After a travel nightmare, Souley Boum's mom gets to see her son play in NCAA Tournament
GREENSBORO, N.C. – Mariam Diallo was scheduled to leave San Francisco on Thursday at noon to see her son, Souley Boum, and the Xavier Musketeers play Kennesaw State on Friday at 12:40 p.m. in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at the Greensboro Coliseum.
Diallo was scheduled to connect in Dallas to get to Greensboro.
"We get to Dallas and it was time to land and it was some type of storm, windy and I don't know, raining," Diallo told The Enquirer by phone Saturday. "We were just flying around. They said we can't land. We hung out there for about 30 minutes just turning around. Finally, they said no one is landing.
"We got diverted to Oklahoma. That was the hard one because we couldn't deplane. We sat there for like five hours in the plane."
This was around 11 p.m. on Thursday night, Diallo said.
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Diallo said the plan was to refuel and try to get the planes back to their original destinations.
"Everybody was diverted there. It was a long line," she said. "So we get out. We get to Dallas at midnight pretty much. And you can imagine, the line was longer, everybody trying to get their travel fixed."
The American Airlines counter was closed, Diallo said.
"They're like, 'Just call the 1-800 number,' " she said. "There's no planes leaving.
"So I end up spending the night at the airport. There was no hotel around. I was by myself and not with my husband. I thought maybe I'm safer inside the airport than outside. It was already 1 a.m."
Diallo was first told that the earliest they could get her to Greensboro was Saturday night at 11 p.m.
"I said, 'No, that's not possible, I have to see my son and he's playing. I'm already going to miss the first (game) and I know that for a fact,' " Diallo said.
Finally, she found a flight that worked and got her to Greensboro on Friday afternoon, but she had to tell her son hours before the game that she wouldn't make it in time.
Diallo landed at 3:30 in the afternoon. She was in the air during Xavier's game.
"Unfortunately, I didn't watch the game," said Diallo. "When I landed, I told my husband, 'Just tell me if they won or not, I don't care if it's by one point or a half point.' That's all I care about."
She got the good news. Xavier came back to beat Kennesaw State, 72-67, which meant she didn't miss what could have been her son's last college game ever, and she gets to watch him play on Sunday in the NCAA Tournament against Pittsburgh.
"This is it, this is his last year. He's not going to be at the NCAA Tournament again. I wanted to be here for the whole thing, but I guess God had his way or American Airlines," Diallo laughed. "I'm happy that they won. Imagine if I got here and they had lost that game. I would have just cried my eyes out."
Boum was worried his mom might not get to see him play in the NCAA Tournament.
"In the game, I wasn't thinking about it ... when we was playing the game she was in the sky so she didn't know what was going on," Boum said. "I'm just happy that she's gonna be able to be here.
"I know tomorrow she gonna be here I ain't gonna miss no wide-open layups. I'm just glad that we won and she gonna be able to see us play tomorrow."
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Souley Boum's mom and the journey to see her son in the NCAA Tourney
