George Kouvalis at the MLS Cup game in Toronto on November 21st. He is holding up the ticket he got to get into the game
By LLOYD QUANSAH
There was an NCAA record 112,118 at the 2003 Michigan versus Ohio State football game. The men’s Olympic gold medal hockey final between Canada and the USA was viewed by 17,748 people at Canada Hockey Place in Vancouver.
What do these crowds have in common? Guelph native George Kouvalis was there.
His life is surrounded by sports. He works for the Guelph Strom of the Ontario Hockey League and Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League.
He is currently working on a clothing line with his friends named Killbomb (KBomb), a sports apparel company and also runs a recreational hockey league in Guelph. He calls himself “his own sports marketing brand.”
Kouvalis, 29, has watched Rafael Nadal against Roger Federer at the 2008 Wimbledon Final, European Cup soccer final between Spain and Germany, 2010 Major League Baseball All-Star game, and countless other events.
He says he attends seven to ten sporting events a month, excluding his commitments with the Guelph Storm. Even though he doesn’t know exactly the mileage he has incurred but he knows that his car has been used a lot.
“Right now, in my car, there’s about 240, 000 clicks, “ Kouvalis said. “…There’s a lot of mileage and you think of the mileage and your like “You live life once. You got to enjoy it.”
This obsession to travel to sporting events began Feb. 13, 1999, when the Toronto Maple Leafs played their last home game in Maple Leaf Gardens against the Chicago Blackhawks. He still fondly remembers he and his father going to the arena
“It was fun, the experience was crazy and I think it was the way of life. It’s was just fun. It was more fun to go to the game then it was to sit back and watch it on TV. I just had that passion and atmosphere and I wanted to do it that way,” Kouvalis said.
Kouvalis calls his obsession “like a drug.” He has countless of stories that range from the weird to the interesting.
Another example of his resourcefulness is when he went to St. Louis for the 2006 Final Four. His favourite team, North Carolina Tar Heels, made to the final four of that year and Kouvalis was determined to go. Kouvalis calls his friend to just drive on a Tuesday to go straight to St. Louis by Friday, with no hotel reservations or tickets. They attempted to get a hotel downtown, but all were booked off. So they drove to a small hotel in “the middle of nowhere.”
After getting their room, Kouvalis put on his UNC gear on and went downtown to try and get a ticket for the sold out game. He went to the lobby hotel the team was staying at the same night, asking people if they have extra tickets. After that failed, he tried the next morning at the box office and with ticket scalpers. One of them told him that it would take over $1500 to get into the game since they were unavailable anywhere. So he made a promise to the scalper.
“I was so mad at him, I go to the one guy and said ‘Mark my word, I will get into that stadium for face value if not free’ and he laughed at me,” Kouvalis said.
So soon after that a reporter from NBC Raleigh station and asked if he was the Toronto man that was searching for tickets at the team hotel. Because of his attempted networking, he was interviewed by the reporter as the die-hard UNC fan from Toronto.
Several hours later his luck changed. A teenager came up to him and said that his father may have a ticket for him. He met the kid’s father, who offered the tickets at face value. Right after that, a scalper offered the man $1000 in cash, which Kouvalis couldn’t match.
“The guy looks at me and goes ‘You know what the difference is? I want Carolina to win more than I need the money,’” he said.
The scalper attempted to purchase it from Kouvalis, who refused to do so since he “came all that way.”
Al Boynton, a friend and co-worker on KBomb apparel, says that his first meeting with Kouvalis in Baltimore set up their current relationship. His fondest memory is a trip to Pittsburgh during the 2009 NHL playoffs.
“We hopped in the car at 6 a.m. and we drove to Pittsburgh for Game 7 of the Conference Finals between Montreal (Canadiens) and Pittsburgh (Penguins), which turned out to be the last game ever at Mellon Arena,” Boynton said.
“Georgie drove all the way there and we ended up going to the Pittsburgh Pirates vs. Cincinnati Reds in the afternoon. We didn’t have tickets to either game and we ended with tickets for both games.
Kouvalis’ girlfriend of five and a half years, Chrissy Maduri, is also a dedicated sports fan. She compares her fandom to his but as she describes it, “he likes it differently.” Her fondest memory was when they went to their hero’s old stomping grounds.
“I met (George and his mother) in Carolina and basketball is my sport. And so we went to UNC and being obsessed with Michael Jordan, I was just happy to be in the little museum that they have there but George was determined to get us onto the court,” Maduri said.
“It was literally something I would’ve never have done. He just checked the door handle, see if he can get in, and the gym was open. Whereas I would’ve been like ‘no, no, no, we can’t go in there since its trespassing.’ But he was Ok with it and now we have a great memory at centre court with the two of us.
Kouvalis still continues with his plans. In 2011, he is going to the Augusta golf tournament and WrestleMania XXVII in the same weekend. In 2012 he will be going to the Summer Olympics in London, England as well as Wimbledon.
While he has a bucket list to fulfill, including the Super Bowl and a World Cup final, he can still be seen as a true fan of sport.
FAN Magazine 