I guess we would have been out a few dollars from the plane ride to Las Vegas.
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We knew after about six hours of making our presentation ... It was that short of time.
Actually it was my sister who came to me and asked me how she could do something for tourism in Clarksville ... I figured we could do something with AAU because I was already involved in it, and we knew that Clarksville would make a great host site. We had everything.
We went to Arlington, Texas, in 1999 to watch how an AAU tournament was run ... We were trying to prepare for our first in 2000. But when you picked up the papers or watched television, all you saw was the Texas Rangers. The AAU tournament was sort of an afterthought.
We knew the community would be behind us ... That made it easy during our original pitch. We knew that if we went to that committee and told them the city of Clarksville would be behind this event wholeheartedly, then it would be hard to say no to us.