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A Different Kind of Hoop Dreams
The most money I’ve ever spent on a sporting event was to see the New York Mets versus the New York Yankees in the 2000 “subway” World Series. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and not just a regular season inter-league contest.
Thirteen years later, I won tickets to see the New York Knicks play the Oklahoma City Thunder at Madison Square Garden. For a regular season encounter, these were fantastic tickets. Face value was more than $300 per ticket. And for that reason, there was no way I was going to attend the game.
Baseball is my main sport. It’s been that way for decades. During my college years, I watched a few hockey and basketball games and decided that hoops would be my “winter sport.” Even so, I still didn’t attend a pro game until after I graduated.
Fast-forward to 2012, when I lived in Queens and Time-Warner Cable (TWC) was my local provider. I received an email saying they were starting a sweepstakes for subscribers, clicked through, and saw a number of upcoming Knicks and Rangers games (since TWC was owned by the same management group under the Garden umbrella). You could enter every day, and with auto-fill, I did just that for the next few weeks.
I won a pair of Rangers tickets – and needed to return a notarized form via fax before TWC would overnight the ducats to me. The seats were good, but…
