The Grove is quiet on Friday afternoon. Ten acres of oak, elm, and magnolia in the middle of campus, students cutting across it on the way to class, nothing to suggest what is coming except the red and blue trash cans appearing across campus, the first tell. Then evening arrives, the tents go up, and by Saturday morning campus is no longer campus. It is born anew. It is The Grove. White tablecloths. Chandeliers inside tents. Chafing dishes and silver platters and somebody's aunt's caramel cake, sliced before noon because nobody was going to wait. As many as fifty thousand people, all dressed to the nines like they have somewhere to be. Because they do.
I have walked through it more times than I can count, and I still slow down. Not for football. Well, not only for the football. But for nostalgia I feel deep in my soul when I look around at the tables, at least one in every tent. Each set with purpose, care, and attention to detail, under a tree, for one afternoon, for the people and the place they love. The Grove on a game day, in all its glory, is exactly what Marelle is, who each collection is made for, and the essence we bring to every table we set.
Each set with purpose, care, and attention to detail, under a tree, for one afternoon, for the people and the place they love.
A Little History on how the Ole Miss family came to be
The University of Mississippi played its first football game in 1893. The team was organized by a Latin professor named Alexander Bondurant, who suggested it borrow a color from each of two schools he admired: Harvard's crimson and Yale's navy. He thought the two would be harmonious together. He was right, and a century and change later they still are, on tents and sundresses and ties and, now, on a set of tiles.
The name "Ole Miss" came a few years after that. A student named Elma Meek proposed it as the title of the first yearbook in the 1890s, and it stuck to the whole university. The famous cheer that we chant to this day came later still. A version of it turned up in the student newspaper in 1926 as "Heighty Tighty," and somewhere over the following decades it became "Hotty Toddy." Nobody can say exactly how. The phrase has no definition you could write down, but in Oxford it means everything. It is a cheer, a greeting, a password, a connection. Say it to a stranger in an airport wearing an Ole Miss hat or T-shirt and their eyes will light up as they say it right back at ya! And just like that, you learn that almost anywhere in the world, someone from the Ole Miss family is never far away, even if you have never met. It ties us together across every age and generation, and not every school can say that. Ours is a rare kind of family.
The Grove was a gathering place long before it was a tailgate. By the 1950s people were picnicking there before games, and for decades they parked their cars right on the grass. Then there is the Walk of Champions. In 1985, Coach Billy Brewer began leading his players along the same path through The Grove before every home game so the fans could see them, and the fans lined the sidewalk and cheered them on as they passed. They still do.
Then came the fall of 1991: two rain-soaked weekends in a row, and ten acres of lawn turned into a rutted swamp. The university sent the cars away for good. Tents filled the space they left behind, and with no bumpers between them, the groups drew closer. What had been a parking lot became a neighborhood. (This is my favorite kind of origin story. The thing everyone loves now was born from the thing no one was happy about at the time.) In 1998 an arch went up at the head of the Walk, a gift from the 1962 team, the only Ole Miss squad ever to finish a season without a loss. The players still walk under it a little over two hours before kickoff, and the crowd still closes in on both sides.
None of it came easy, and that is part of the point. After 1962 the program spent long stretches of the following decades looking up at the rest of the conference, and Ole Miss fans learned to show up and have a good time anyway, rain or shine, win or lose. Last fall, their hard work and dedication were finally rewarded with the first eleven-win season in school history and the program's first trip to the College Football Playoff. Then, weeks before the first playoff game, the head coach left for a rival. The players walked into Vaught-Hemingway under first-time head coach Pete Golding, promoted from the defense, won forty-one to ten, and went on to New Orleans and beat the Georgia Bulldogs in one of the best games I have ever seen (though I am biased). This is a program that has stumbled, risen, and kept showing up for more than a century, and never more plainly than in the past year. The Ole Miss family, made up of the athletes, the students, the staff, and the alumni, has stayed unbroken and remained steadfast in spirit, and it always will. Because we are Ole Miss, and our love for this school and for one another was never going to leave with one coach.
Fans here keep a positive outlook. Whatever a season brings, we can always claim that Ole Miss has never lost a party, and certainly never one in The Grove.
The wind tiles
Every Marelle mahjong set has four winds: East, South, West, North. They are the directional tiles, and in American mahjong they are also the seats. Four players sit at four sides of the table, East deals, and over the course of an evening the deal makes its way around. Everyone gets a direction. Everyone gets a turn to start things.
If you have ever watched a game from the sideline, you already know where this is going. Football is a game of positions. Every player has a place on the field and a job that only makes sense in relation to everyone else's. So when I sat down to design the winds for the Grove Collection, the idea arrived nearly whole. Four winds. Four players.
I drew each direction as an Ole Miss football player in motion, the way you'd see him in The Grove as the team makes its way down the Walk of Champions before a game, or from the stands as the ball is snapped. The words stayed, each wind spelled out in full. That part mattered to me more than anything: you should be able to read a Marelle tile across the table in a single glance, at the end of a long night, with your reading glasses somewhere in the other room. A tile that is lovely and unreadable is a tile nobody plays with twice. So the direction reads first, and the player carries the story underneath it, with his wind's letter on his jersey.
The tiles themselves are built in layers, and each design is embossed into the top surface, which captures a level of detail and realism that, to me, is the only acceptable way to depict these players. Run your thumb over a Marelle wind and you'll feel the edges of him. It is the kind of feel that makes a tile hard to put down. After all, mahjong is a game played by hand, and I think the hand deserves something to notice as much as the eyes do.
Why the players
I could have put almost anything from The Grove on those four tiles. The tents, the trees, the chandeliers hanging above the tables, the arch itself. Any of them would have technically worked, and yet none of them are the real reason the tables get set on a gameday.
The players are. Every tent in The Grove on a Saturday morning was set up, dressed, and filled because a group of young men is going to walk through it on their way to the field. A little over two hours before kickoff, the crowd closes in on both sides of the walk, and for a few minutes everyone turns to face the same direction. That is the moment I wanted on the tiles: the people everyone gathered for, passing straight through the place we call home.
There is a quieter reason too. The winds are the tiles that move. Every hand the deal passes, and the seat that was East a minute ago is something else now. Nothing about a wind tile stays put, and nothing about this program has either. It has stumbled, risen, changed coaches, and kept walking under that arch with heads held high. Putting the players on the winds felt honest in a way that putting them on a dragon or a flower would not have. The tile that turns belongs to the team that keeps turning up.
The tile that turns belongs to the team that keeps turning up.
And there is the plainest reason of all. Football is a game of positions, and so is mahjong. The four winds are the four seats. Put a player on each one, and everyone at your table has a position.
Four winds, one table
Here is what I have come to believe. Gameday is not only about the game, any more than mahjong is only about the tiles. What people actually drive three hours for is the table under the tree, the friends they only see in the fall, the aunt with the cake, the laughs and the good times. But the game is what gets the table set. Without a team walking down that sidewalk, the tents wouldn't go up and the tables wouldn't be set. Football gives fifty thousand people a reason to say yes, and the players give them something to gather around.
A mahjong set does the same thing on a Tuesday night. It gives four people a reason to say yes, a table to sit around, and a seat that belongs to each of them. That is the whole point of putting everything important to Ole Miss and The Grove on a set of tiles. Not to decorate the game, but to bring the part of Oxford that gathers people, and the reason they gather, to a table that might not be anywhere near Oxford at all.
The Grove sets its first tables of the season this Saturday at home. Two hours before kickoff the team will walk under the arch surrounded on both sides by people and the tables they set with purpose. Wherever you are that night, set a table too. Pull up a chair. Draw a tile. The wind is with you.