Mini-Review: Assembly Hall

As mentioned in the last post, I went down to IU yesterday to see a basketball game. I must say that I was pretty impressed with Assembly Hall, although there were a few quirks about the place. Rather than writing out a full review, I’ll list some points out in bullets:

• The pep band seemed to get into the game a bit later (read: 30 minutes) than what I was used to with the Boiler Brass. It’s not a big issue (especially since they were heavily involved during the game), but it was a bit noticeable to me.
• I was surprised about the relative lack of lighting in the arena. On TV, it seems to be a well-lit place, but that apparently just applies to the area immediately surrounding the court. At my seats (row 29), I felt like I was in a half-lit theater. It was certainly enough to see by and perform all necessary tasks (including reviewing the program), but it was also the darkest arena I’ve ever been in.
• The height of the arena was pretty impressive. I’m glad we didn’t get tickets up in the upper balcony, as we would have been hard-pressed to see details other than through binoculars. I think it’s definitely worth $5, though, if you haven’t seen a game there before and are in the area during the rest of the season.
  At the same time, though, I’m not sure that I would choose that as a design. I may be biased, but I’m still impressed with the seating available in Mackey. None of the seats are blocked by any overhangs, and even at the very top you’re still not all that far away.
• Like most Big Ten basketball arenas, Assembly Hall is known for its passionate fans. I was thus not surprised to experience the craziness in the arena, especially at halftime after a half-court 3-point shot went in hitting nothing but the net. In addition, IU kept it close during the entire game, which gave the fans plenty of times to stand up and cheer on their team. The referees were also a bit uneven in their officiating during the second half, which gave the fans plenty of chances to yell at the referees. Let’s just say that the people around me had some choice words for them… yes, even the old folks. =)
• As part of the introduction video, the video board played a short excerpt from Caddyshack which featured Bill Murray’s character being told to get rid of the gophers. It was slightly inappropriate, but… it worked well for the day.
• Speaking of inappropriate things, I am a bit surprised that the band is allowed to play “Rock and Roll Part 2″ (aka the “Hey, Go <insert name of team here>” song) with most of the people in the arena (students and alumni alike) saying “Hey, you suck!” How is this acceptable when the Purdue bands were forbidden to play the song after students would insert “IU sucks!” at certain parts of the song?
• A free Whiteout t-shirt! Not sure what I’ll do with it, especially with the IU logo on the front, but it’s a free t-shirt nonetheless.

All in all, it was an enjoyable game to watch, even if I didn’t really have an interest in either team there. Minnesota deserved the 67-63 win in my opinion, but they came awfully close to giving it up, even with the foul discrepancies in the second half.

Thoughts on The General

I had been looking forward to this past Thursday for most of the week. Not only was it going to feature Purdue playing at Minnesota in a key Big 10 matchup, it was going to feature Bob Knight in a color commentary role.

Growing up here in Indiana, I definitely knew about Bob Knight. My mom graduated from Indiana and so I grew up a big fan of the Hoosiers. Obviously things changed later in life, but for most of my years I followed the exploits of Knight up until his firing from the university in September 2000. Later when he was coaching at Texas Tech, I saw a few of his games, but never really paid much attention (other than the game in which he broke Dean Smith’s victory record.)

I knew that I was never going to go to IU (who’s really ever heard of their CS program before?), but I still followed the program a lot up until my senior year when I decided to go to Purdue. After that point, I converted over and soon became a die-hard Boilermaker, watching pretty much all of the basketball games during my four years there–which covered the transition period from Knight’s old rival Gene Keady to the current coach Matt Painter.

This all led into Thursday night and the basketball game. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Bob Knight was a decent color commentator. He was able to give a lot of flavor to the game both from his experience at the arena and from his coaching career. After one traveling call, he stood up, took off his microphone, made the traveling motion to Donnie Gray, and bowed. He also was surprisingly pretty balanced in his coverage of Purdue, although his coverage was a bit incomplete at times. (He apparently didn’t realize that Chris Kramer has started most all of his games while at Purdue and has just recently been coming off the bench due to his ankle injuries). About the only complaint I have came in the last few minutes when he started mixing up the two teams when talking strategy, but that was a minor flaw.

The reason that I decided to write this post was in conjunction with a trip I’m making tomorrow. My brother goes to Indiana, and tomorrow I’m going down with my family to visit him and see my first game in Assembly Hall. I’m sure it’s some sort of heresy to watch a game there not involving Purdue, and definitely more of one to actually root for them. I’m going to try avoiding the latter one, though, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens if the old people around me all choose to get involved in the game. We’ll see what happens… I’ll try to post up a report about the game and my feelings on the arena tomorrow.