OPINION: The Wa-booze Cannonball

K-State's announcement that it will sell booze throughout the football stadium makes me think back to the good ol' days when everybody just hid their hooch.

It's been a long-running evolution. If you go back far enough, there was no alcohol allowed in the stadium, and no alcohol allowed in the parking lot. Simple: State property. No drinking allowed.

But in reality, people have brought their own booze to their tailgates as long as I've been alive, probably back at least to the opening of KSU Stadium with its giant parking lot in 1968. It was gravel back then.

The cops occasionally made a show of trying to enforce the rules, but they never really got serious about it. The wink-and-nod arrangement for a long time was that you had to pour your beer into a cup so that the cops could pretend that they didn't see you drinking. Don't ask, don't tell. If you flaunted it by carrying around a Coors, they would come over and either wag their finger at you or grab the beer and dump it out.

In more recent years the state actually changed the laws to allow people to drink in the parking lot. So no more hide-and-seek flimflammery there. There's a time limit - you can only start drinking five hours before kickoff on game day and you're supposed to stop at the end of the third quarter.

Inside the stadium itself was a different story. It was never allowed at all at the beginning, although again there was some wink-and-nod stuff going on because, until the mid-1990s, the crowds were so sparse that nobody paid any attention. My father-in-law tells stories of bringing in coolers full of beer and even once wheeling in a keg. A buddy of mine once drove his jalopy down the ambulance ramp, parked at the corner of the north end zone, watched the second half and had a few more from his driver's seat.

With the opening of the west-side luxury seating area in 1993, they allowed booze in the suites but you had to bring your own in. Then that evolved into full bars in those exclusive areas as fancy-land seating expanded on both sides. A couple years ago, they started selling drinks in designated "tailgate zones" in the stadium itself, but you had to have a special pass to get in there.

Now it's going to be booze everywhere.

Here's my sense of it, given my experience with the history. Make of it what you will.

My sense is that there will be no more and no less alcohol consumed than there's ever been. It'll be more easily accessible, but it'll also be more expensive. In a way, the only shift will be that K-State will collect some of the money, rather than liquor-store owners.

Oh, and now they have a direct financial interest in preventing you from wheeling kegs in. So in case you're wondering, those days are over-over.

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