When I was growing up, I had a drawer in the young adult sized desk in my room that was dedicated to ticket stubs. Whether it was the memento from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Home Alone, or my first concert experience – one glorious night with Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine – I would rush home, open that drawer and toss another stub onto the pile. I can still picture the Hornets tickets with Muggsy Bogues or J.R. Reid on them and I still get a little angry thinking about that drawer getting emptied sometime between 1990 and today without allowing me the chance to relive all the terrible and wonderful choices one last time.
Nowadays, we don’t really get that chance. Unless you’re a season ticket holder, your ticket is either a printout with a barcode on it that more than likely has a TicketMaster logo and an ad for Applebee’s on it or even worse – you don’t even get a printout, you just flash your phone at an uniterested ticket taker after hastily chugging one last beer in the parking lot.
Where’s the fun in that?
So when the Roaring Riot team was talking about how to improve our Away Game Experiences, one of the ideas we had was to create an away game ticket for each game, something that you could hold in your hand, throw in a frame along with a great picture, or even just toss in a drawer and forget about for a decade – so we reached out to our friend Joe Bello, who you may know as That Punk Panther, who you may also know as the artist that created the artwork for the Panthers 2017 season tickets, and along with our friends at OrthoCarolina, who are always striving to improve the experience, came up with some custom artwork for each experience.
We’ll give you a sneak preview of the artwork for the Motor City Takeover, but we’ll save the rest of the surprises for later in the season.
These one-of-a-kind pieces of artwork were hand-drawn by Joe, and we think they’re pretty cool. Actually, we think they’re ridiculously awesome – and the only way you can get your hands on one will be to come with us on an Away Game Experience – we won’t be selling them on our store or as art prints; we’ve been striving to turn our Away Game Experiences from just a weekend you have a spectacular time on to a weekend you’ll never forget, and these mementos are just the first part of how we’re stepping up our game.
Come with us – book your favorite experience and see what surprises we have up our sleeve. I can guarantee you, this is going to be our best year yet!
