Tailgating isn't just for tailgates anymore.
What used to be a simple pregame picnic lunch served out of the back of a pickup truck or station wagon has become a multibillion-dollar business that, to some fans, is more important than the game itself.
And few people know that better than Jeff Campbell, owner and, until recently, sole employee of Gameday Customs of Long Beach. Campbell outfits trailers designed specifically for the care and feeding of tailgaters.
Small enough to fit in a garage or an RV spot in a football stadium parking lot, Campbell's trailers cost from $13,900 to $18,500 and come equipped with a wet bar, a flat screen TV and satellite dish, a "kegerator" for keeping the suds cool and a 1,000-watt generator. There is even a toilet to accommodate frequent visitors to the kegerator.
It's a business Campbell, 56, learned the hard way. In the 1970s, his family owned Sportland Trailer Sales and RV, a recreational vehicle company that boasted sales outlets in Long Beach, El Monte and Arizona. It had a manufacturing plant in Paramount.
Campbell joined the family business after graduating from USC in 1974, just in time for the first oil shock to send the RV industry into a nose dive. The company soldiered on for a few years, but the second oil crisis in 1979 finished it off.
"It was tough to sell RVs when gas lines were going around the block and interest rates were at 20%," Campbell said. "Timing's everything, and we had none."
His timing may be better this time around. Launched on a shoestring in December 2005, Gameday hit the market amid a boom in tailgating.
Claiming 50 million practitioners nationwide, the tailgating industry has its own trade association, a magazine and a convention that drew 25,000 people to Las Vegas last year. Membership in the American Tailgater Assn., founded just three years ago, already has reached 150,000, according to Kevin Miller, publisher of Tailgater magazine.
"Tailgating is so huge that some people go to the stadium just to tailgate and not even to go to the game," said Darryl Dunn, general manager of the Rose Bowl.
He estimates that 10,000 people who "attended" last year's USC-UCLA game in Pasadena never made it inside the stadium. (It's gotten to the point that the Rose Bowl may try to limit tailgating by non-game goers to lessen traffic problems and ensure there's enough parking for ticket holders, Dunn said.)
