Arenagate

Normally when a basketball team makes a bone headed mistake off the court it doesn’t affect me, but when the Charlotte Bobcats jumped the gun on Sunday I was there to capture it and in turn set off a series of events that lead me to here today.

First a little back story, since it opened in 2005 Charlotte Bobcats Arena has been Charlotte Bobcats Arena, and that’s pretty rare in modern arenas and corporate sponsorship. I can only think of four other big arenas that don’t have corporate sponsorship, Madison Square Garden in New York, Rose Garden in Portland, New Orleans Arena in New Orleans and The Palace of Auburn Hills in Detroit, but I digress… Recently it’s been reported that the Bobcats are in talk with Time Warner Cable to rename the arena the Time Warner Cable Arena, quite a mouthful no?

Now this hasn’t been officially announced, but on Sunday at the game against Toronto, on the sideline they had big Time Warner Cable Arena signage on the rotation. Odd I though, as at this point I hadn’t heard anything about it being renamed, so I snapped a picture of it. Later that night I uploaded it to Flickr and thought nothing of it. The next day at work I received two calls in quick succession on my iPhone from a number I didn’t recognise, and when I get calls at work from numbers I don’t know, I kick them straight to voicemail. So I had 2 missed calls and no voicemail, kind of an odd combination. So I called it and it took me through to the secretary of Greg Economou, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Bobcats Sports & Entertainment, another mouthful, but needless to say, he’s high up in the Bobcats organization. Not knowing why he would call me I left my name and number and about an hour later he called me back…

He explained that it was a mistake to display that signage, and in order to defuse a potential hiccup, would I be able to remove my image from Flickr?

Now, before I continue:

OK, now that’s out the way, he proceeded to say that he would repay me for the inconvenience. Whatever I wanted, tickets for a game, be his guest at an event, press pass to get on the floor, whatever… Now I was quite taken aback by this, I mean, if you were offered pretty much an open door to a major arena, what would you do? I did the first thing that came to mind… Tickets to Springsteen in April! I said this as I’d previously mused how extortionate the prices for this event were, and how often to you get to see Springsteen and the E Street Band live nowadays? Consider it done he said, he or one of his associates would call me.

This was on Monday afternoon, now almost 72 hours have passed with no reply and I’m unsure what to do? Like I said, the Bobcats are a client of ours, so I don’t want to be a dick and rock the boat on this. But on the other hand, a man’s word is bond, right?

Another thing that kind of weirded me out was how quickly he found me. The picture hit number 3 on Google for the term “Time Warner Cable Arena”, but even then there no mention of my cell phone on my Flickr account, somehow within 18 hours of posting the picture to Flickr my cell phone was buzzing away. He worked hard to track me down, and it wasn’t even a “are you the Gregor Smith who was at the Bobcats game last night?” He knew it was me, there was no beating around the bush.

So yeah, what should I do? I’ll prolly call his secretary in a few hours, maybe I’ll push the picture back from the privacy of “marked as private” on Flickr and see if it reenters Google quick as before. Many possibilities…