* For the record, it was 7 to 5 vodka plus peppermint schnapps to water, and it tasted a bit like toxic mouthwash. I had one obligatory shot early in the day, but then reverted to actual normal Ultimate style eating and drinking for the remainder of the day. Well, kinda normal - I did eat way more pizza than usual for an Ultimate tournament (including dinner, probably a full 10" pizza on the day, in true TMNT fashion), and I had brought a chocolate-butterscotch-cashews-and-almonds bark that I had made that had nothing to do with turtles but was friggin' delicious. At some point I'll post the running graph I've been keeping of my aforementioned new calorie-counting dietary habits, and you'll see one hell of a spike for June 12th - good habit for an Ultimate tourney, as I felt energetically fantastic all weekend, despite playing in Flagstaff which, incidentally, is at 8,000+ feet.
I think the picture captures the good times well. I'm not going to pretend to be able to name the characters involved here - I'll leave that job to Aaron - but I'll throw the names of the super-fun Phoenix contingent that lit up the weekend. Without further ado, your Phoenix Mohini Ninja Turtles:
Kelly, Dheintime (or is it?), Big Nate, Cisco, Clint, Tricky, Cole, eBay, Russ*, Emily, Nyet
Rebecca, Skunk, Jenga, Lindsey**, Kaetlynn
* - Russ is obscured here, but more importantly, he's wearing a green shirt and grey shorts or something. I.e., not exactly a TMNT costume. Which is fine, because sometimes it's annoying to have to run to Goodwill and ask, "Hey, do you have any red satin bathrobes that could double as a sensei outfit?" Russ was supposed to be Shredder, and finding a big purple cape was not in his time budget for the week. But fear not; we adjusted the narrative. At some point, Russ and I decided that he was "Avid TMNT Blogger Guy," a lesser-known character from the series, so his costume was just that - normal looking dude, invariably living in his his mom's basement, with an inordinate amount of TMNT knowledge. I think it worked.
** - Lindsey is also not in costume, but her excuse is "better" - or worse, I suppose - my 3BK captain slipped a disc in her back during the week and was hobbling around dilapidated-grandma style all weekend. Sadness - she did come though for the team spirit with pizza runs. Props! Get better soon, co-cap'n-my-co-cap'n.
I went dressed as Splinter, btw, the mutant rat sensei of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Pretty sure I got this as the oldest (wisest? Nah...) of the bunch, which is not entirely true, as both Big Nate and Cisco are older than I. But whatever, it was fun playing Ulty in a bath robe and a black belt. Here's what these goofballs look like in action on the line - note the nice intermingling of enemies here:
The easy costume-related highlight of the weekend was committed by this guy:
That's Dheintime in the foreground and Tricky-as-one-of-the-turtles in the background. Dheintime played an early point in full regalia, including a hood/mask and tinted swim goggles. Seems said goggles were designed for seeing the lane in front of you and not a periphery fulls of discs - Dhein poached off on a deep throw to one of the Barrio women, got in perfect position to D it, and ... swing and a miss. Goal, hilarity, it was that kinda tournament. Of course, DT was completely incognito, what with the head-to-toe black and tucked in blond locks and all, so the line of the day was delivered by opponent / good guy Jon Miller: "Man, I would have laughed even harder if I had known it was you!" Funny times.
I suppose some mention of the gameplay is in order. We shockingly, despite our costumes and pregame radioactive ooze shots and general goofy attitude, ran off 8 points in a loss to routinely-nationals-qualifying co-ed team Barrio*. Granted, it was a Barrio tryout team, so a number of their peeps were not really representative. Barrio is one of those teams recruiting free agents from around the country, toeing the line of the number of roster players who need to live in the actual section / region. It's completely legit - everyone else is doing it, too - but it results in situations like this, where "Barrio" isn't Barrio. (Some of their players who are actually from Tucson were playing for other teams at this tourney, further complicating matters). Still, fun to play okay if not well against a team of studs - I actually scored a goal with Grobe guarding me, which I will go ahead and record in my diary**. Some of their tryout guys were trying to do WAY TOO MUCH, and they consequently had tons of turns. We were well outmatched, but we gave them at least something of a run. So an opening loss, but one that was well-expected.
* - Hmmmm. A bunch of white people from Tucson, AZ, naming their club Ultimate (a notoriously white sport) team "Barrio." Hard to get too gripey in a country where the NHL champions are the "Blackhawks," where the Cleveland Indians still have a "Chief Wahoo" logo that smacks of 19th century caricature, but still ... this sentiment is only amplified by one of their cheers, "I just got paid in the Barrio, I just got laid in the Barrio," etc., devolving into more and more illegal indiscretions. I don't want to drop a '90s PC liberal jackass commentary here, but as I've noted before, "I don't exactly think they're celebrating Hispanic heritage over there." Ugh. Then again, I've got some eskimos and prostitutes pissed off at me, so comments withdrawn.
** - Hells yeah I will - I'll also remember my first throw of the day, no prior warm-up backhand huck to Dheintime, my nasty IO flick huck to Dhein past Miller, and totally forget about my OI backhand huck to Tricky that missed the back left corner about a yard wide. I.e., a good throwing game por moi, and an oddly appropriate sensei title achieved for the day.
