Midtown bars and the Stephen C. O’Connell Center were swamped Monday evening, packed with raucous fans eager to see the Florida Gators men’s basketball team faceoff against the Houston Cougars for the NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship title.
But just a few miles away, a different energy brewed — quieter in volume, but no less lively.
At the Oak Hammock retirement community, more than 400 elderly fans gathered in orange and blue to show their Gator pride.
“The culture here is absolutely mind-bending for us,” said Jim Dodge, an 85-year-old basketball fan who moved to Florida more than 20 years ago. “It’s loud, it’s a continual thing, during the whole game, before and after. It’s amazing.”
His wife, 84-year-old Peggy Dodge, said it was “fun to be on the winning side.”
“As a new resident,” she said, “I just can’t get over the spirit.”
Neither of the Dodges went to UF, but they showed their Gator pride through orange and blue attire. With other Oak Hammock residents, they headed to a special buffet put together in honor of the championship game.
Asked for his predictions for the night, 81-year-old Pat Kelley, a former lawyer and night guard at Smathers Library who went to UF in the 1960s, was confident the Gators would win.
“Only because they are a deeper team,” he clarified, agreeing with other retirees that Florida is a “second-half team” pulling through later in the game after wearing Houston out.
Kelley discussed betting odds with fellow resident Dick Elnicki, an 86-year-old former UF information systems and operations management professor. Neither of them put money on tonight’s game.
Elnicki’s only prediction: “Nobody here is going to die because of the way the game comes out.”
“It’s hard not to be a Gator in this town,” said Elnicki’s wife, 83-year-old Ann, who got her masters in occupational therapy at UF in 1982. “It makes us feel young!”
Some residents said they would try to stay up for the game, but were also recording it just in case they fell asleep. But 84-year-old Donna Wagner, who went to UF from 1959 to 1961, said she intended to watch the whole game live.
“I’m going to wait for the blast at the end,” Wagner said.
She has season tickets to almost every sport played at UF. Tonight, she was considering watching the game from her home instead of the common area because the chairs were more comfortable and there were fewer rules.
“There’s so many rules here that we’re trying to get changed so we can party all the time,” Wagner said.
Not everyone in the room was a lifelong basketball fan. Jeani Valter, an 80-year-old recent Gator convert, dressed in orange and blue from head to toe, admitted she’s more of a football girl.
“I’m in love with Tim Tebow,” she said, her Gator earrings swinging. “I have a life-size cardboard cut-out of him in my apartment.”
But she couldn’t resist the game day excitement and learned as much as she could about basketball over the past two weeks. Although most of her peers said they were “too old” for superstition, Valter held tight to her tradition of drinking out of her lucky cup.
“I always have to have a Gator tumbler,” she said.
Contact Pristine Thai at pthai@alligator.org. Follow her on X @pristinethai.
Pristine Thai is a university general assignment reporter and a third-year political science and journalism major. Her free time is spent attending classical music concerts or petting cats.
