Christian and Mathi Ott had planned their trip to Houston for months. They were going to watch Curaçao, the tiny Caribbean nation making its World Cup debut, take on Germany. Then, about an hour before kickoff, the email came: Their tickets weren’t going to work.
The Otts, from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, told WPDE-TV they’d bought their tickets through a resale site and suddenly had nothing. They were told to wait because tickets sometimes get released right before a match, so they waited outside the stadium, increasingly certain they’d flown across the country to stand in a parking lot. Eventually, they scrambled and paid dearly for last-minute replacements, making it in, but the day had been a stressful, expensive mess.
Photo credit: Igor Batista/Unsplash
The real turn came the next day. Their flight home got delayed, so they killed time at an airport bar, where they fell into conversation with a friendly man and his wife. The Otts launched into the saga of their nightmare trip with a couple of sympathetic strangers. Then the man’s wife said something to him, and he looked back at the Otts.
“He looks at her, then back at us, and says, ‘Well, I’m the prime minister of Curaçao,’” Mathi recalled to the TV station. The friendly guy at the bar turned out to be Gilmar Pisas, the leader of the country whose team they’d flown to Houston to support.
Pisas, apparently charmed that two South Carolinians had gone to all this trouble for his nation’s debut, made them an offer on the spot.
“He told us to pick one of their upcoming games,” Mathi said. Ecuador or Ivory Coast, all expenses paid. Mathi called his mom to run it by her. Her response, according to Christian: “Of course you’re going.”
What followed was the opposite of the parking-lot disaster. Pisas flew them to Kansas City, where they spent time with his family and friends and were invited to a private watch party at the InterContinental for a Netherlands match.
The Otts, by their own cheerful admission, were a little out of their depth.
“Honestly, we looked like we didn’t belong there. We were surrounded by CEOs and people worth millions of dollars,” Mathi said. “They bought us food and drinks while we watched the Netherlands game. Then the prime minister came down and greeted everyone, and we got to talk with him for a while.”
Then came the actual reason they’d flown out: the Curaçao game. They took an Uber, waited through the long entry line, browsed the FIFA store, and found their seats.
“The view was incredible,” Mathi said. “The fans were amazing—dancing, chanting, and having a great time.”
A weekend that started with a canceled-ticket gut punch ended with the Otts heading back to Myrtle Beach with a story almost too neat to believe: The worst part of the trip was what put them at that particular airport bar, next to that particular stranger.
