It was quite nice, fancy setup at a nice hotel. Filet Mignon and scallops for dinner, there was a silent auction going on with a live auction after dinner. We bid on a few items in the silent auction, but didn't win anything. I thought that I was going to get some glass tickets to a Lighting hockey game, but someone swooped in at the last minute and outbid me.
The whole Magic team was there, and they gave everyone a small basketball (after a nice donation) to get autographs.
After dinner, they kicked off a live auction with some nice stuff up for auction, but that was way out of our budget. One of the items was a trip to Hawaii with the General Manager of the Magic. One of the players and the team's COO got into a bidding war, and the trip ended up going for $18,000 I think.
Rick DeVos, who owns the team (he started Amway and still lives in Michigan I believe) gave a nice speech too.
After dinner and the live auction, they had all sorts of things setup to fill your time and take your money. There was a casino where a lot of the players where playing. An area where you could play video games with a few players, a photo thing, a small basketball court to shoot hoops, and karaoke with Dwight Howard. Each thing cost money to do, with all of the money going to the charity.
I sat down at a poker table with another guy and Tyronn Lue. I lost my $50 really quick, and bought in for another $50 because I knew I could "get it" back. Even though I wasn't going to get any money back, only raffle tickets to win stuff in a drawing at the end of the night. The table eventually filled up, Tyronn is a really good guy, it was fun playing poker with him. I did win all of my money back to, I bought a total of $50,000 in chips, and ended with $219,000, including busting Tyronn in a monster pot. He went home at that point, and I ended up with a whole roll of raffle tickets.
While I was playing poker, Sarah was wandering around getting autographs. She really wanted to get a picture with Patrick Ewing (who is now an assistant coach with the Magic). But, his "handler" told Sarah not to bother him while he was playing blackjack. The other "handlers" (each player had someone to usher them around to make sure that they were where they were supposed to be) told Sarah that they did not like Patrick Ewing's handler very much.
I didn't know what to do with all of my raffle tickets, because by the time I got them, they had started the drawings. We asked a worker if there was still anything to draw on, and it turned out they had forgotten one prize. So, we dropped all of my tickets in there, and they pulled one of mine out. We won a thing where the kids will be able to be on the court before the game with the team for a game next season, and then form a line that all of the players will run through and high-five the kids during the player announcements before the game starts. So that should be really cool for them.
It was pretty fun, it was worth the small donation that we ended up making.
