Sigh of the Times

Our hopes ran high until the initial personal foul sometime late in the first quarter. Backed up against their own goal line, the opponents quarterback was scrambling to the outside, fading further back towards the endzone, subject to the ongoing rush of crimson and gold. Without the penalty, perhaps the play would have ended with the bad guys at fourth down and long on their own one yard line. Without the penalty, perhaps the play would have ended with the interception that resulted from the Hawkeye’s errant toss downrange, thrown only to avoid an untenable situation with their backs against the wall.

Instead, the quarterback was forced out of bounds as his pass was intercepted, opposing fingers deep in his facemask. The bad guys benefitted – yardage and an automatic first down – and we watched the hopes of another season fade even before the first conference game. The Cyclones (aye, Sigh-clones), rarely fail to fail.

In recent years, I’ve found myself in Iowa City for the annual intrastate scrimmage. In fact, I’ve only seen the game once in Ames, about a thousand years ago during my second senior year there. But heck, when a friend leaves a cryptic email less than 48 hours prior to kickoff stating that you should be at some Dogtown bar the following evening and that there’s really no plan except to try and scalp some tickets,… What the hell. We had nothing scheduled for the weekend, anyway. A road trip seemed just the thing.

Fortunately, we found a hotel room to reserve, and the local inns were full. Ahead of us at the counter was some guy who had arrived just moments before us, unloading his bedraggled family from their Jaguar SUV. He was assuring the hotelier that he had talked to someone earlier and had given her his credit card number “and everything”. No, he couldn’t remember her name. No, there wasn’t a confirmation number. No, there wasn’t a room for them. However, we did have a confirmation number, and I now have a few more points on my preferred sleeper account.

Ames looks nothing like Iowa City prior to the Big Game. Kinnick Stadium is in the middle of town, which pushes the tailgating into more widely spread parking lots. Cyclone Stadium (and Jack Trice Field) is situated in the middle of the Skunk River flood plain, with dedicated parking in the lots and fields to all sides. It’s a veritable sea of parked cars and pickups and vans and campers and tents and awnings and drunks college students. Most don’t even have tickets, they just enjoy getting loaded out of doors amidst a huge crowd and few toilets.

We parked somewhere near Veterinary Medicine about three hours before the game and hadn’t been walking ten minutes when we saw Story County’s finest escorting an obviously inebriated citizen from the grounds. As we didn’t have tickets yet, we thought of asking for his (since he wouldn’t be using it), but decided against it, thinking that he’d only have a single seat, and we not wanting to sit in the student section.

The first scalper we found was wearing a sign saying “tickets” standing not fifty feet from a guy with a sign saying “tickets wanted”. I thought it only neighborly to introduce the two but, surprisingly, they already knew each other. This guy wanted a hundred a half a piece for adjoining tickets he said were near the 20 yard line, about half way up. He dropped his price to one thirty-five as we walked away. I was almost ready to pay the man, but wanted to look a little further, especially since we really needed four tickets to accommodate our cryptic friends.

We continued our walk around the stadium, found that the ticket booth was only selling SRO (i.e. those awful bits of grass at the south corners), and continued walking. About three quarters of the way around, we found another scalper asking one twenty-five each for a pair, strangely so, near the 20 yard line, about half way up. I weighed the cost against driving 450 miles to drink in a parking lot, and gave the man a wad of cash before heading the rest of the way around the facility to meet some friends with beer in a convenient field. These friends already had tickets from our usual source (a mutual friend at the University), but we planned this trip way too late to take advantage of the free seats. We weren’t exactly sure where their free seats were, but we assumed they were near the 20 year line, about half way up.

Friends found, we found that they had collared some youth who was unloading his family’s season tickets for beer money. Since cheap beer in Ames is still pretty cheap, I gave him forty dollars for the set, speculating that our ticketless friends would eventually answer their phones and let us know if they were successful in finding seats on their own accord. At worst case, I could likely unload the worst of the tickets (likely near the 20 yard line, about half way up) and recoup some of our costs.

When they finally answered their page, we connected and split the total cost, reducing our ticket price to seventy-two fifty each – not too bad for a ninety dollar face value ticket. Appropriately intoxicated (adult appropriate, not student appropriate), we headed to the game, finding that the four tickets I purchased, from two different people a half mile apart, were in the same section, in the same row, and only two seats apart, in the center of the end zone, and nowhere near the 20 yard line. Not bad seats, really. Luck was with us that day. How could she not smile on the team as well,…

I forget sometimes. Forget that Lady Luck is fickle, and usually defers to her ugly stepsisters of Fate. As the Fates would have it, the home squad had twice the yardage in penalties, one lost fumble and threw four interceptions. On a surprising note, the 35-03 final score wasn’t their most embarrassing finish to this series, but it certainly wasn’t pretty.
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