Travel notes from an epic trip to the Battle in Seattle

When I first saw the name of this event, I read it as Battle for Seattle, so when Kentucky beat Gonzaga, I wondered how the logistics would work. Did that mean we’d somehow pick up Seattle and move it to Kentucky or would it be like a Puerto Rico situation where we own it from afar? I’m sure Mitch and Andy would have figured it out, but considering it was the Battle in Seattle, it is a moot point.

In, for, around, it didn’t matter. Kentucky won what could have been the most exciting neutral site regular season game in school history and being there was incredible. I covered the game for KSR in what was my first non-Rupp Arena media experience and only my second time in Seattle.

In short, I’ve got notes.

Seattle lived up to both the hype and stereotype

When I got off the airplane and walked through the terminal, a wheelchair passed me. That might not sound odd, but the thing is, it was just a wheelchair. No one was in it and no one was pushing it. The wheelchair was driving itself, returning to its autonomous driving wheelchair lair after dropping off a passenger at a gate. I’ve seen self-driving cars in Phoenix, but witnessing this little black chair roll by on its own weirded me out and served as the launching point to a unique 48 hours in Seattle.

I stayed in the Belltown neighborhood, just outside of downtown and walkable (ish) to Climate Pledge Arena. I hope some Kentuckians who made the trip and spent time in this area braced for some culture shock. Every color of hair imaginable could be seen in Belltown as locals lingered around independent coffee shops and dive bars, oftentimes with a dog and marijuana cigarette.

Seattle is known for its rain and the weather lived up to the stereotype this weekend. Honestly, it was less of a rain shower the way you think of it in Kentucky but more of a perpetual mist that never went away. I’m not sure I ever truly saw the sun and between the wetness and the wind, it felt much colder than the 50 degrees it showed on my phone.

Despite these gloomy markers, Seattle is also beautiful. The local art scene is vibrant and the skyline viewed from the top of any tall building is as scenic and iconic as any in the country. While I didn’t make the trek up the infamous Space Needle, I did take some time for Seattle’s other major tourist attraction.

Blue got in at Pike Place Market Saturday afternoon

If you’re unfamiliar with Pike Place Market, it’s the spot where they sling fish. When the Kentucky basketball team visited on Friday, Kerr Kriisa earned the privilege of wearing the apron and catching the 20-pound fish heaved at him from 20 feet away. Kerr had one turnover this weekend but it wasn’t on that play. Kerr caught the slimy creature like a pro.

Kerr Kriisa is enjoying his time in Seattle at the seafood market. 🤣

📸 @KentuckyMBB pic.twitter.com/28a2VE5usn

— Casey (@BleedBlueCasey) December 7, 2024

While I didn’t beg or pay the fish shop to let me follow in the footsteps of Kerr, I did walk around Pike Place Market for a while. It is a maze of trinket tables, seafood diners, art galleries, Christmas carollers, street performers, and a Starbucks. Guess which one drew the biggest crowd? Yep, the coffee.

To be fair, it is the original Starbucks, so if coffee is your thing, this location is likely your Mecca. Still, the fascination around the small shop required ropes and security which was too much for me to partake.

The other prominent feature of this Seattle tourist center was Kentucky fans. It wasn’t a full-blown Big Blue Nation takeover as you see in Nashville for the SEC Tournament, but I bumped into someone wearing a Wildcat beanie around every corner within the jam-packed shopping corridors.

It was a good indication Kentucky fans would have a good showing that night at Climate Pledge Arena.

I went to the wrong restaurant twice in one day

Unlike Jack Pilgrim and Steven Peake’s road trip to Clemson, I didn’t run into any poop-stained walls, but I had my fair share of mishaps. The one most worthy of a forehead smack was when I went to the wrong restaurant twice on the same day. Not to brag, but it was a feat so embarrassing, it is also most impressive.

