I never cease to amazed at how fans at various sporting events clamor to grab t-shirts, mini footballs, baseballs and other trinkets tossed into the stands during breaks in the action. I’ve long suspected that if a cute cheerleader with a bucket of dead rotting fish started throwing them into the stands, fans would fall all over themselves to grab one.
Several years ago, at a Nebraska football game, the Husker promotional team created a t-shirt shooting device that worked like an old style Gatlin gun, spewing hundreds of shirts in rapid sequence into the stands at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln. And of course, fans went wild to grab one of the t-shirts that probably didn’t fit them anyway.
I thought I recalled seeing a story that the device had been modified so it could shoot Runzas, a statewide sandwich thing, into the crowds. Runzas are sold virtually exclusively in Nebraska and are described as “a type of baked bread pocket, similar to a pasty or a bierock, traditionally filled with ground beef, cabbage, and onions.” (They’re really good, if you’ve never easten one.) Although I know there are hot dog cannons in use around the country, I could not find confirmation that Runzas had been shot into the crowd at Nebraska games. In my humble opinion, that would be a great promotion.
Which brings me to other in-game promotions, most notably the infamous “kiss cam” that ruined the lives of two people at a recent Coldplay concert and has been the topic of endless memes and posts on the internet. If you hadn’t heard about it, a married top executive of a large company and his secret girlfriend, the company’s Human Resources Director, were caught cuddling when a kiss-cam zoomed in on them.
It reminded me of an incident I heard about many years ago of a somewhat similar nature.
I was working my way through college on the night desk at United Press International and worked with a single young woman who had become involved with the married well-known assistant sports director of the Albuquerque Journal. He was notorious for being a skirt chaser and she had apparently made it know that she was available to have her skirt chased.
One weekend, under the guise of reporting at some sporting event, they managed to sneak away to a Dallas Cowboys football game. As I recall, the game was rather lopsided (in those days, the Cowboys won a lot), and the crowd began thinning out early.
As the camera roamed around showing the rapidly emptying stands, it spotted a couple high up in the cheap seats with no one else around. They were practicing PDA (public display of affection), when the camera zoomed in for a closeup. There was no doubt of the couple’s identity and since the Cowboys were followed widely in Albuquerque, many people who knew the assistant sports editor immediately gasped, then chuckled when they saw the two lovebirds.
I didn’t see the incident live when it happened because I was working and we didn’t have a TV in our office. But several colleagues in the building came to my office and related what they had seen and somehow managed to capture a video clip or photo of it. Because the television feed wasn’t being shown inside the stadium, the couple didn’t know they had been “caught” until they returned to Albuquerque.
Not unexpectedly, the young woman soon took an assignment with UPI in another state far away and the assistant sports editor’s wife filed for divorce.
With security cameras and smart phones everywhere these days, it’s good to remember that if you do something you shouldn’t be doing, it will likely end up soon on the internet or on TV.
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