After I first read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when I was about 9 years old, I remember opening every Hershey’s chocolate bar from then onward secretly hoping that I’d find a Golden Ticket inside.
Fast forward more than 10 years. Last weekend, I had the grown-up version of a golden ticket handed to me when a fellow journalist asked me to do some freelance work assisting the Associated Press reporter at the Arizona football game.
The golden ticket in this case was an all-access press pass to Autzen Stadium; my trip to the Chocolate Factory was free reign on press row.
The Media Level of the stadium truly is a world of its own. You step into an elevator – not Willy Wonka’s Great Glass one, but an elevator nonetheless – where there’s an attendant (Oompa Loompa?) stationed to push buttons for you. You flash the golden ticket, and he smiles and hits “5”.
The media level is designed to make a journalist feel like royalty.
The hot food bar calls to you from the middle of the concourse, the smell of hearty beef stew and fluffy rice wafting over to your nostrils. This savory fare will be replaced by trays of perfectly iced cupcakes at halftime.
There are little 8-ounce foam cups available for coffee, and a popcorn machine sits off to the side.
The game starts, and I realize immediately why the press box is situated about 75 feet above the rest of the stadium. Watching the game from that high up literally gives you a bird’s eye view of the action.
You can identify the kind of play the Ducks are running, which receiver screwed up his route, and how the defense is spreading to cover the offense.
The marching band’s convoluted formations also make much more sense from the press box than they do from the student section.
Other services offered on press row include the standard play-by-play piped into speakers in the bathroom to ensure that the industrious journalist never misses a moment’s action, and a press box announcer, who calls plays in a clean, crisp manner very different from the emphatic, booming voice of Don Essig, the public-address announcer for the rest of the stadium.
Watching the game from twice the elevation of the student section apparently also means that you’re going to be twice as cold. To keep from freezing in the open-air press box, I come up with the idea of filling two of those little 8-ounce coffee cups with hot water, and using them as hand warmers, periodically refilling them with boiling water throughout the game.
With six minutes left in the fourth quarter, I traipse down to field level with my fellow scribes, and that’s when I really felt like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory.
The energy on the sidelines is absolutely electrifying. Coaches pace up and down, screaming at their players; you can hear the thump of pads hitting pads, and everything suddenly seems a whole lot more fast-paced when you’re five feet away from an army of 6-foot-4-inch, 250-pound gridiron warriors running toward you at full speed to chase down a tiny pigskin. It’s intense, it’s in-your-face, and it’s absolutely exhilarating.
I wipe the awestruck look off my face long enough to invade the Arizona locker room and play the part of the inquisitive journalist. Then I head back up the Great Glass elevator, deliver my notes and leave Nike Kingdom behind.
But I kept the golden ticket. And maybe one day, I’ll get to return to the hallowed halls of the Chocolate [email protected]