It started Saturday morning when I ordered food from a hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Biscuit Bitch, which really embraced the Seattle neighborhood’s vibe. When I say hole-in-the-wall, I literally mean a sole window in the facade of a building was the only place where food was exchanged. You had to order online and you got a text when your meal was ready for pickup. Thankfully, it was located just outside my hotel so, perfect! So I thought.

When I went to pick up my biscuit and gravy to give me a taste of the South in the Pacific Northwest, they didn’t have my order. It turns out that I accidentally placed my online order at their second location which was a quarter-mile away.

Just in case you were wondering, a quarter mile is much farther than you think at 8 a.m. in the cold, dark, rain.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, I made the same mistake when I tried to meet up with the KSR radio crew at a sports bar named Buckley’s. As I roamed through a restaurant packed with Kentucky fans, I couldn’t find Drew and company anywhere. I finally broke down and asked a bouncer where the radio show was and he told me it was at their other location, about a half mile away.

I’m not sure who Seattle thinks it is having more than one restaurant with multiple locations within a half-mile of each other, but I didn’t appreciate it. Then again, it is the home of Starbucks where there are sometimes locations across the street from each other so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

When I arrived at the correct Buckley’s there was a line of blue out the door. Even though the doorman didn’t believe me when I said I was with Kentucky Sports Radio, he let me in any way. It was a good thing the one person who wasn’t in that building was the fire marshall based on the mass of humanity inside the bar.

I made my way up to the show where I saw Mario, introduced myself since we’d never met, and told him I write for the website. His response: “What website?”

I took my loss, squeezed myself out of the bar, and trudged to the arena.

An arena pledged to the climate

If Pike Place Market was a maze, Climate Pledge Arena was a labyrinth. At baseline, I have zero sense of direction so navigating the lower-level tunnels and catwalk sky bridges was nearly impossible. Escalators, elevators, and stairwells, all of which never lined up exactly made every trip from the rafters to the floor (a walk I had to make several times) an adventure. It was as if the building’s architect was MC Escher.

To make matters more complicated, because it is a professional sports arena, it was packed with VIP lounges around every corner. That meant hoards of people who may or may not have fully known where they were going either, were also in the tunnels and skyboxes meandering through the building.

Aside from the lack of signage and the large volume of lost humans, the overall aesthetic of the arena was gorgeous. If this is Seattle’s audition to get an NBA team, it fits the bill and then some. That being said, the same Kentuckian who might be culture-shocked with the sights around Belltown probably didn’t appreciate the paper straws and reusable water bottles throughout Climate Pledge Arena. However, being the most climate-conscious sports arena in America is also a heck of a superlative, so kudos to the commitment.

To drive the green theme home, the arena has nature-centric decor. I exited through “the forest” which was a mural of dense tropical foliage on every wall. Say what you will, but it was prettier than concrete.

The crowd was all over the place

Big Blue Nation isn’t used to being outnumbered at neutral sites, but a game in Seattle against Gonzaga was the exception. There were about 80 percent Gonzaga fans versus 20 percent Kentucky fans, but those 20 percent were loud.

In the second half, when the “Go Big Blue” chants reverberated through the environmentally safe halls of Climate Pledge Arena during a timeout, the DJ intentionally turned up the music to drown the Kentucky fans out. That plan would backfire during the next break when he played Mony Mony, a song Gonzaga must use at home games as well but instead of “Hey! Let’s go GU!” Kentucky fans ensured that “Hey! Let’s go, Big Blue!” could be heard through the TV.

Between West Coast-based Kentuckians and Bluegrass dwellers with a knack for travel, Seattle lured a wide range of Kentucky basketball fans. I saw young men in Pope hats, mature women in Wildcat sweaters, and everything in between.

However, I do have to call out the most perplexing couple I saw in the stands. There was a man in a UK pullover sitting with a woman wearing a sweatshirt featuring the words, “I hope both teams lose.” The Venn diagram of college basketball fans who hate both Kentucky and Gonzaga is so small it is almost nonexistent, so my guess is that this was her, “I’m being dragged to a live sporting event and I hate all sports” protest shirt, but the oddity of it has been living in my head rent free the last few days. At least her shirt was blue, I’ll give her that.

