Basketball Tournament With My Dad

This past Friday, my dad and I went to Birmingham for the Alabama High School Basketball Tournament. We try to go one day every year; which is actually rather odd considering neither one of us is a big fan of basketball. We’ve been going since I was in high school, maybe even junior high. When I was younger, the whole family would go and we would go every day of the tournament. Now, we just pick one day to go and we stay the whole day.

This year we picked Friday because the Madison Academy boys and girls were playing in the Class 3A finals; and, since my dad and just about everyone else in my family is an alumnus of MA, we try to support them as much as possible. My dad came by and picked me up around 8:30 on Friday morning and we hit the road, stopping off at Hardee’s in Decatur for some breakfast.

The day before we had both entered to win tickets to the tournament on a blog and the winner was supposed to be announced at 10 a.m. So, we called Tony, who was stuck at work, and asked him to check on it for us. Finally the results were posted and… we didn’t win. Since we didn’t have to go anywhere to pick up tickets, we found a parking spot. We had been driving around in circles while Tony was trying to find out if we were winners and spotted a lot sponsored by the VFW and decided we would park there. However, by the time we pulled in and parked, there was no one around to take up money. So, we parked waited around a few minutes and since no one ever came, we started walking to the arena –we got free parking!

Once we got to the arena, we bought our tickets and found a seat inside. The first sets of games were semi-final games and most of those were pretty good. We had brought a backpack full of snack food to munch on and I had also frozen some bottled sodas for us. My dad asked for one of his sodas and I handed him the one that was most thawed. Well, when he opened it, it spewed everywhere. It got on the seats, the floor, our clothes, the guy in front of us. So, a word to the wise, if your bottled soda is frozen solid and has only thawed a little bit, do not open it unless you want soda all over you and everyone around you. I had some napkins and wet wipes so we were able to clean up pretty well and we shared with the guy in front of us so he could wipe off his sweater and head. When it came time for the second Class 6A boys’ semi-final, we were surrounded by fans from Homewood and let me tell you, they were obnoxious! I graduated from Hoover and so naturally I didn’t like Homewood while in high school, but my goodness, my dislike was confirmed when sitting around their kicking and screaming and flailing fans.

After the Homewood game, everyone was asked to leave the arena and buy another ticket for the evening final session, which would feature Class 2A girls’, and Class 3A girls and boys. We waited around and let a lot of the people clear out before we started out ourselves. Now, if you go to these tournaments often, then you know that when the arena is cleared before the next session, people will place their folded newspapers and game programs over the seats in the arena to save their spot. Everybody knows this and it’s common courtesy to not take those seats. As we were about to walk up the stairs, I noticed a guy picked up one of these seat saving programs. At first I thought he was just going to look at something and put it back, but no, he looked at it and took it with him. Then he took some newspapers on another row. For some reason this really cracked me up and I also made the determination that there was no way we were leaving anything to save our seats.

I made a pit stop on the way out and when I came out of the restroom my dad was lingering around the fruit smoothie stand talking to a couple of girls. When he saw me he told me we were just going to hang out there with them so we wouldn’t have to leave and pay to get back in. One of the girls worked at the smoothie stand and another one knew one of the Birmingham cops and he told her she didn’t have to leave so we just hung out there with her as if we were all together. At one point someone told us to leave and about that time the cop walked by and pointed to the girl and said that she was with him, and so that person thought we were all together. The plan worked. As my dad says, the preacher never pays!

The final session of the day didn’t turn out as well. Both Madison Academy teams lost for the second year in a row. We left the boys’ game a little early because we knew they were beat and we wanted to get a jump start on the traffic. We stopped at Wendy’s for a burger on the way out of town to balance out all the snack food we had been munching on for most of the day. We finally headed south for good and my dad told me stories about his latest goings on the whole way home, which was funny and good because it kept me awake. Despite the MA losses, it was a really good day, one that I always look forward to.