Spring break ain’t what it used to be.
The annual festival of debauchery as we North Americans know it began the same way most of our other great innovations: borne out of the simple, beautiful minds of a men’s swim team.
But spring festivals have been happening for thousands of years, starting with cavemen emerging from their winter holes to celebrate the arrival of warm weather.
Modern day North American spring break originated with the swim team from Colgate University, a small liberal arts college in Hamilton, N.Y. According to beer-hazed legend (Wikipedia), the Colgate Raiders were looking for an Olympic-sized pool in which to train during the cold New York winters of the 1930s and settled on the Casino Pool in Fort Lauderdale. After a couple of years, the training camp had grown to a competition featuring 300 athletes, who celebrated swimming fast by drinking beer and doing really dumb things, a routine that later become the source material for an international incident named Ryan Lochte.
The little training sessions soon became an annual phenomenon attracting thousands of athletes and partygoers. It was a rousing success, making spring break the most practical thing to ever come out of a liberal arts college.
A film called Where the Boys Are, starring noted tanned person and future Celebrity Wife Swap participant George Hamilton, was released in 1960 and brought the Fort Lauderdale secret to the world. The year after the film was released, 50,000 students showed up.
By the 1980s, the annual tradition had grown to include more than 300,000 students each year. It’s hard to believe, but Fort Lauderdale’s residents grew frustrated with the annual arrival of an army a dumbwads all looking for a bush to puke in. And God only knows the cost of sidewalk repairs rung up by missed balcony dives.
In the late ’80s Fort Lauderdale passed laws and put the word out to let the yahoos know that they were no longer welcome. At about the same time, the United States raised the legal drinking age to 21 across the country.
The Fort Lauderdale void was soon filled by Panama City Beach, another Florida destination that in the ’90s let it be known that it would love nothing more than to have a bunch of bros walking down the sidewalk pretending to ride motorcycles by saying “Braaaapppp, braaaappp, brap brap brap brap!” That never gets old. Oh wait, it got old really quickly, as Panama City Beach burned its welcome mat in 2015 following several spring break shootings.
What’s this world coming to when consenting adults can’t get together and shoot some Jägermeister and then shoot Travis, the bartender?
I was back on spring break this week for the first time since my college days and, man, things sure have changed. My wife was away for the week — family emergency or healthy snack convention or whatever — leaving me and my two boys, age four and six, alone for an epic road trip to the Interior.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever ventured to south Okanagan wine country for spring break but let’s just say that if there was one specific class best represented, it would be “seniors.” The term “last call” was more of a literal description of reality than a nightly prod out of the bar. There were some late-night shenanigans — on the first night, my youngest picked a 3 a.m. fight with sleep. Everybody lost.
There was debauchery — my oldest can now proudly claim he owns the title Fart King. But nobody got shot and nobody threw up on a cactus. It wasn’t the good old days but I guess that’s how life goes as we get older. The party ends for everybody some time. Everyone except for George Hamilton, of course.
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News.
@Sports_Andy
