Here we have a fan shooting for $5000 from half-court of the Bucks-Magic game in Milwaukee.

These on-court promotions are always hit-or-miss, and whenever I attend a professional sporting event I’m struck by how many of them there are. It’s not just the purview of minor league baseball; NHL and NBA games both feature constant entertainment during the many breaks in the action.

Here it is:

The nonchalance is what makes it. Listen to how he answers the question from the MC about which shot he’ll be attempting. “Half-court!” he says, as if there was no other option.

But there was! Let’s talk about his strategy here, because there are a lot of holes. $500 is a lot of money, and in theory, the odds of hitting a free throw are far superior to the odds that he’d nail the half-court shot for $5000. (The mid-range option of $1000 for a three-pointer is borderline; if it were $2500 it might have been worth it, given the percentages.) That’s bad process, unless you’re lacking in confidence to the point that a free throw is just as much of a long-shot as the half-court effort.

Of course, going for the free throw does open up the possibility of missing it, while also robbing the arena of the potential spectacle of a made half-court shot. He certainly had his mind made up, and you can’t take away the perfect result.

I’ve only ever been involved in one on-court contest, during a break in a Fort Wayne Mad Ants D-League game a few years back. A friend and I were told we’d have to answer a Mad Ants trivia question. And that it’d be multiple choice. We both loved basketball, and knew a fair amount about the team, so we thought we had a shot.

The question ended up being which Christmas song was the favorite of a particular player. We took way too long deciding which to guess, then guessed wrong.

We were booed off the floor.

About Jay Rigdon

Jay is a columnist at Awful Announcing. He is not a strong swimmer. He is probably talking to a dog in a silly voice at this very moment.