Ran with Big Nate and Le Tigre for New Year Fest1 this year and had a great if not victorious time. Le Tigre is a Master's Team conglomerate from New Mexico, Tucson and Phoenix. You have to be 33 to play in the master's division for the club series, but Big Nate is all excited about Le Tigre 2012, so I jumped in with them for a three year preview. We ended up having about 13 actual Le Tigre guys (Russ, Nate, Bill, Jamal, Glen, Digo, Brendan, Chris, Jack, Eric, Harry, Dave, and Nyet) plus 3 stragglers (Pat, Pat, and Lee), all fairly competent if not in the best shape of our lives. Good mix of handlers / cutters; the most notable pregame thing was that Lee malaproply said we should do "ice builders" so we started insulting each other's playing abilties. Funny stuff.
Won our first game against Cole and the ASU crew pretty easily, 13-7 or so; they were athletic but took the predictable chances. Our second game was against the ASU alums, featuring Tricky, Vince, Rob, Pete, and some other solid characters. I remember making a crazy horizontal layout catch on an IO forehand from Russ, a greatest attempt on an errant throw from Lee that involved diving into the watching ASU team on the sideline (Pat tried to get it, but Vince ate it up), and generally watching Pete make some key Ds at very bad times for us. We were up 7-5 at one point but managed to fade and drop the game 13-11. Sadness.
Our third game was against Papal Age, an alumni team from Notre Dame who seemed to forget about that whole WWJD concept. A very deep and talented team who also enjoyed some bad calls and general asshattery; not too much fun, and the only game we were not competitive in (another fade-job, we lost 13-8). Our last game of Saturday was against the NAU alumni team featuring Skunk and a redheaded guy whose name I didn't catch. A very competitive and spirited game, my big memory of this one was a nasty breakmark scoober to Jack for a score and an accidental clocking of said redhead - we were zooming in from opposite directions toward a corner of the endzone, he got there a split second before I did and so when I took a swipe at the disc I caught his suddenly-appearing nose instead. I felt really bad about that one; he was very forgiving and realized it was just a freak event. We once again faded late and lost 13-11; sort our MO for the tourney.
Before I forget, 1: Big Nate, on a dead disc, gave me the ol' head nod go deep communication. So I did, only Nate threw the disc about 90 feet in the air. Just a really, really terrible throw, hilariously so. I read it quickly and went to the spot, only six other guys all had time to catch up to it and came flying into me from the side. A technical foul (ha), but it was laughable to call on a throw like that. Much fun of Nate was made. 2: The ground at this tournment, unsurprisingly, was terrible - dried out, dead grass made for the effect of Ultimate on razor-blade laced sandpaper. On a couple of occasions, the disc was thrown to me low and I clearly thought to myself "this is going to hurt" before hitting the deck to secure the catch. Ouch. I lost a fair amount of skin which made for fun (lack of) sleeping for the rest of the week / end.
Beck and I had dinner at a local house restaurant called Asi es La Vida which turnd out to be a bit disappointing. I was zonked and passed out the second we got home.
Sunday was more of the same - we drew a New Mexico club team in the first round and managed to drop the game 12-11 on point. Barf. That led to a friendly with one of the Sprawl squads in the losers' bracket - we got our act back together and worked them pretty well, 13-7 or so.
This account is probably not doing justice to the fun we had - we lost a lot of tight games, true, but we had a good time in the process and had some real clicky moments. I played individually well all weekend on both sides of the disc, and as Nate pointed out, some of the core of the actual Le Tigre side really picked it up at the appropriate moments. So despite a paltry 2-4 record, we felt pretty good about ourselves, and it's always nice to reconfirm one's ability to play semi-competitive disc. I caught a little of some Phxation and Sprawl games, too, and ran into Verbal's wife Tali (aka EWO SUPREME!) for a brief chat on Sunday.
PLUS, the nice thing about an early round exit was ample time to get home in time for the Super Bowl. Another post.
1Lest you think i am the only grammar nerd in these parts, the program for the tournament contained a paragraph-long diatribe from former VOTS president and all-around good guy Keith about the mispronunciation of the tourney as "New Year's Fest." particularly instructing the reader to look at Year and notice the lack of an "'s." The paragraph, natch, had a typo in it.
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