Buffalo Rising | Gus Macker Meets Its Match

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Jun 25th 2006, 7:53pm By queenseyes

Gus Macker is an incredible 3-person (to a team) basketball tournament to watch. There are so many different age levels of players who compete against one another and every game is exciting in its own way. RoBear and I decided to head on over to watch a few of these games earlier this afternoon. The best part about Gus Macker is that it's cool to walk from game to game... watching one for a few minutes before moving onto the next. And every once in a while you get sucked into a game so you watch it until the end.

We were in the midst of our watching our third game when the first drops of rain started to fall. We agreed that it was no big deal and continued to observe the match-up, which was being played right near the front steps of City Hall. The tournament officials called 'play-on', but the rain continued to fall harder and harder until...

The skies opened up and thousands of players and fans ran for cover in every direction. Trees, tents, parking garages and City Hall all became shelters from the storm... a storm that was blowing torrential rain sideways while shooting lighting bolts overhead. We finally decided to duck into City Hall where hundreds of other people were already jockeying for a dry position on the front steps. The place was getting packed like a can of sardines and security guards were allowing folks to head inside, but not past the the main entrance way. So people continued to hang out as the winds and the rain whipped about the city. By this time it looked as if there was no more hope for the tournament and all anyone could really do was wait for the clouds to disperse. A couple young kids decided not to let the rain spoil their day so they headed back onto the court to play in front of the captive audience. That was amusing for a while though the steps continued to get rained on and more and more people clamored to get inside the building. At one point Mayor Byron Brown (dresses in his Sunday finest) ducked into the building and asked security to free up even more of the first floor to the soaked party. That helped a bit as it loosened up the bottleneck that had formed at the front doors. The day was really turning out to be an eventful one despite the lack of ball being played. By that time I think that all hopes had washed away with the rain, so we decided to make a dash for it back to our car. As we ran through the rain we could still see thousands of people waiting out the storm. "Good luck", I thought... as much as I wanted to stick around to catch a few more games I also wanted to get out of soaking wet clothes. I guess it'll have to wait until next year.