Three years ago to this very date Illinois played Xavier at the U.S. Bank Arena. We were fortunate to watch the game with our friends Eric
Dettinger, his now wife Heidi and his brother Mike.
(Pictured from left to right: Mike Dettinger, Brian McCormick, Susan McCormick, Matt McCormick, and Eric Dettinger.) We had good seats – about 12 rows from the floor near one of the baselines – and were looking forward to watching the game.
Mike Dunn, Xavier’s director of sports marketing, came up to us with about five minutes before the game started. Mike said: “Matt, do you guys want to sit on press row?” I said “hell yeah!” Brian, as usual, was running late and not yet there. I, as usual, was getting slightly anxious waiting on him and wanted to get to the sweet seats ASAP. Mike said we should be seated at least one minute to tip. Brian waltzed in at
1:03 to go. I told him about the seats. He smiled – like he expected this to happen – and only said “cool.”
All five of us walked down to the seats behind press row. We were almost late getting to our seats because Brian had to stop and say hello to the 43 people he knew. It reminded me of “
Goodfella’s” where Ray
Liotta (as Henry Hill) walked into the night club and had to say “hi” or “
salut” to everyone and they responded in kind. It was surreal, for it seemed like the game was waiting on Brian. Right when we got to our seats the National Anthem started. We were next to
XU's beat reporter, Dustin Dow from The Enquirer, various radio guys, and the
WLW play by play team was literally feet away.
The last thing Mike Dunn said was “be cool about the beer, the food, and cheering. Don’t yell at the refs. Don’t stand up and try to be ‘low profile’.” Sorry, Mike we did not listen to
any of your advice! At the first time out, Brian suddenly had one of the beer guys come down near the floor. He bought ten beers. As he was passing out the beers, he got a couple of food guys to come down to the floor. Brian bought multiple orders of nachos, pretzels, and pop corn. In Brian’s logic, these seats deserved a little splurging and he had “all the basic food groups covered.” Soon, we were yelling at the terrible refs, making fun of Illinois’ players, and cheering for Xavier. We had multiple beers and had a blast. Oh yeah, Xavier won 65-59.
Brian always got the greatest seats, got into exclusive places that nobody even
dreamed of trying to get into, and loved being on the “VIP” list. Often, we would just get out of his way and watch in wonder at how he pulled it off.
Knowing Brian, my guess is he worked over a “scalper” pretty hard to get some “great seats down low” in Heaven.
Miss you Brian!
