Camp Randall used to sshake. I mean physically shake. You could feel it in your bones standing in the student section back in the early 90s before they renovated the place. We packed 77,000 people into a stadium built for 60,000 and the whole damn thing would sway when we jumped around to House of Pain before the fourth quarter. You cannot replicate that feeling with a fancy new video board and club seating. The old concrete was cold in November and the bathrooms were terrible and the seats were too small and I would trade every single one of those luxury boxes they built in 2005 for one more night in that crumbling old horseshoe.
Remember the 1993 Michigan game when we stormed the field and tore down the goalposts? That was the old Camp Randall, the one with the track still around the field and the press box that looked like it was built in 1952. You could smell the brats and the beer from the tailgate lots a mile away. Those portable toilet trailers lined up along Monroe Street. The way the fog would roll in off Lake Mendota during those late October night games and you could barely see the field from the upper deck but you knew exactly what was happening because you felt it. That stadium had soul. It had history. It had the ghosts of the 1962 Rose Bowl team and the 1984 team that almost beat Ohio State and all those mediocre squads from the 70s that nobody remembers but they bled for this program just the same.
Now they want to talk about stadium upgrades and modern amenities and how we need to compete with these new facilities programs are building. I look at what they have done to the place with all those suites and the fancy concessions and the Wi-Fi in the stands and I just see a museum. A sanitized version of what we used to have. The new Camp Randall is nice I guess, clean bathrooms and good sightlines, but it does not have the teeth that the old place had. You cannot manufacture that kind of atmosphere with architecture. That came from the people, from generations of families who have been coming to those games since the 1940s, from the students who stood in the freezing rain for four hours because they loved this team.
Give me the old concrete. Give me the cold metal bleachers. Give me the 1998 team running out of that tunnel under the old scoreboard. That was real.