew that some people would turn up to some games with a TV and tailgate. I wasn’t sure how far in advance they would do that. I got a bunch of T-shirts I would give out and I was going to get my own grill and I was going to make my own tailgate. What happened was I went to the Saints website and people started sending me menus. They would say “this is what we are going to cook for you when you come out”. So from there on there was no point in me doing all of the cooking because I can’t cook anyway. By the second game people had actually heard about me and this trip and they actually wanted to tailgate with me. That was in Green Bay. From there I had met Karen and Jay DiEugenio from Tailgater Monthly. They were great and Karen, especially, told me of all these different people at my next stop and she told me to contact those people. She gave me contacts for people to look up at most stadiums.
It may sound a bit contrived that I am going where the people are kind of expecting me but it was a great starter. Someone is there welcoming me with open arms and at least I don’t have to run around the stadium looking for the tailgaters that are not too drunk or etcetera. I was able to have one of the best tailgates at the Raiders game because these certain people had asked me to join them. In some respects I haven’t always been able to see a view of the fans and certainly how aggressive they are. I would always be with the home teams’ fans and nine times out of 10 I had tailgaters expecting me. Those tailgates that had people that were similar to myself, love the sport, love the community aspect, meet true fans, not just trying to get drunk and be an asshole. They know where the line is. There have been games where I knew no one going in and I had to introduce myself to people while there.
I really didn’t have much knowledge about tailgating until I left England and I kind of just played it by ear. Sometimes I have missed tailgates. In D.C. I missed it. In Seattle I kind of missed it just because I am traveling and I am on the road. Getting to New England is very difficult on game night. At Pittsburgh I missed the tailgate so I went back and did another Pittsburgh game to give them another shot. Hopefully with playoff games I can go back to those teams I may have missed the tailgate the first time around.
Tailgating Ideas: What’s the best thing about the entire tailgating experience to you? No matter where you go, what do you like the best about tailgating in general?
Adam Goldstein: If people know of me, it’s the support that they have given me. The fact that they have this “wow factor” has been impressive. These are guys that have been tailgating for years and I am wowed by them. Just the way they react when they hear what I am doing is great. They tell me, “I would love to have done that”, or “you are living my dream”. It really is a metaphorical pat on the back for me. Sometimes I am averaging five hours of sleep and I am asking myself, “why the hell am I doing this?”. To get that kind of response from people who are 60 or 70 years old who have been doing this for years, and I am essentially a tailgate rookie, I am from England, but for them to give me so many kudos makes me feel like this is worthwhile.
I know there are some people back in England that are following my trip. They may be a Miami Dolphins fan but they are also following my trip and their NFL experience is kind of through my eyes. People that I just randomly meet, a lot of the times they ask me, “you’re doing what?”. When I met Mike Ditka he said, “You’re doing what?”. He couldn’t believe it. Once I told him I quit my job and sold my flat he said, “Oh my God, that’s amazing!”. Once the people realize that I am not doing it for money and I am not writing for a company,. They’ll ask me, “who are you working for?”. I tell them, “No, no. I am just a crazy fan and I wanted to go on a trip of a lifetime.”. Once they hear that they’ll say, “Here, have a beer” or “shake my hand” or “give me a high five”. People have offered me places to stay or food. That makes me feel that it is all worthwhile.
I have had a few bad comments on the website. On other websites a few people have said some nasty stuff. Certainly some of the people in England, some of the media, were mocking me before I went out to America. Certainly you are going to get those people who are either jealous or haven’t thought of it themselves or are assholes. Most of the time, 99 percent of the time,NFL fans are appreciative that I am doing this trip. I’m doing it for the NFL and the fact that I am from England takes them by surprise. I’ve had one or two run ins with obnoxious people. I nearly got into a fight in Jacksonville. A guy wouldn’t let me pass. I was trying to take a picture of one of the extreme fans and he wouldn’t let me go down the aisle to take a picture with this guy. He started swearing at me and I told him, “listen, I am trying to get you more fans into your Jacksonville Stadium. I am trying to get fans for each team.” Other than that, everyone else has been very gracious and have encouraged me to take pictures and told me their stories of how they became a fan of that team. Most of the people have been really cool.
Tailgating Ideas: Heading into the final week of the season, you have been to just about every NFL stadium by now, correct?
Adam Goldstein: Apart from Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, I have been to all of them.
Tailgating Ideas: Of all the other 30 NFL stadiums you have been to, which one has the best atmosphere? This is apart from the time you personally had at a particular stadium but overall, which stadium puts on the best tailgating? As a guy that has never really been tailgating before that has now seen a lot of tailgating, which stadium would you suggest a fan must visit to experience the best tailgating?
Adam Goldstein: I would have to say and I am sure would agree with me but I would have to say Lambeau Field before a Green Bay Packers game. I enjoyed myself there and the people were extremely friendly. It felt, even though I am a Bears fan and it saddens me to say this, but it just felt like the home of football. The tailgate and the passion of the fans made it feel like it was a college bowl game. At Lambeau, people don’t walk around. At other stadiums people are up and down, getting food, they seem to not care so much. Packer fans were full on watching the game and passionate about it but not the point where they were aggressive or obnoxious. I walked around wearing my Bears gear and I thought, “oh no, they are going to give me shit.”. They didn’t and they were wonderful about it. After Lambeau, in terms of the stadium atmosphere I would have to say Heinz Field is an electric stadium atmosphere. I would certainly say Qwest Field in Seattle is loudest stadium. I am a bit biased towards Chicago but I wouldn’t say the tailgate was one of the best in Chicago. Philadelphia is a very good tailgate. I was very impressed. I was also very surprised by Houston. I had a wonderful time in Houston. It was a beautiful tailgate and a beautiful stadium. Oakland was a good one too. Overall, I would say if an NFL fan wants to the best overall experience, go to Lambeau Field.
Tailgating Ideas: When it comes to NFL tailgating, what would you say was a weak showing or they just didn’t seem too into tailgating?
Adam Goldstein: