The Burning Desire of Texas A&M
Fifteen years after the horrific bonfire collapse that killed 12 students at Texas A&M University, undergraduates there are again building—and setting ablaze—a monstrous conflagration on the eve of the final football game of the season. An immersion into the cult of the Aggies.
ESPN / APRIL 2014
A blaze erupts in the eastern sky -- daybreak comes hard and fast in Texas. A dozen pickup trucks are parked on the dirt of a clearing. A grove of post oak and cedar spreads in three directions. Beyond the woods is a ranch. In a chicken coop over there, something serious must be going down because the roosters are absolutely shrieking, like berserk warriors on the brink of an atrocity. In the beds of the pickups, blanketed forms shift. People are sleeping in there, have been since last night. They're undergraduates from Texas A&M University, and between the sudden sunlight and the animal racket, they begrudgingly arise. They pull on coveralls and sharpen ax blades and pinch black plugs of dip into their gums. Soon the trees in this grove, a pocket of dusty vegetation 30 miles northwest of College Station, will be mostly gone, transfigured into a four-story tower, then torched. The back of one guy's T-shirt says: "Build the Hell Out of Bonfire."
If you've heard of this pyrotechnic Texas A&M tradition -- at one time the most notorious ritual in all of college football — chances are it's because you remember how its timber immensity, almost complete but not quite, buckled during a work shift in the wee hours of Nov. 18, 1999, and came crashing down in a terrifying cascade. Fifty-eight students, most between the ages of 17 and 21, were crawling all over the stack at the time, engaged in various duties. Twelve of them died, 27 were injured, their bodies crushed and twisted. Suddenly, for the worst of reasons, people around the country were aware of this Aggie tradition, which had evolved into such an institution that it had become a proper noun: Bonfire.
It was also a tradition that had, the news coverage suggested, run amok. An estimated 8,000 undergraduates, some 25 percent of the student population, helped erect Bonfire. It was an entirely student-staffed and student-managed project nonetheless supported by the university and in part financed by it. Incredibly, it now seems, Bonfire was built and burned on campus —sprinkler systems installed on rooftops to keep Bonfire's cinders from setting the campus ablaze — and ignited before A&M's annual rivalry game on Thanksgiving Day against the University of Texas. A hundred thousand people would show up for the almost liturgical incineration, an event known as Burn. It comprised 8,000 logs, rose more than 90 feet into the air and weighed in excess of 1,000 tons. It had the shape of a wedding cake but also bore an uncomfortable resemblance to depictions of the Tower of Babel. It was hyped as the biggest bonfire not only in the world but also probably in history. The media seemed to relish reporting that hundreds of gallons of jet fuel were used to ignite it….