So yay, I'm up at 4:30 with a throbbing toe.
"Ooh, ooh, GOUT!"scream a thousand first year med students. "Too much uric acid! Acidosis! Too fat! Stop drinking red wine from a 400 year old cellar!"
No, not quite. I have a couple of bad blisters on either side of my foot from Saturday, and one is on my big toe and under my 10 year old callus I have from Ultimate. This is probably more than you ever wanted to know about my nasty feet, but suffice it: it's a deep bad blood blister, and playing on it last night ripped it pretty deep. Ugh. At least now I get to take a week or so off up in Rochester and let the general Nyetplex heal. About time.
So yeah, we started men's league last night. A big fun time - I was playing at about 63% because of my all-out insanity this weekend, but got progressively looser as the day went on. Here's the team I'm playing on:
Keith - Captain and VOTS president, good handler with mad backhand hucks
Miller - young crazy guy from ASU, fast and raw
Clint - Fast young player; really inexperienced
Cole - Superstar athlete up there with Vince in terms of athleticism. A lovable jerk, if that makes sense. And a badass player.
Damon - Mentioned here several times; recent import from Canada with great throws who is sweet in the sky
Danny - rookie; don't know him.
Dixon - Sprawl captain type; older, feisty player. Kinda an unlovable jerk. But a very good, quick and crafty player.
E-Bay - ASU athletic player who is fast and a bit raw, too. All of the ASU guys are fun individuals who pretty much fulfill all kinds of state school stereotypes1. Good dudes.
Jack - Older player who is very wily and fast. He's probably 38-42 or so and plays like he's 21. Incredible. He additionally has a dog named Zoey who is the best Ultimate dog on the planet. She just sit son the sideline the entire game without a peep. S & W, take note.
Jason - Younger folk, don't know him.
Joe - another Sprawl handler, solid guy.
Roland - Older player, captain of Offshore Swilling and a very nice guy. He's much older - late 40s early 50s, I think - but plays solid.
Ryan - A very good Sprawl handler - reminds me a big of Johnny Swills from the Tufts days, only he's right handed.
Simon - German kid who just moved here; tall skinny and pretty quick, really nice and really enthusiastic. Great kid, and getting a lot better. He played really well last night.
Tommy - Another relatively unknown rook.
So a good mix of folks, and I get to play with Cole2 again, as well as Jack, Keith and Damon who are some of my favorite dudes from VOTS to play with (Ebay, Miller, and Ryan are no slouches either).
Last night, as mentioned, I still was feeling great. I played okay - good hucks and general throws, and actually cut pretty okay, but I was just crappy in the air - I had three chances to go up and sky for one - none of them good throws, now that i think about it - but I just came up empty. Oh well, sometimes you get the bar, pass the beernuts. I really wasn't feeling it last night, and still managed to make a pretty reasonable contribution.
We won the first game 17-4 or some such against the likes of Pete, Sam, Bryan P, and Paul of fnuky fame. We just killed the other team coming out of the gates, going up 6-0 and never looking back. On the few occasions where they did score, they threw zone at us and we just SHREDDED it. Badly. Probably my highlight of the night happened when their deep deep cheated up and I hit a guy with about a fifty plus yard hammer for a goal. Also had some nice deep forehand hucks. Keith was smoking in this game. Nice.
Our second game was against team Nabity, also including Justin (not the fnuk, the tall dude from Sprawl), Cisco, Josiah, Ned, Tricky, Tim, and Rob. WOw, tha tteam looks good on paper (but they all do, what with 4 teams instead of 16). They played well, we did at times, but we had a lot of drops and general sloppiness. This was the game where I couldn't sky, presumably because I'm still sore from the other night. Ah, well. I did get a handblock on a Justin backhand huck, though, which is kinda like taking a fastball off your hand from two feet away. Ouch. We played them tight, I had some nice deep throws to different people, especially Jack, but we came up short in the end and lost 14-13. Good game.
At one point, someone on our team gacked it, and I ended up one on one with Eric in the endzone with no mark on. If you don't know, the defender is pretty much screwed in this situation, especially when the guy you're guarding has 6 inches of height on you. But the funny thing was that we both planted hard to cut at the exact same moment - it was like I was reading his mind - and we put our feet right into one another. It hurt quite a bit, but once we figured out we were okay - we came off the field for an injury - we just laughed about it. It was almost a choreographed collision. Good times with Nabity3. He played really tough D all night and hucked and skyed a bunch for scores; good game for him.
So a kiss your sister 1-1 night, not ideal but pretty decent considering how crappy I felt.
1 - Perfect example: last night, we're trying to come up with a team name. Keith offers "Ho ho ho" because, you know, 'tis the season, and our jerseys are red. One of the ASU guys chimes in with "What about 'Bitch Bitch Bitch?'" 'Cause, you know, ho = bitch, ha ha ha. And then another with "Ladies Suck." It devolved into locker room trashy talk in seconds. At which point I stand up for women everywhere and sarcastically say, "Why don't we just call ourselves Misogyny?"
Silence.
"What's that mean?" comes simultaneously from three of the ASU guys.
Ladies and gentlemen, let's hear it for state standards!!!
2 I've come to appreciate the dude the more I get to know him. He remains unbelievably cocky and all that, but he's a fantastic player and he is always intensely looking for ways to make everyone better. Good times; and playing with a guy like him (or Justin from fnuk, or Pallaver and MAZ from Tufts, or Damien from Rice, i.e. a superhuman superstar) is always sweet.
3 So Eric says something like, "Well, I did my job." "Huh," I replied. It turns out that he was picked in the 4th round (meaning in the top 16 players) and I was picked in the first (top 4) - maybe actually the 2nd round, but Keith had the snake picks, i.e. picks 4 and 5, and took Cole and me. So he was joking that if he as a fourth pick had taken out a first pick, he had done his job. Ha. But interesting - I got picked toward the very end in this draft last year, so apparently my stock has gone up. I don't think I would have taken myself that early - I just can't jump with the big guys and can't run with the speedsters, so it seems you would want more sheer athletic ability with your top picks. Still, it's a good feeling and gives me a bit to live up to. So once I get healed up a little, I will have to get some track workouts in so I can throw down for real. It occurs to me that I am once again 4 years out from surgery, and it was right about this time after the first one that I started feeling back to myself. It's not like I have a lot of empirical data to back that up, just seems that it takes a few years to get completely back up to speed.
But it made me feel crappy last night, because I was way too sore to play like a first round draft pick. And I just couldn't do anything in the air, ugh. I did only have a single turnover in the games, though - at least only one that I would be willing to take the blame for - and handled well, so if that's what I was drafted for, then awesome.
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