Davidson in Detroit Part Two

Thursday we were welcomed to Detroit with a shit ton of snow. It was really only about four inches, but when it was snowing, it was big assed flakes falling sideways. Here's a look at it from the 25th floor of our hotel. It snowed like hell.
It definitely sucked, but since we had no snow in Charlotte this year, I was alright with it. I suspect if I had to shoot video of the snow and feed it back, I would have not been ok with it.
If you're covering a major event, pray to Jesus Byron Goggin is running the Sat truck lot. He knows the deal and it shows the minute you pull in and he directs you where to park. Byron spent years covering sports. He's since seen the light and went out on his own a while back, but Ford Field hired him to deal with us the entire weekend. He rented a sweet generator providing us plenty of power, rented the riser with plenty of room for stations from five markets to do live tv and made sure we all had coffee and hot chocolate at all times. Efforts from Byron made this event an absolute pleasure to cover. It was in no way the enormous pain in the ass covering large sporting events typically are. We even had a fleet of golf carts and drivers to transport us from the sat buggy lot to the media entrance. It whipped ass. The NCAA, NFL and anyone else that deals with media for a large event should immediately hire Byron and all media will be happy. Even sat truck operators.
It's an unspoken rule in tv when on the road, you must drink. It's probably like that in other professions, too. Regardless of what kind of day you had, or how early you have to get up the next morning for live shots, you have beverages with your colleagues. More than one. Luckily the hotel bar had a dynamite staff, a kitchen that stayed open until 12:30 every night and buckets of Budweiser on sale for the duration of the tournament. DK, Welch, Ridley and others from Charlotte and around the country gathered downstairs every night for buckets. Hotel bars are a neat place. People drink with reckless abandon because they only have to make sure they can stumble to the elevator to get home. We kept it fairly calm despite multiple buckets each night.

Thanks to the efforts of David and Ryan, we were able to put make some spectacular television from Detroit. It's amazing what happens when you have three people that don't suck at their jobs and care about what their feeding back to North Carolina. We send nothing but top quality tape back home and I'm damned proud of it. I think when you're with people who care about what they're doing, they're better company, too. We had a blast together.

Parts of Detroit may not be much to look at, but the people are spectacular. The town is full of characters. Good characters who were friendly and sincerely welcomed us everywhere we went. It may have been Syed the barback, Byron the Truck Lot guy, Boy Wonder the golf cart driver or one of the many shuttle bus drivers that transported us to the field from the hotel and back several times a day. I loved the people of Detroit. It's enough to make me want to return for another event. I never would have thought that on the way up. I can sincerely say I mean it now.

Because of those wonderful people, I purchased a Detroit Tigers hat and became a fair weather fan for the summer. The Tigers promptly ran out to an 0-4 start. Sorry guys.