Basketballs journal

It's night number two of camping out for tickets for the University of Kentucky's midnight madness,and I'm bored, so I'm writing about it. I'll attempt to explain what that cryptic sentence means, and why I'm telling you this.

Most of you who are reading this probably read and vaguely remember my World Cup journals which were promptly seized by the Crossfire Knights of The Queen's English; who defended the sacred word "football" with an honorable (honourable) valiance normally reserved for the battlefield. Hopefully this time around, I will avoid such pitfalls, although I am most likely seriously underestimating the relentlessness of the trolls here. I simply want to give those interested a look into the fan culture of the most successful and most prominent college basketball programs in the United States.

I won't belabor you with how athletes progress to the premier professional level, but in America, the university level is much like Formula 3, except that the better football and basketball programs are followed as adamantly, if not moreso, than their professional counterparts. And in basketball, the University of Kentucky has more wins than any team in history, and as a byproduct has one of the largest and most dedicated fanbases in the country. At the moment, they are the basketball parallel to Manchester United in that they're loved by many, but hated by more. The fans here expect nothing less than a championship every year, and view anything less as a failure. Which leads me to why, exactly, I'm bothering to tell you what I'm doing right now.

Most of the big basketball schools (Kentucky, Kansas, Duke, North Carolina, and Connecticut are the first to come to mind) open the first practice of the season to the public. Because the governing body of collegiate athletics (NCAA) sets a universal start date for organized practice, these practices take place at midnight on that date. Hence, "midnight madness." At Kentucky, because of the rabid fanbase, this is a huge production, as you can see in this video of last year's practice:



One would expect a hefty ticket price for this event, and you may be shocked to find that admission is completely free. And, as you'd imagine from the most successful program in the country, there would be a huge line for tickets, and you'd be completely correct. In fact, the University had to put a limit on when people could begin getting in line, and they decided three days would be long enough.

So, on Wednesday afternoon, I set out, tent in hand, to stake out a spot to--as one cynical journalist put it--stand in line to stand in line. I wasn't shocked that about 300 tents had already been set up by my brethren, and as of this writing, there are in excess of 600 tents set up around the famed Memorial Coliseum. (Kentuckians love grass, and although Lexington has a population in the hundreds of thousands, there is plenty of grass (pitch) to set up tents) Here's a video from earlier today of just part of the 'madness'

Tickets aren't distributed until Saturday at 07.00, maybe I'll write a little more about it as that approaches if it seems like there's some interest. I might even decide to use one tone next time. I don't know why I'm telling you this, just thought some of you might be interested in a decent read about an interested American sports culture. Oh, and I'm bored for the moment, seeing as it's midnight.