Finally, hats off to Gonzaga fans who were the perfect combination of passionate and polite. They didn’t try to start a fight at every timeout like UConn fans. They didn’t shout obscenities like Tennessee fans. And they didn’t do beer bongs of Crown Royal in the parking lot like Louisville fans. They were just intently cheering for their team and that was it. Well, one guy dressed as a gorilla and pleaded for the Supersonics to return to Seattle with a Hello Kitty sign, but what fanbase doesn’t have one of those? Combined with the dramatic game, it made for an ideal college basketball atmosphere.

A little behind-the-scenes media stuff

I’m punctual to a fault. If a party starts at 8:00, I’m there at 7:55 uncomfortably hanging out in my car for five minutes and then wondering why I’m the first one to arrive. The same thing happened as I waited for the press doors to open two hours before tipoff. As the clock struck 5 p.m. Pacific time, I was the first media member through the doors.

Also on brand for me, I immediately got lost, but eventually, I followed enough people who worked there to make my way down to the floor where I hovered around the Kentucky bench on the lookout for Lamont Butler news. An awkward eye-catching exchange with a Kentucky staff member prompted me to ask if Lamont was playing tonight but I only got, “We’re still trying to figure that out.”

When Butler emerged from the locker room wearing sweats, I tweeted out the picture of him that confirmed he wasn’t playing. Shortly after, my phone felt like an electric razor stuck in the on position. Matt Jones reposted my Butler tweet along with a shoutout to follow me and several hundred of you took him up on it. Feel free to jump on the train too, if you’d like. My puns will make you roll your eyes with regularity.

As for our in-game seats themselves, they may as well have been in the Goodyear blimp. On the postgame radio show, Drew called them the worst media seats he’s ever had, but I wasn’t complaining. I was impressed with Climate Pledge Arena’s Wicked-esque ability to defy gravity, suspending a media bridge over the court like a trapeze. Do you want to cover Seattle sports for a living? Acrophobics need not apply. Acrobats, however, are welcome.

Sitting beside Mario from the radio show, to whom I apologized for accosting at the bar, was great. His excitement made it difficult to maintain journalistic stoicism but to be fair, he wasn’t the only one marking out from the press catwalk. I don’t think Andy Katz minded.

I wrote my post-game articles from the TV broadcast desk because why not? After a short time, it became a little challenging to concentrate because a hoard of people wearing “Conversion Crew” shirts worked on transforming the basketball court back into a hockey rink for the Seattle Kraken’s NHL game the following day and blasted club music while doing so. It was the most unique writing distraction I’ve ever had.

Oh yeah, there was a game too

Ah yes, the game. The reason tens of thousands of people navigated airplanes, road trips, autonomous wheelchairs, graffiti-laden alleyways, fish markets, and unnecessarily close together restaurants with the same name to all be in the same Earth-friendly arena.

By now, you’ve already heard all of the records it broke, namely matching the largest halftime deficit win in school history.

Kentucky’s dramatic 90-89 overtime win was the fancy cream on top of a Starbucks latte that made the long wait worth it. Several dozen fans didn’t even want to leave. They all wanted to hang around, soaking up the remnants of what was one of the best regular-season game atmospheres they might ever experience.

And of course, Mark Pope noticed. After his press duties, he went up into the stands to greet fans, take pictures, and give hugs and high-fives to everyone he could. Hashtag, he gets it.

Taylor Swift was playing an Eras Tour concert in nearby Vancouver which meant two of the most rabid fan bases in existence, Swifties and Big Blue Nation, descended upon Seattle on the same weekend. Credit to the city, it handled everyone well. Kentucky doesn’t make many trips to the Pacific Northwest, but next time they do, I encourage you to make it happen. Unlike the town’s overpriced coffee, the trip was well worth it.