When I saw this I immediately assumed the line was for concert tickets:
But it was a basketball game they were so excited about! Georgetown, with their great center Alonzo Mourning, was coming to play Rice just before Christmas break. The Owls had started the season well and the crowd was eager to see their first big challenge:
We lost 47-53 (!) but that must have been an extremely interesting game.
Bonus:
As I recall, Mourning was injured and didn’t even play—but I think Mutombo did. I vaguely remember a news report talking about how coaches were using brooms to swat Brent Scott’s shots to get him used to Georgetown’s shot blockers.
The next Thresher was more than a month later — Jan. 11 — during which time the men’s basketball team went 2-6 to fall to 5-7. The only mention of the Georgetown game was a photo in which Brent Scott trying to score looked like a small fellow surrounded by giants.
(page 9: https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/67983/thr19901207.pdf?sequence=1)
Will the excitement of college basketball, and big games played before large crowds ever return to the Rice campus? It used to be so much fun to watch the Owl men compete with the giants at Autry Court, now the Tudor. If a private, selective university like Villanova, in a similar metropolitan city as Houston (Philadelphia), with an endowment about one-tenth the amount of Rice, can recruit top players across America and compete for national championships in basketball (and track and field), WHY CAN’T RICE?
Ah … the Jungle Gym. It earned that nickname when there was no air conditioning in the gym and officials frequently had to stop action so someone could mop the sweat off the court.
Hi Melissa – If I am remembering right, I believe the woman on the right in the first picture is my fellow class of 1991 Hanszenite Mary Bittle Teer (now Koenick). The man in the middle looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place his name. For what it’s worth, I still own (and wear) that same sweatshirt he’s wearing.