SportsPants

This year, your favorite wearer of the SportsPants was blessed with the ability to attend the National Championship game at the Rose Bowl between the Texas Longhorns and Alabama Crimson Tide. Here is my journal of my three-day stay:

Wednesday January 6: Good God it’s early. I know that’s no reason to complain when you get this opportunity…but 4:15 wake up calls hurt. A lot.

Time to get in the shower, but I don’t know where the hell anything is. I was able to go on this trip because my dad managed to secure two face value tickets to the game. He had been teasing me all week about going because it was supposed to be him and his wife doing this. I found this upsetting as his wife, though a lovely person, is not a particularly big Longhorns fan, so I felt it to be a waste. His teasing came back to haunt him as the wife fell under the weather and left him with an extra ticket and a very interested son. Advantage: Pants.

The early wake up call forced me to stay at his house the night before and now it’s pitch dark and I’m fumbling around like an idiot who returned from a night with too many Flaming Dr. Peppers. Once I stopped stumbling around speaking in some sleep-induced combination of Chinese, English, and Hindi, the rest of the (early) morning went smoothly.

At the airport there is a Southwest Airlines flight chartered for the Texas fans (apparently others are attending this game as well.) If you’re familiar with the way Southwest does things, it’s a first come first serve seating arrangement. My dad and I get to the airport early in order to get into an early boarding group since we both like aisle seats. It was then that we found out that the group running the charter was boarding people according to their last name. My last name begins with an “S”. Middle seat it is. Why must I be persecuted just because my last name isn’t Abbott?

Los Angeles, California. It’s 75 degrees and sunny, the only place in the United States that isn’t frozen. Scoreboard.

We check in and go to some pre-party at the Santa Monica pier. It’s a generic collection of carnival games and tourist restaurants found on a boardwalk that preys on tourists and bored teenagers who aren't welcome in any other establishment. I decided to try my luck at the basketball-shooting booth. You know those things: you try to make a basket at a hoop that’s smaller than usual and set further away. Your three-point stroke will not work here, lad.

My first shots are pathetic: one horrible miss to the right followed by two air balls. The drunken Texas crowd is razzing me. I take another chance to redeem myself and nail two in a row to win a new basketball which kicks the stuffing out of that generic dragon type creature you won by knocking down the milk jugs with a football. I'm feeling good though I have no idea how I’m going to get that basketball home on the plane.

Time for bed and tomorrow is the National Championship game. I’m in a warm city and I just won a prize. Life is good.

Tune in for Part II coming soonish.