When you think of tailgates in the Queen City, it’s hard to picture anything but the iconic Before the Roar Tailgate hosted by Bengal Jim and his friends Mark Thomas, TonydaTiger Brooks, Craig Johnson, and James Coppola. The party has grown to take up half of Smale Park and keeps getting bigger, so we sit down with Jimmie Foster (a.k.a. Bengal Jim) to learn what goes into throwing the city’s longest-running continuous tailgate.
You’ve been running the longest continuous tailgate in the city since 1993. How did it start and grow to where it is now?
Starting out, it was nothing more than me and four or five of my buddies sitting with a charcoal grill and a cooler. We’ve literally not missed a tailgate since. Even through COVID we found a way to tailgate responsibly. During the pandemic, we had a customer who had this giant lot a few blocks from the stadium, and we did a drive-in tailgate. The Bengals were playing, but we watched the game in the lot on a giant screen…