Behind Enemy Lines: My trip to Thompson-Boling

I want to start out with a disclaimer about all the UT fans that may or may not read this blog post and before I start ranting about being ‘behind’ enemy lines.

First off it isn’t all UT fans I hate. I do have a hatred for the color orange. I’ve lived close to the UT boarder my whole life and I have way more UT fans in my part of the state than Louisville fans. They are annoying, fickle and seem to only care about their team when they are playing UK.

With that being said, one of the most influential and best teachers I ever had in high school was a huge UT fan and when they beat Kentucky in a game when Rondo was at Kentucky he played the game in a continuous loop all day during class. It was misery, but he is one of the truest and best, kind hearted UT fans that I know. He is what it means to be a ‘fan’ of a team. Shout out to you Mr. Coburn for showing me that not all UT fans are annoying twerps.

Now onto my trip to Knoxville: First off the city itself is grey and dull and looks like something out of the movie ’28 Days Later’. Yes this was my first time to Knoxville since I was a little kid, so I was surprised that there is even life in the city. I was more worried about running from zombies, turns out that all of the zombies were wearing orange.

We parked in front of Neyland Stadium, and I swear to the good Lord above I thought several times walking the small walk to Thompson-Boling that the place was going to fall in on my car. The place is OLD looking and it was supposedly once a dorm room as well. I think when the guy told me dorm room he meant prison cells though.

Alright now onto the good stuff, my first impressions of Thompson-Boling were that of a circus. I don’t know why. I guess it was just the setup of vendors around the concourse but as soon as you walk in you can see the arena and the floor, there isn’t the tunnels like there is at Rupp Arena and that was unique.

Don’t get me wrong, when I say it was a circus, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a nice arena. It’s a shame that a program that of UT has such a technologically advanced arena. All the seats are stadium seats and are narrow so you are right on top of the action. Just like many arenas’ now a-days there isn’t a bad seat in the house, and I was a good four rows from the main top of the building, row 20 section 317 to be exact. Their student section is set up just like Rupp’s but it’s A LOT smaller.

Four friends and I arrived about an hour and a half before tip-off and there were A LOT of blue in the house. On the way down on 75 we saw a ton of big blue fans, at restaurants after the game. It wasn’t a really LOUD blue crowd like I’ve heard on TV but we had a good group of 30-40 in our section and represented very well.

I was kind of offended, as was my friends that they didn’t even sell out the arena for the UK game, and if they said they did, they lied because there was a ton of empty seats around me and one complete section was empty. Now they could have sold those tickets and the people didn’t show up, but I’m still convinced that some of their older fans sitting high up didn’t know if they were watching the women’s or the men’s team.

Atmosphere wise it got loud in the arena maybe three or four times. At the under 15 time out there was a loud eruption for the fact they were up like seven nothing and then in the second half when UK went on the run it was louder in my apartment on a Friday night than it was in that arena, after that when UT needed a big stop (and never really got it) the crowd got loud.

The amazing thing to me was with about 30 seconds to go people just started filling out the arena. I mean with TERRENCE JONES going to the line late in the game and a chance he would miss both free-throws everyone was leaving. It was amazing. This made me yell ‘Look at them filing out of Thompson-Boling’ which proceeded for me to get into an argument with a few of the fans sitting below me. Not going to get much into what was said partly because I don’t remember but he said something about Calipari which made me say, well at least we will have our coach next year.

Boom. Roasted.

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