NBA All-Star Event -Over promised, under delivered
by Anotherupsetmother on 2/14/10Dallas Convention Center - DallasRating: 1 out of 5I bought tickets for me and my 2 grown sons, who live out of state, to attend this event. I wish they would have been 9 & 10 years old, but they were 26 & 27. I wasn't able to take them to any event like this when they were little.
My oldest son was so excited to attend and hoped to have Kobe sign a painting he did of him from back in 1999. We also had tickets to the East and West Practice Game, but the Kobe event was during the same time. My son left the practice game, didn't event get to see the West come out to practice, and waited for over an hour to see Kobe in hopes to get his attention for just a few seconds so he would maybe sign his painting. Kobe didn't even acknowledge him, but slapped his hand with the hundreds of others in line.
The whole thing was a Zoo. It was so crowded and long lines for food and the NBA Store. The advertised "get up close and personal" with your favorite players was a TOTAL JOKE. If you had tickets to the Practice Games, once you went in to that section, you couldn't leave to see the Jam Session activities and then come back in. I waited online to get tickets as SOON as they went on sale at 10 AM. I couldn't even get the lower level seating. I know there were Pre-Sales for this event.
The announcer at the Practice Games was VERY VERY Annoying. The whole thing was very disappointing.
The only bright spot was my son did get Ron Harpers Autograph and got to shake his hand.He also caught a ball thrown by Paul Pierce, which was pretty cool. We had high expectations that were not met. We left early.