The gang at the Grill Works outside Portal 2 looked like a convention of the loneliest souls in the zip code.
“Sad,” the woman behind the counter sighed. “Itap sad.”
Business was humming, all right. Humming a lullaby. After two-and-a-half hours and two Class 4A girls Final Four semifinals at the Denver Coliseum, she counted serving no more than 50 patrons, tops.
“We’d have lines, normally,” the vendor over her right shoulder chimed in, waving a free hand to indicate a queue that would ordinarily snake to the back of the hall. “We needed something .”
Mounds of popcorn and gallons soda sat relatively unloved and untouched. Meanwhile, Coliseum staffers with disinfectant spray popped in and out of restrooms and bounced from doorknob to doorknob Thursday. Spray and wipe. Spray and wipe. Repeat.
“It was really weird,” Holy Family forward Tyler Whitlock said.
With the cancellation of sporting events rising across the globe because of the coronavirus pandemic, CHSAA went for the compromise approach with its boys and girls basketball championships: Officials capped Thursday crowds for the 4A and 5A girls Final Four at four free passes per player.
Mix in friends and family with staff and personnel, and attendance averaged about 200 patrons per game in a building that seats 9,300 for basketball. Thursday night sessions at the 4A and 5A Final Four typically draw 1,200-1,500 per game under normal conditions.
These, most certainly, were not.
“Last year, it was packed. It was a very different atmosphere,” said Whitlock, whose Tigers advanced to face Mullen on Saturday in the 4A title game with a 38-31 win over Green Mountain. “It felt a lot different since there were so many empty seats and everything. But our crowd showed up, and it was fun.”
For their comparatively small sizes, those in attendance sure as heck didn’t lack for spirit. Especially because swaths of them spent as long as two hours penned into the cavernous concrete ring at court level below the main court, usually the domain of CHSAA staff, players, coaches, administrators and assorted media members.
To alleviate crowd-to-crowd contact, organizers had guests check in at the player and staff entrance on the lower level. After being stamped, they got lined up and told to wait near doors in the lower concrete ring. They weren’t allowed into the arena until the game going on ahead of them had finished and the crowds for that contest had already been cleared out.
“We’ve been here since 5:15,” Jake Campbell, father of Grandview guard Libby Campbell, said as the clock edged toward a quarter to 7. “Of course, we can’t watch (the game going on), so we’ve got to kind of walk around.
“It is what it is. I understand the fear. Personally, I am a little skeptical of the virus, but thatap just me, personally. But I also understand that itap manifested itself into our (thoughts).”
At a table a few yards away, another stranger to the bowels of the building, vendor Dave Kukulski, thought about the big picture. Based in Phoenix, his Kukulski Brothers souvenir company works championship events in six states. He’d logged more than four decades in the souvenir game and 17 different CHSAA basketball tourneys — but he’d never seen anything like Thursday.
“I don’t begrudge CHSAA or anybody else,” Kukulski said. “We don’t really know who had (the virus) and who doesn’t so we’re just hopeful that everything will work out all right. And I’m sure itap going to take a while (before) it starts to level off. I’ve poured my heart and soul into this business, but itap not worth somebody’s life.”
Or somebody’s growling stomach, stuck clear on the other side of the building.
“I heard there was one concession stand open,” Jake Campbell said. “So I asked the young lady here, ‘How do I get there?’ And she said, ‘You can’t.’”
