You would think that someone could have planned ahead.
You would think someone could have foreseen the probability of this little difficulty and acted accordingly.
But no, at The Pyramid the night of the Memphis-Temple game, I had to wait outside in the freezing weather with several thousand other University of Memphis students while event staff tried to let us in one at a time.
We'd all probably still be standing there in line, if someone with a bit of intelligence hadn't come along and opened up a few more doors where more than one person could go through at time.
Granted, I've never seen a line at the student entrance during a Memphis basketball game before, but with Calipari-mania running wild, someone should have been able to figure out this would happen.
I bring this up because tonight the Tigers face UT-Martin at The Pyramid and I would rather not be stuck outside again when the opening buzzer sounds.
Believe it or not, this columnist is a rather avid U of M basketball fan. There's nothing that I hate more than missing the opening tip-off to a game that I arrived at 30 minutes early.
That is sheer stupidity and will drive away fans, like myself, if it keeps happening.
Therefore, I hope someone took some initiative and gave the students more than two doors to enter through.
While I'm on the subject of Tiger basketball, I've got another beef with how the students were treated at the last game.
You see, when I finally did get through the bottleneck they called the student entrance, I found out that there were no longer any seats left in the student section.
So now I'm late to the game AND sitting in the nosebleed section.
While I'm happy that Memphis is finally supporting our team, I'm upset that we students are getting a raw deal.
Not only did we lose our prime seats behind the Memphis bench in exchange for seats behind the goals, where you get a horrible view of the court, but there's not even enough of those lousy seats to hold all the students that come to the games.
It seems to me that we students are being treated like second-class citizens now that there are actually people buying tickets. While that makes sense business-wise, it doesn't make much sense if the school is really trying to get the students behind this team.
We'll see tonight if anything has changed. If it hasn't, then I don't know what to say -- other than they've had their chance and I'll just have to listen to the games on the radio from now on.
