When the Walt Disney Company bought ABC and it's various other entities, it also aquired ESPN. This opened the door to massive amounts of professional sports programing, events, tournaments and you name it, we now do it. Several years ago when Disney 'Uppity Ups' decided to build the Wide World of Sports complex, Most of us said "Huh?" "Why?" and "What a waste of space and money." I have to officailly say that, "I was wrong and they were right." There, I have now eaten crow and addmitted i was wrong. :)
The sports complex is one busy place. It mostly has tournaments that only those involved would be interested in seeing, but the people involved in scheduling events there keep it buzzing. The the most popular event has to be the Atlanta Braves spring training. After that would be the Tampa Bay Bucs training camp. From what I was told, the Bucs facility in Tampa was in really bad shape a few years ago. In fact, the newspapers said that when a player got up in the morning to brush his teeth and found a frog on his tooth brush, the officials knew they had to do something. IT'S DISNEY TO THE RESCUE ! They were invited to the sports complex for training camp while thier Tampa facility was being overhauled. Of course the rest of the league gave them grief. "Ah, your training camp is at Disney World. They're going to make you soft." Some one correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that year they won the super bowl. Talk about eating crow. Needless to say, Disney hosts the Bucs training camp every year now.
Pop Century resort took for ever to complete. Located across the road from the Sports Complex, it was started before Sept.11th. Since the attendence dropped like a rock after the world turned crazy, the construction at the new resort ground to a crawl . . . an extemely slow crawl. They finally finished most of it and it was opened a few years later. EXCEPT for the very last building. they put up the walls, windows and door and shuttered the rest. The people involved in bringing sporting events to Disney property saw an opportunity to turn the weedy construction site into a BMX track and snagged a long standing BMX competition from California.
Most of the tournaments at the complex are leagues people have never hear of. I picked up an extra shift working crowd control for some kind of basket ball tournament. All I know is they where inner-city kids from up north and NCAA people were scouting for thier colleges. The floor of the arena was actually split up into four courts using a heavy curtian-like divider, so they could have a round robin style play offs. A team that had finished playing decided to bring home extra souveniers from the teams on the other side of the curtain and stole ipods, cell phones, ect, from thier backpacks. Needless to say the victims were pissed and chased the thieves out of the complex and into the parking lot were they almost had a riot. The county sheriff's department had to be called in. I guess you can take the kid out of the inner-city, but you can't take the inner-city out of the kid.
The Disney Marathon is huge. I always knew it was a big deal, but i never knew just how big it was until I worked it a few years. I have been told it ia a qualifier for the Boston Marathon. An estimated ten to fifteen thousand people run this thing every year. I picked up a shift at Epcot one year, so we saw them coming and going. . .so to speak. At 7:00am the teeming masses were happy, energetic and talkative as they entered the back gates of Epcot and headed off towards Magic Kingdom. I lost track of how many people were wearing Tinkerbell wings and Minnie or Mickey costumes. But the images of a guy with a scruffy, patchy beard wearing a Minnie dress will be forever burned into my mind. In front of the pack was a few wheel chair participants. Let me tell you, these people were flying. The year i worked it, the lead wheel chair guy was probaly finished and back at his resort sipping Margaritas long before the runners even hit Magic Kingdom.
A few hours later and less than a mile from the end, how ever was a totally different story. I was just behind Spaceship Earth and the park was open to guests as the Marathoners ran passed. I have to say MOST of our day guests understood the concept of 'wait for a break in the runners before crossing the marathon line'. Key word here is most. We did have a few individuals with the 'I paid my $75, I'm going anywhere I damn well please'. It was our job to prevent collitions. Since you can't physically stop someone, we did have some near misses. The sadess thing i saw that day was two different runner fell on the track and had to be taken off by paramedics. They ran all that way and were less that a quarter mile from finishing and their bodies just ran out of steam.
Speaking of running out of steam. . . keep checking back for new updates.
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