Good morning, Buck Nudders. Welcome to the Buck Nuts Morning 5 here.

On Monday, December 20th, 2021, I am Dave Vittel. I am joined by Steve Hellwagon.

Steve, let's start out with an interesting story from your end.

You were mid-flight on Friday on the way to Vegas to cover the Ohio State Kentucky basketball game.

When word came down that the game was canceled because of a COVID outbreak in Ohio State's program.

So how did you get the word? Just tell the listeners that interesting story.

Yes, there's actually Thursday afternoon. We had had football interviews.

I think from 11, 30 to 2 that day and I was on a 220 flight.

So I went to the first hour of the interviews and then bugged out and had it over to Port Columbus and met my son who came in and he and I.

And a friend of mine and his son, who's a college student, the four of us, we're going out.

They were going obviously, it had tickets to go to the Ohio State versus Kentucky game, the CBS Sports Classic there in Las Vegas.

And so we're about 90 minutes into the flight. We're over Missouri somewhere. We're on a direct flight out of Port Columbus going to Vegas.

And my son said, oh, I think there's some news. And we got on, you know, these planes are equipped with Wi-Fi.

So we get on there and we see that Ohio State's made the announcement that they had to cancel and pull out of the classic and the team was supposed to fly on Thursday from Columbus to Las Vegas.

But apparently everybody need to be tested beforehand.

And Coach Holtman had actually done an interview segment with the local media at 930 on Thursday morning and Adam Jardy from the dispatch had asked him because there were starting to be COVID cancellations all over the country asked him, you know, what are you guys doing about this is they raised awareness about this, but you shouldn't shouldn't be doing, you know, to kind of stay away from.

You know, there were situations where you might contract the virus or whatever even a breakthrough case.

And coach admitted that there'd been some breakthrough cases with the staff during this past year, but he gave you no inkling or inclination that anybody had tested that day and perhaps didn't even know because they were going to practice and presumably, you know, before after practice or whatever they had these tests come up.

And they've shut down everything. I don't think they're practicing as a group, I assume people are getting individual workouts who are healthy enough to go in and do that.

And they've already canceled the game for this week in Tennessee, Martin, but here we are 90 minutes into the flight and I suppose that we known before the flight we would have all put our heads together and figured out if we were going to take the trip out there, but you get out there.

You realize really quickly that if you want to come back a day or two earlier, it's going to cost you an arm and a leg, you know, to upgrade your flight to another day on less than seven days notice.

Plus, I'd already prepaid for the hotel room. We stayed at the Luxor, which is walking distance to the team mobile arena and we had a great time. I mean, it turned out to be a great weekend to sit there and watch all the bowl games.

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