Monday, April 8, 2013

Final Four



Here's to the nerds.

Especially those that win awards, like tickets to the Final Four. The NCAA, in an effort to promote their student-athlete objective, recently established an award that honors the top GPA earner in each sport. The prize: two tickets to the Final Four men's basketball tournament. As I am almost 5 years removed from my college career, I never had the opportunity to win this newly created award (that, and my freshman fall econ grade quickly put an end to this ever happening to me). However, Andreas Haug, a good friend from Norway and current student at Colorado University, was in fact the winner of this prize, boasting an impressive GPA of 3.98 and a starting member of CU's 2 national skiing championships in the last three years. And as a displaced Norweigan, he needed an energetic friend who had an intimate knowledge (or at least a baseline) of basketball knowledge and enjoyed big time competitions. Guess who he asked...

That's right, this weekend Andreas and I enjoyed all that was Bracketville in ATL. Outdoor concerts from Zac Brown Band to Ludacris, watching a basketball game with a capacity crowd at the Georgia Dome, and lower bowl tickets to two a night of great competition, the trip was all that we could have hoped for. Big time collegiate sports are alive and well.

A lot of the fun for me was the ability to play tour guide to Andreas, as he had never before been to the South, and didn't really follow basketball. I prepped him throughout the week with video clips of everything from Lil' Jon to the ESPN documentary on the Fab Five. By Saturday night he actually knew some of the college basketball greats being honored at halftime (as a newly minted Michigan fan he booed Christian Laettner) and had eaten meals of chicken and waffles to catfish.

I'm really hoping that Andreas keeps his grades up this year, and most importantly that that he needs a tour guide to next year's Final Four in Dallas. Andreas and I were remarking that skiing has allowed us to travel the world and experience so many different things that we would otherwise never be a part of. This certainly fell into that category.

0 comments: