Mardi Gras in St. Louis08:08:24 AMThanks to a generous friend, I had the chance to go to St. Louis for the Final Four and Mens' NCAA National Championship basketball games this past weekend.
Through a lottery put on by the NCAA, he'd secured two tickets for seats we knew wouldn't be really great but, hey, it's the FINAL FOUR!
We're going!
Saturday, the night of the Final Four games, we dutifully arrived in plenty of time and had a couple of beers with the crowd surrounding the Edward Jones dome. At the appointed time, we, along with forty-thousand of our closest friends, made our way into and up into the stadium. Up up UP into the stadium.
Our seats, it turns out, were at the opposite end of the stadium from the action. Yes, that IS what the diagram on the ticket package indicated but, well, we'd held out hope the diagram wasn't to scale. We were wrong.
Here's what happened: The game was held in the same stadium used by the Rams; in other words, an indoor football stadium. Imagine a football field running along an North/South axis. At the South end of the field, from, oh, the 10-yard line or so to the line at the back of the End Zone is a basketball court. The basketball court is turned the opposite way from the football field so the baskets are on the East and West ends of the court.
With me? Okay.
On the football field, immediately North of the basketball court, they'd erected a temporary set of bleachers the full length of the basketball court and equal in height to the lower-deck seating in the football stadium. These are The Good Seats. These are not Our Seats.
Imagine further, if you will, lying on the floor of the court at the foot of the temporary bleachers and sighting up into the rest of the vast stadium. Your job is to identify any seat in the stadium that has any possible chance of seeing the entire floor so that your employer, the NCAA, can sell them to unsuspecting basketball enthusiasts.
Like, for instance, us.
What you'd come up with, if you did this, would be a set of seats starting from the ground at courtside and tapering higher and higher up the stadium until you get to the opposite corners of the upper-most decks of the stadium where it would finally taper out.
I'm very pleased to say we weren't in that very last, very highest section where you have no hope of seeing any basketball. That's the good news. The bad news is we were in the next-closer section (see the red area in the diagram above). Don't get me wrong: I was thrilled to be there--we both were--and, thanks to my friend having enough sense to bring two pairs of binoculars, we were actually able to see the game. But it wasn't nearly as much fun as it should have been because the crowd around us wasn't into it. They couldn't be...they couldn't see it.
No, I know, you figure I'm exaggerating. Well, here's the view from my seat: Judge for yourself.
If I sound like I'm whining, please don't take it that way. That's not my intention. I just wish we could have seen the games better and been more involved. And, I'm a little surprised the NCAA considers seats like these appropriate to sell to their fans. But you know what? We're big boys and at least adequately resourceful. Come Monday night, the night of the National Championship game, things were different.
This time we knew the deal. We knew where to park and what to expect from our seats. We also knew that every block around the stadium was blocked off, filled with college students, and poured full of beer. It was, in other words, like Mardi Gras. It was a party. It was loud.
It was fun.
It had big-screen TVs with excellent sound systems right there in the streets.
In a total sales cycle lasting roughly 45-seconds, we dumped our $55 tickets for $200 and sauntered back to the street for another beer and to start rating the coeds. Soon, the game started and we and all our new Illini friends rooted and cheered and had a GREAT time watching the game from the streets. It was so much fun we want to go back next year (Indianapolis, this time), but I don't really care if I have tickets or not.
On the other hand, one set of (scalped) tickets could just about finance the entire weekend, including a round or two of golf. Hm. Where do I sign up for that ticket lottery?
