Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Cassell Coliseum can't flush with a full house
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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@roanoke.com
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Dan Casey
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A bit of historical research into the Stadium of Olympia yields few clues as to how its 20,000 or so Greek spectators answered the call of nature.
But if they did it behind bushes and large boulders back in the fifth century B.C. it's fair to say that scores of fans at Cassell Coliseum got a little lesson in ancient history Saturday night.
It was a cold lesson, for sure -- delivered behind trash containers, bushes, and in between twin outdoor electrical transformers, with snow flurries falling. Before, during and after one of the best basketball games ever played in Blacksburg.
In case you just emerged from a weekend coma, the Maryland Terrapins edged the Hokies 104-100 in a double-overtime squeaker.
People there (like this Maryland alum) will remember that game for years.
Not least among those memories will be the coliseum's absolute lack of water, which is unimportant except as it relates to rest rooms, every one of which was shuttered.
You got that right.
There were 10,000 people and no place at all inside Cassell Coliseum to pee.
To divine how such events could transpire, I called Virginia Tech on Monday.
What the heck happened? I asked spokesman Mark Owczarski.
You may have heard it was a water main break. But you may not have heard the whole story.
The game was scheduled for 4 p.m., and throughout Saturday morning, the preparations flowed smoothly.
Then about 1:10 p.m. a catering van making a delivery to a pregame party in Cassell's Bowman Room hit a fire plug.
Crews shut off the water and repaired the spraying hydrant.
When they turned on the water about an hour later, it broke a water main on the other side of the coliseum, at the intersection of Spring and Washington, Owczarski said.
They fixed that break and turned on the water once again only to spring another leak in a different place outside Cassell about 5:30 p.m.
If that sounds like a comedy of errors, you might be onto something. Unless you were there later, squeezing your legs tightly and wishing you'd had the foresight to wear adult diapers.
Tech gave serious consideration to canceling the game or playing it with no fans, Owczarski told me. But they got an OK to proceed, sans bathrooms, provided facilities in nearby buildings were available.
I and my 11-year-old son, Zach, and some friends were blissfully unaware of those inconvenient contingencies as we waited through the delay in a Blacksburg sports bar.
Where, alas, I drank about four Diet Cokes and three glasses of water.
Which turned out to be a horrendously bad strategy, considering.
We found out about the closed bathrooms only after we got into Cassell with nearly bursting bladders.
Desperate for relief, Zach and I fled the coliseum and found a slowly moving line in an adjacent building, with at least 500 other men and women, all in dire need of the eight or so available johns.
Somehow, we made it back before the game started.
"Zach, we're not getting anything to drink for this whole game," I admonished.
About halfway through the second half, he started talking about nature's call once again.
"There is no way in the world I'm leaving this game before it's over," I told him.
The poor kid nearly died when regulation play ended and the score was tied.
"Hang on, buddy. The overtime's just five minutes," I counseled.
And then the first overtime ended and the game was still tied.
I can't tell you what we did between those two overtime periods because I'm not sure if there's a statute of limitations for public urination.
But it's safe to say we weren't the only ones of our gender with the idea.
Behind every bush, and in every shadow surrounding Cassell, it seemed, you could find furtive and shivering men, surrounded by small clouds of steam, as they briefly studied their feet before dashing back inside.
Sympathetic cops arrested not one of them, according to the university's crime log.
What a game.
They will call it the Bursting Bladder Classic.
Ladies, you have our sympathies.
