Still... Got It?

I had already watched his silky lefty backhand huck go up a time or two in the game. So when I found myself in the middle of the open field with a lot of space and a one on one matchup, I had predicted the sequence ahead of time - big fake downfield, hoping to drag me with him, then coming back upfield to the disc so he could get it and be the guy to send it deep. So I knew that a little bit, and he was a reasonably quick guy, but not death-defying fast like some out here. So when he took off deep - all 6'3" of him - I ran while looking at his legs, waiting for the plant and come back. And it came, so I planted, too. He headed back toward the thrower, but I pursued about a yard behind him, in full bore sprint mode, guessing that the in-cut was his only option left. So the throw goes up, about shoulder high, and I put everything into it and catchup to him and lay out, full horizontal, four feat above the earth and bam right in front of his outstretched arms get the crazy horizontal flying-in-the-air layout D. WAHOO! The general response is "@#$%," and while he's staring at his hands or whatever, I get up off the ground and sprint toward the endzone. Someone picks it up, tosses it to another teammate, and then the deep flick goes up, and my guy is trying to catch up but his brief soliloquy and standing there has cost him, and I catch the score. Ya. Double happiness.

It's been a long while since I've legitimately beat a competitive, tournament player back to a disc for a layout D. So pardon the self-congratulatory tone of the above. But with the surgeries and injuries and such, it's nice, especially when entering one's 31st year, so remember what it feels like to do something relatively athletically sweet.

I played with a pickup team called "Immaculate Goat" at New Year's Fest in Tempe this weekend and had a spectacular time. A few of the guys were holdovers from the Velvet Jones team in December and some other guys whom I've played with in various pickup games around Phoenix. There are some good pics from Saturday afternoon here. We essentially held seed, coming in second in our pool and winning the crossover game to head to the quarter finals. The day started with a 13-0 game against a high school team who had essentially no idea what they were doing; I think we turned it over once. Yowsers. We scrimmaged with them afterwards and tried to point out some strategy type things; always good to pass it on. Our second game was against a traveling team from Mexico City; very high-spirited, and very aggressive and energetic. There are some big time cultural differences in sports behavior, the most glaring of which is that the Mexican team talks and shouts and cheers and curses (puta! cabron! pendejo! etc.) ALL GAME LONG. Sweet game which we won; really great bunch of dudes who hung out after the game despite language differences and all that. They ended up battling their way into the top bracket by beating ASU later int eh day, so that was cool.

We then ran into a masters team from Tucson who more or less handed it to us; just had some very, very flowy offense that we never got around to defending. Barf. So 2-1 in pool play, then we faced UCSD B in the crossover game and walked away with it easily. Our quarterfinals game (where the afore-detailed nyetian moment of glory occurred) was against a Notre Dame alumni team who practiced some very questionable Christian principles on foul calls w/r/t the whole "thou shalt not bear false witness" concept. Argh. This was our fifth game of the day, and just before half, when we were only down 7-5, suddenly our entire team cramped up, got injured, etc. The ND team had about 12 subs and eventually outran us to win something like 15-10. Oh, well.

(Quick interlude - we had birthday dinner with the D&C Saturday night. I had a very involved time getting to their house to shower before dinner - I got stuck on I10 behind Monster Truck Rally AND Disney on ice traffic (i mean, really, wow) and showed up to dinner about an hour late. Good italian food for supper, a lot of sitting around the restaurant and chatting; I was pretty out of it what with the several miles i had sprinted over the course of the day. Hung in there and went back to DC's house for a bit and SUCKED it UP at Guitar Hero - I was terrible on a Sex Pistols song, and only mildly redeemed myself on Welcome to the Jungle before getting annihilated by Muse's Knights of Cydonia. DC, it should be mentioned, have quite obviously been practicing A LOT. We headed home about 12, when I started my laundry because i needed my jersey for the Sunday games. And then I woke up at 6 to start the dryer so I could head out at 7:15 for the fields).

And on Sunday - no one was there. Our game was supposed to start at nine, but I was the first Goat to show up, and the other team had one guy. So we stood around waiting. Did I mention it was fifty degrees and POURING RAIN? Eventually everyone rolled in and we played a stupid game to eleven against a team from LA - we won, huzzah - but then our entire team crapped out. Turns out we would have been playing the team from Mexico again, so we just let the team from LA take our place. So then it was about 11 o'clock and I headed home.

It is, let me tell you, SO much fun to drive 45 minutes down to the fields, warm up just enough to get the ridiculous amounts of soreness out of your legs / arms / back /body, and then only play one game. So that sucked. But the tourney overall was fun, and we went 4-2 and got the sensation of winning our last game. Very fun bunch of dudes on the Immaculate Goat - check that above picture link for the sweet logo on the front of our jerseys - and I definitely look forward to playing more NYF's with them in the coming years.