We had the option of taking a bye in the 2nd round in order to head to a bar to watch the "biggest match in American futbol history" USA v. England World Cup first round, first game match. I thought it would be *awesome* to roll into a Flagstaff bar in full ninja regalia to root on the USA, but apparently my teammates are a bunch of commies and wanted to stay and play the game at the appropriate hour. (A solid decision, it would turn out - not only did it allow us to play a game with the sun out and things at a balmy 55 degrees instead of the 40 or lower later that evening, but the tournament dinner pizza came at the end of our last game, giving us a leg up on grabbing food over the other six teams that were still mixing it up. More on that later). So we played the Flagstaff pick-up team and pretty much ran over them - actually, we let them stay in it a lot longer than they should have, but won easily 13-8. Another fun one that featured a half-time "the foot clan kidnaps April O'Neil" narrative, and yes, we behaved like five year olds and played TMNT. I think I got my best heckle line of the day when the turtles consulted their sensei before engaging the enemy: "I question whether she is worth it." And if you've seen the series and the gratuitous amount of trouble April got the turtles into, this would surely strike you as the wisest thing you've heard.
The rest of the day, ugh. We stumbled over to new fields to play the New Mexico club co-ed team, and they spanked the ever-living crap out of us. We still had some fun in this one, but our women were fairly badly outmatched in this one, their Z tripped up both genders of our inexperienced players, and before we knew it, things were 13-3 bad guys. That one was really forgettable. Our malaise traipsed into the next game, too, against another New Mexico team featuring Jamaal (from Le Tigre, a good buddy of mine*) and others. We, um, blurped, and were down 4-0 before we blinked. Played them pretty evenly from that point on and lost 13-8, but the damage was done - my clearest memory from this one was sitting on the sideline, sharing a sideways glance from Dheintime**, and grabbing a Coors Light for each of us. We dubbed these drinks "mental insulation" to save us from, er, let's just say "frustration." Again, good to have a weekend of fun rather than serious Ulty now and then.
* - Jamaal is a bit of an elder statesman of Southwest Ultimate a great guy. He also made a great play on me in this game - he was cutting in, and I got a good read on the throw that was aboutto come to him on the under. I sprinted as hard as I could, went to lay out around him for the D ... only he felt me coming and jutted his last step right into my path to block me off the disc. Totally legit, veteran move, resulting in a sort of hip check that prevented the D and unfortunately sent us both tumbling. But even that was cool - we both came up saying "are you alright?," both recognizing that despite the violence of the collision, it was a clean and good, aggressive play on both sides. No foul, no harm, and we played on - having witnessed many a snarling near-brawl in the wrestling match aka NBA finals this past week, I really appreciated this cool moment on the field.
** - The Ballad is nothing if not littered with praise of DT, but it warrants mentioning that we rode up to Flag together and had a good opp to chat about Sprawl, tryouts, and the good life in general. Turns out we share a hatred of 1980s-90s popular country music, further cementing my notions that he is a quality individual. He also instructed me in the car to at some point during the weekend throw it out in front of him as far as I could to see if he could catch up to it. So at some point on Sunday, I did - threw an upwind IO backhand as absolutely far out in front of him as I could. His guy gave up, saying, "no way," only to watch Dhein not only catch up to the disc but coast under a floating throw for the score. Given that the play was called about 28 hours in advance, this was pretty cool and emblematic of the sort of sparks of highlights we teamed up for on the weekend. More to come on this in the ensuing months, I hope.
As mentioned, our day ended after that game, but the others were still going on, so we snagged our pizza dinner and chilled for a bit. Our "pizza dinner" there should have been rendered in quotes, as each team was allotted 2.5 pizzas for an evening meal. That's 20 slices*, with most teams having 19-21 players. That's 20 slices, with a friggin' $325+ entry fee. This, despite the fact that the fields were cheap as all get out, the tournament director opted for free, amenity-less campgrounds for lodging, and bought the absolute bare minimum for snacks / supplies for the day. This tourney lacked any kind of bracket or white board to show us where and when to play. It lacked WATER, for insert-your-deity's-name-here's sake. I only bring this up because the TD - Trent, or whoever he was - is kinda a mercenary tournament organizer who is doing this to turn a profit. That's lame on face, without arguing too much - but if you're going to try to swing that, I would hope you would make it a SICK tourney. And 'twas not. So boo on you, homes, and that's not even counting for the fact that you almost double-booked the fields with a soccer tourney on Sunday. Hexta lame all around.
*Over my singular slice of pizza, I watched a Flagstaff player named Andy Wade play in a tense game against Barrio. This is worth mentioning because one A Wade showed up Monday for Sprawl tryouts. More on this in posts to come, but dude is a SWEET pickup for the Phoenix squad. It naturally makes our selection process that much more difficult, but again, we'll save that noise for another post. Good to have an overabundance of riches, methinks...
Okay, good to get that out. We had fun, so maybe the prolonged gripefest is not in order; in dude's defense, he recognized the error of his limited pizza-ordering ways and got a little more later. But it wasn't enough, and seriously, "professional tournament director?" