Austin, Y'all!
What a country! I rode 750 miles last Thursday, but I'm still in the South. As a Blue-Blood Kentucky Wildcat fan able and willing to jump through hoops to follow our team, I deployed to Austin to stay with cuzin Darrell and attend the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight in one glorious weekend.
Darrell and I staked a claim in a ticket line Friday morning to attempt to get two of a bundle of tickets released at the last minute by Michigan State. The rumors were that the amount of tickets to go on sale were 150 to 200. We waited from 7:00 till 10:00 a.m. when the ticket booth opened. The wait was a classic example of how ugly a situation can get when thes re is a line of true sports fans being infiltrated by professional broker/scalpers. Healthy optimism degraded into chaotic confrontation when we could not get event coordinators or campus police (the arena is the University of Texas property) to intervene. Without law and order (wild west?) you get unfettered human nature, and the result is not pretty. Long story short, when we started at 0700 I was 35th in line, each person can purchase up to four tickets, multiply those numbers and get 145, so if there are 150 tickets available we thought we were to be rewarded with two very precious tickets. By 10:00 when the ticket window opened I was 5oth in line because of the infiltrators who had cut the line in front of us through the course of the morning. The event personnel showed up a little after 9:00 to monitor but by then most of the low-lifes had jumped the line. We bitched, called campus cops, ranted, accused, threatened to cut in front of the cutters...emotional roller-coaster from visions of Sweet victory to nadir of negativity. They only ended up selling about 40 tickets, meaning that some inner circle scums pilfered tickets just before they went on sale, but us good guys had the satisfaction that none of the scalpers got to add to their largesse at our expense.
Darrell and I came back at the beginning of the Duke/Michigan State game and bought our tickets from the @$$#0l&$ on the street, but what are you going to do?
Since I was wearing a UK cap two different Lexington, KY TV stations approached us and taped interviews. The first reporter was an attractive woman who asked us stress-free questions like 'where y'all from?' The second station reporter had the gall to ask five trivia questions about Kentucky basketball, and between Darrell and me, we were 0 for 5. Finally, he asked us a question that would be easy to answer, 'Who' going to win tonight?' We got that one right.
Later we called our cuzin Tony who works for the UK hospital administration and has been known to supply many many of us cuzins with tickets to KY games over the years. I called him to warn him that he might see us on the local news that evening, and hoped we wouldn't embarrass him. It hadn't occurred to us that he would have any tickets because this was game day. Unfortunately, while still having the horrific memories of the mornings experience at the ticket line, Tony volunteered the fact that 'I wish I'd have talked to you four hours ago, because that's when I got rid of my last six tickets!'
We thoroughly enjoyed the thrashing which Michigan State gave to the Dukies, and of course we drew blood by beating Utah for the sixth straight tournament game. It is now Easter Sunday, we just enjoyed some of our uncle Vird's sausage imported in from Owensboro, KY, and we are resting up in anticipation of this afternoon's game with the Spartans. Life is fine...mighty fine.
Darrell and I staked a claim in a ticket line Friday morning to attempt to get two of a bundle of tickets released at the last minute by Michigan State. The rumors were that the amount of tickets to go on sale were 150 to 200. We waited from 7:00 till 10:00 a.m. when the ticket booth opened. The wait was a classic example of how ugly a situation can get when thes re is a line of true sports fans being infiltrated by professional broker/scalpers. Healthy optimism degraded into chaotic confrontation when we could not get event coordinators or campus police (the arena is the University of Texas property) to intervene. Without law and order (wild west?) you get unfettered human nature, and the result is not pretty. Long story short, when we started at 0700 I was 35th in line, each person can purchase up to four tickets, multiply those numbers and get 145, so if there are 150 tickets available we thought we were to be rewarded with two very precious tickets. By 10:00 when the ticket window opened I was 5oth in line because of the infiltrators who had cut the line in front of us through the course of the morning. The event personnel showed up a little after 9:00 to monitor but by then most of the low-lifes had jumped the line. We bitched, called campus cops, ranted, accused, threatened to cut in front of the cutters...emotional roller-coaster from visions of Sweet victory to nadir of negativity. They only ended up selling about 40 tickets, meaning that some inner circle scums pilfered tickets just before they went on sale, but us good guys had the satisfaction that none of the scalpers got to add to their largesse at our expense.
Darrell and I came back at the beginning of the Duke/Michigan State game and bought our tickets from the @$$#0l&$ on the street, but what are you going to do?
Since I was wearing a UK cap two different Lexington, KY TV stations approached us and taped interviews. The first reporter was an attractive woman who asked us stress-free questions like 'where y'all from?' The second station reporter had the gall to ask five trivia questions about Kentucky basketball, and between Darrell and me, we were 0 for 5. Finally, he asked us a question that would be easy to answer, 'Who' going to win tonight?' We got that one right.
Later we called our cuzin Tony who works for the UK hospital administration and has been known to supply many many of us cuzins with tickets to KY games over the years. I called him to warn him that he might see us on the local news that evening, and hoped we wouldn't embarrass him. It hadn't occurred to us that he would have any tickets because this was game day. Unfortunately, while still having the horrific memories of the mornings experience at the ticket line, Tony volunteered the fact that 'I wish I'd have talked to you four hours ago, because that's when I got rid of my last six tickets!'
We thoroughly enjoyed the thrashing which Michigan State gave to the Dukies, and of course we drew blood by beating Utah for the sixth straight tournament game. It is now Easter Sunday, we just enjoyed some of our uncle Vird's sausage imported in from Owensboro, KY, and we are resting up in anticipation of this afternoon's game with the Spartans. Life is fine...mighty fine.
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