Every Friday from now until football season, I give this post up to you. You give me your favorite, most memorable, funniest, saddest, whatever story related to UK athletics. It doesn’t have to be any minimum length although the person who send me a 1-sentence post probably will not make it. But I just want the story that you always tell your friends or means the most to you. You don’t have to use your name.
Just send it to me at [email protected]. Today, the struggle on getting season tickets.
Hi,
I wanted to share my UK fan story, and I’ll start with a little background. My name is Rodney Lipps and I teach math at Clay County High School in Manchester, KY. Grew up a huge UK fan and I can still remember asking for UK season tickets for Christmas every year as a kid. Lived and died with UK all through my childhood and when it came time to pick a college, I passed on other schools offering more scholarship money to attend UK. I rationalized that by telling everyone I chose UK because I wanted to go to pharmacy school, but it was really just so I could have access to much better basketball tickets as a student than I could normally get growing up.
Fast forward several years later and I’m married and teaching. I was bored one day during lunch and decided on a whim to fill out a bunch of entries for the UK season ticket lottery. I completed an entry for everyone in our family I could think of, and I made sure to contact ALMOST everyone to let them know if by some miracle they were chosen, to accept the tickets and I would pay them back. I say almost because my father-in-law lives in Corbin and we hadn’t saw him in a few weeks and I never did get around to telling him I entered him in the drawing. Several months later, we’re at our house and he is visiting. I’m in the back room on the computer and I suddenly hear my wife scream, “You did what?”
I ran in to see what was going on and he proceeded to tell me he had received a call from a lady in the UK ticket office congratulating him on his name being drawn for season tickets and wanting his credit card info so they could process his order. Knowing that he or his wife hadn’t entered any drawing, he understandably thought it was a scam and told the woman he wasn’t interested. As he finished his story, I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. He kept apologizing, but I couldn’t be mad because he was the one person I hadn’t told about the entries. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to attend 3 Final Fours (including 2012) and a couple SEC Tournaments, but I still get a sick feeling whenever someone mentions anything about UK season tickets or each time my son or daughter asks to go to watch the Wildcats at Rupp.
Go Big Blue!
-Rodney
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