It's large and square, with slightly slanted sides and four 20-foot high screens covered in thousands of tiny lights. When it's dark, it's just another JumboTron. But when it lights up, and cameras around the Kohl Center start panning the crowd, it's my archenemy.
The JumboTron and its unflattering screens have frightened me since the seventh grade. Before then, I was afraid of mostly normal things—clowns, spiders, seaweed, global warming—and the only thing that had ever prevented me from enjoying life was a crippling fear of ants at age five. But now I live each football game and hockey game in fear that I will be projected for everyone to see. And I'll look like an idiot.
There are four types of people who make it on the JumboTron. First, the cute girls in jerseys, with nicely done hair and a little-too-heavy eye makeup, Bucky Badger tattoos on their cheeks who grab their friends and scream when the camera hits them. The second most featured JumboTron characters are the fat men. They are usually shaking their groove thing when the cameraman finds them, but on a larger and jigglier scale. Sometimes they do a little strip tease with their XXXL-sized jersey. Then there are the babies—children up to age six also count. They're in team apparel, they're dancing, they're happy and they are just too thrilled—sometimes confused—when they see themselves on the screen.
I don't fit into any of these three categories. I belong to the fourth—people who are humorously caught doing something embarrassing. This includes that guy who spilled ketchup on his shirt, that woman bending over and that girl who is eating the french fries she spilled off the front of her sweatshirt while stuffing her face with a chicken tender. Oh, wait, that was me.
That wasn't even the tip of the Jumbo iceberg. The chicken tender incident—which my grandmother saw on television and left a voicemail yelling at me to eat slower—is just one in a long line of JumboTron incidents that have embittered me toward a staple of modern sports.
In seventh grade, I made it on at a Marquette basketball game when I was studying flashcards for a test the next day. Some drunk dental students yelled at me for the rest of the night, and I then decided to self-impose a JumboTron drought. I learned to spot the cameras and planned where I sat in relation to where they were pointing.
I slipped up last year. It was between the second and third periods at a hockey game, the Badgers were up and the KissCam came on. It panned to the old couple, the young couple on a date, the two guy friends—which gets the crowd to laugh every time—and to the student section. The couple in front of me had been making out Elimidate-style for the entire game and it was nauseating. They were at it again, and I was making puke faces at them until my roommate elbowed me.
""Caitlin, you're on the JumboTron. You might want to stop that.""
I looked up. There I had been, in the upper part of the heart, grimacing at the make out couple. I grabbed my protective PowerPlay shield and hid for the rest of the game.
It happened again at a football game. The camera zoomed in on the students, I inadvertently was dancing like a gerbil, but I saw it and dove behind my roommate. I got six phone calls.
""I don't think they picked you because you were one of the pretty ones. You were one of the silly ones."" That was my mom.
