By JOE HOLTZAPFEL
Maybe one of the funniest things I ever saw at the Field House might have been this.
Not sure who they were playing, but the Marshall coach at the time was the great Ellis Johnson. During the first half, Coach Johnson and the refs were not seeing eye to eye on some of the calls and Coach Johnson left the floor at half, and was definitely not a happy camper.
When Marshall came out in the second half, sitting beside Coach Johnson at the bench was a dog. The dog was wearing a pair of glasses. The place went nuts and Coach Johnson was then assessed a technical.
This was one of those things that you just never forget.
When the Marshall team started to recruit a little better and the team record started to improve, seats started to get hard to come by and me and my friend couldn’t get a seat when we went to the games. I told him we needed to get a season ticket next year so we would have a deceit seat for all the games.
So the next year, we made a trip up to Gullickson Hall before the season started. We went to the ticket office and tried to apply for a season ticket. The lady told us we had to be an alumni to get to apply that early.
Well, we kind of fibbed a bit and told her we were members of the Marshall alumni. She then very graciously gave us an application and told us how to fill them out so my friend and I would get tickets together. She asked us if we members of the Big Green Club and my friend asked where to we put that on the application and she showed us.
And when our tickets arrived, we were put in section 8 of the Field House. Anyone who remembers the seating arrangement there knows these were very good seats.
The next year was a banner year for The Herd with players like Mike Dantoni, Russell Lee, Billy James, Tyrone Collins and Randy Noll. The Herd made noise heard around the nation.
In the MMI, the Herd beat a nationally-ranked St John’s team and moved into the top twenty in the nation.
One game in particular I remember, was the Ohio University game when both teams were in the top twenty and maybe undefeated. When we arrived at the game we could have made a mint by selling our ticket as there were a thousand people outside the Field House looking for tickets to this sold out game.
Needless to say there wasn’t any amount of money could buy my ticket.
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