How This All Started
Back in 2011, @afturner and I were invited to an Army vs Navy as a guest of a military member. Because of that, we had no seats and the game was 100% packed tight. We ended up sitting on the player's heated seats on the sideline for the entire time which was simultaneously very cool and anxiety inducing.
You'll have to excuse me, because I do not follow football at all and really had no idea what was going on most of the time. So I don't really know the terminology. However, each time that the players would return to the benches, Amanda and I would end up in the middle of the huddle with the coach and the players crowding around us yelling out plays. Then the TV cameras would come in and I must have looked like a deer in headlights there in the background.
Little did we know, but President Obama was about to show up to the game and sit right behind where I was positioned. All of a sudden, secret service started to pour in and surrounded us. The President walked across the field and shook hands and took pictures with various service members while I sat there on the side of the field trying to look like I somehow belonged there. (Also freezing my butt off!)
Obama sat down about 20 feet behind me up in the bleachers while secret service men lined up standing about 8 feet behind me in a row. They had the stereotypical glasses and earpieces that you see in the movies, and kept doing that thing where they put their hand up by their ear and talk, and then go back to standing up straight and putting their hands together.
@afturner and I were laughing and trying to take pictures of him while pretending to do selfies such as the following image.
There were so many officers surrounding the President that I had a hard time getting a photo of him. Also I didn't want to get approached by a secret service member, so I tried to keep it cool. Finally I managed to get this next photo when a gap in the officers appeared.
We kept snapping off photos, and I was probably being that annoying guy, but how often do you get such an opportunity? At any rate finally we got over the excitement and started trying to follow the actual game. It was pretty cool because at one point the Navy Leap Frogs parachuted in which was cool to watch.
In the above video, you can See Obama sitting in the bleachers behind me (his head is turned away). You can use the photo above the video to reference his position.
A Misunderstanding
After the game ended, we met up with my sister-in-law, who was a photographer for the Leap Frogs at the time. I can't remember exactly what it was, but she urgently needed to either get something, or drop something off with another service member somewhere under the building.
As everyone was crowding out of the stadium, we got lost walking through a maze of passages trying to find the room where she needed to do her thing. Eventually we accidentally ended up in the room where the President's motorcade was parked and were spotted by a group of secret service men.
We turned around and continued our search around the facility, but kept accidentally ending up in some private area that was designated for Obama and his people. At one point we ended up in a meeting room, another point we ended up in a snack room. Then we went into a room where there was a single Presidential limo all on its own. We were starting to freak out, because we were just trying to find a particular guy and kept accidentally looking super suspicious!
Stopped in our Tracks
Of course we knew it would eventually happen, but finally, two secret service men seemingly popped out of nowhere in front of us, and one guy behind us. They started to question us but luckily my sis-in-law was able to explain what we were doing. It also helped that she was in uniform. We weren't doing anything weird, but I can see what it must have looked like!
After realizing what was going on, I overheard one of the service men radio someone and tell them that everything was ok. Apparently they had been monitoring us for about 30 minutes.
Finally we managed to find the person that we were looking for and everything was sorted out. It turned out that he was actually in the bigger room where the motorcade was located so we walked around for nothing.
Well, perhaps not completely for nothing. I now have this story, and the memory of it. We had a great laugh and have been talking about it for years now. I still don't know anything about football, but at least I got a bit of an adventure.
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