In the past three months I have been to two professional sporting events, one a football game featuring the Houston Texans vs the Florida Jaguars and a basketball game featuring the Houston Rockets vs the LA Lakers. Although I will listen/watch football ocassionally on t.v. while knitting, I am not a big sports fan. Until now my experience with team sports has consisted of sitting and standing on the sidelines of various youth soccer and baseball games cheering my children and drinking watered hot chocolate and eating stale doughnuts while trying to keep warm, or sitting shivering on the cement bleachers of high school football fields, eating stale hot dogs and sipping weak instant coffee while waiting for half time and the marching band, with my children in it, to do the half time show. Since most of this watching and sideline participation occurred in the fall, winter and early spring in the Netherlands and Massachussets, my associations with sports to date have been those of cold, damp, discomfort, rain, snow and wind.
Technip, the company Phil works for has elegant full service sky boxes at Reliant Stadium and the Toyota center which they need to fill frequently with clients and an equal number of Technip employees, preferably married so that enough females are present to keep it from becoming a stag event.
In both instances, the food was gourmet, featuring tournedos of beef, grilled or roasted chicken, plentiful vegetables and get fat just looking at them deserts. The liquid refreshment flows readily and non stop service provided is by a waiter, server and bar tender for each box. There are memorial t shirts and or baseball caps with team logos and my hat collection has become numerous. The attendees, a combination of management and rank workers has been friendly and more social that sports oriented. In fact, if you are in one of these sky boxes, you don't even have to sit in the seats that overlook the arena or field but can sit inside on easy chairs and watch the whole thing on a big screen t.v. There is probably more schmoozing around the food and milling around inside than there is actually watching the teams play.
At the recent basketball game there were three women and eleven men. At one point I looked around from observing the pre-game antics of the mascot on a people mover as the waiter came down among the seats whispering only to the various men, ignoring the three women, and pointing back to the inside of the box. Two Houston Rocket cheerleaders, clad in barely covering , tight, skimpy outfits, had arrived to pose and simper with the men. The flashing of cell phone cameras was nearly blinding. I found the waiter's obvious discretion amusing. How did he know that I wasn't lusting after having my picture taken with two silcone endowed, wiggling and giggling chicklets? After the cheerleaders had pranced and posed their way out of the box, the waiter presented the host Tech Nip salesman, with genuine autographed copy of Yao Ming's shoe. Examining it later I realized shoe was longer than my entire forearm and extended hand, and stood taller than the distance from my elbow to my shoulder. Unfortunately Yao Ming was out of the game with a broken foot.
The biggest problem with the sky boxes, at least in a basketball game, are located in the upper levels of the stadium, it is impossible to see how tall and big the rest of the players really are. Seeing how much of the ball their hands encompassed when they were holding it gave some perspective as did reading the height statistics where the average was 7 feet from the program, but I think the only way to comprehend the true neck cricking size of these giants would to be to see them from ground level.
The basketball game surprised me with its speed and casualness. Being used to the big fan fare after every play of professional football on t.v. along with the frequent replays and commercial breaks, I was startled to realize that not only had play started but that both teams had already scored. Because of the speed and seeming casualness of play, the lack of whistles and pauses while the referee's calls were debated and frequent interruptions to change teams, it took a lot more focus to follow the game. In many ways, it was similar in feel to soccer in its speed, athleticism and movement back and forth along the floor. The half time had a brief session of the mascot throwing out water bottles and t shirts and a short display of the cheerleaders "dancing" but seemed to be over before it really got going. I guess I am spoiled by the production involved in watching marching bands during football half time shows.
Of the two events, I much preferred the basketball to the football. In fact I can actually see myself becoming something of professional sports fan, especially of basketball and the Rockets, if, that is, I could always watch the games in such luxury. But since I don't foresee a lifetime share in a sky box at the Toyota center in my future, I guess the Texans and Rockets will just have to learn to play on without me.
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