Fired up and seeing red

Monday, Sept. 10, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.

13,000

Spectators served

Months of planning

$200,000

Cost

$40

Admission price

28,000

Bratwurst consumed

Gallons of mustard spread

Gallons of ketchup squirted

5,500

Chicken sandwiches served

1/2

Ton of cheese consumed

60,000

Beers served

17,000

Bottle of waters consumed

14,500

Sodas sipped

100

Portable toilets used

3 or 4

Depth in spectators lined up to use them

Tommy Rocker performances

Too many to count

Cases of indigestion

The World's Largest Grill didn't make the trip. Neither, as it turned out, did the Wisconsin football team's vaunted offense. But that didn't prevent thousands on thousands of bratwurst-munching, beer-guzzling football fans from turning the softball fields on the far edge of Camp Randall West - er, Sam Boyd Stadium - into the "World's Largest Tailgate Party" before Saturday's Wisconsin-UNLV game.

Even if Guinness World Records wouldn't acknowledge it as such.

"We tried to get Guinness to certify it , but they turned us down," said Terry Murawski, a former quarterback at Anderson College in Indiana and a native Hoosier (Terre Haute) . Go figure. As executive director of Wisconsin's national W Club alumni association, Murawski wields the biggest grilling tongs when the Badger Nation gets together for a Saturday afternoon cookout.

"I guess they're more interested in some guy with the longest nasal hair," he sniffed at the Guinness snub.

Just keep him away from the spicy mustard.

This wasn't the first time Wisconsin had fired up its collective grill in Las Vegas. But none of the previous official pregame tailgate parties had attracted a crowd like this one. It seemed all of Madison and half of Milwaukee were there, and if you thought it impossible to pronounce the names of all those little towns named for American Indians that were represented, you should have tried counting them.

"I got married at halftime of the Western Illinois game in 1991," said Ken Werner of Mukwonago, who was attracting attention at the back of one the long bratwurst lines - probably because he was still wearing his white wedding tails with a Bucky Badger embroidered on the back, along with a red kilt, knee-high socks and red-and-white custom-made wingtip shoes by Allen-Edmonds.

Werner's wife, Jill, showed me her ring. It was a replica of Camp Randall Stadium with a huge garnet on the 50-yard line.

There were 42,000 witnesses at the Werner wedding - "We weren't very good in 1991," Ken said, explaining the modest turnout at a cavernous stadium that now attracts more than 80,000. "But there are still a lot of people who owe us a wedding gift."

On Saturday, the Werners and about 15,000 of their closest friends had to settle for a bratwurst or two or three or three dozen, courtesy of Port-A-Pit Catering of Tucson . Murawski said the W Club had to make an out-of-state recruiting trip for a blue-chip grill when the world's largest one, sponsored by Johnsonville Sausage of Sheboygan Falls, Wis., either had a previous commitment or dumped its charcoal load in Aisle 3 of some Winn-Dixie supermarket.

The 65-foot - long, 54,000-pound Johnsonville Big Taste Grill can turn out 2,500 BPH - brats per hour - and Murawski might have panicked when he learned it had been ruled ineligible for this trip.

Not to worry. The Port-A-Pit grilled more than 4,000 brats an hour, thus making it the Ron Dayne of mobile grills.

With their bellies full and their cholesterol levels easily covering the point spread, the Badger Nation eventually trudged from the tailgate area to the stadium, leaving a huge wildebeest-on-the-Serengeti dust cloud in its wake.

There wasn't a spoiled brat in sight.