June 6, 2015 – Greg Rappaport goes behind-the-scenes with a Guinness World Records adjudicator.
On Saturday night, when the Fever and their fans successfully captured the Guinness World Records® mark for largest number of people lighting glowsticks simultaneously at a single venue, we shadowed Michael Empric, the Guinness World Record adjudicator, throughout the evening to see up close how a record gets made.
Photo Gallery: Fever Glow Record >>
Empric, who lives and works in New York, has a job that takes him far and wide to be a witness and judge of whether or not a record has been completed. His office covers North, Central, and South America, meaning a normal week could have him in Lima on a Tuesday, and Kalamazoo on a Thursday. Basically, there is no such thing as a normal week for him. But on Saturday, he was in an office in Bankers Life Fieldhouse, awaiting the report sheets of the stewards, helpful volunteers who made it possible to quantify the amount of people who actually cracked their glowsticks.
In the end, the final count was 3,712 people lighting glowsticks, which was good enough to snap the previous held record of 836 people, a mark set by musical artist Steve Aoki and his fans. After announcing that the Fever and their fans had more than quadrupled the record, Empric presented a framed certificate confirming the achievement.