The most memorable and funniest time I ever had working anywhere, was the night the Pistons won the world championship. I drove to work that day with one of my best friends named Eric Herzog. On the way into work we just knew that tonight was the night that the Pistons were gonna take it home. Eric called into 97.1 and talked to Greg and Michelle. They were asking people where the party was gonna be at if the Pistons won. Eric told them the party was gonna be at Hoops, which is a bar right down the street from the Palace. Hoops is where a lot of the Palace employees and players would go after games. While Eric was explaing why Hoops was so cool he said jokingly that Rick Mahorn was alwayw up there cheating on his wife. We laughed it off and went into work
Once we got into work we told our boss about Eric being on the radio. He kind of got mad because apparently the word had gotten around about the Rick Mahorn comment. The Palce was just as bad as high school when it came to gossiping, and since Mahorn was a fixture at the Palace people didn't find it funny. We kept our mouths closed for the rest of the day about that situation.
When the game finally started around 9:30 Eric, my boss, and I decided we should start drinking in between work. We concocted this drink with Monster Energy drink and vodka, it was great. The energy drink helped us work faster so we could get everything done before the 2nd half started.
Eric and I would always watch the 2nd half of games with the bus driver for the visiting team. He was this old guy who knew a lot about bball but hated the Pistons. We found this secret tv out in the loading dock that only the three of us knew about. Well during the finals more and more people found out about it and started joining us. There was this guy who drove for David Stern, some security people, and even Kid Rock got down on the action when he was going for a smoke break. When the 4th quarter hit Eric and I knew there was only one place we had to go. We watched the entire 4th quarter cheering on every play with our new friends(which our group turned into about 15- 20 people). When the final buzzer sounded I had never heard that place so loud, it was pandamoneum.
In our warehouse we had champaign set aside for the players to drink. We tried bringing it to the players' locker room but were denied entry. After this our general manager came down and told us that if the players didn't want it that we could drink the champaign. Now this was great. Sitting down in our warehouse enjoying the celebration with champaign and getting paid for it. There were alot of people who requested the night off so they could watch the game. But there was no way I was going to be in any other buildning that night than the Palace.
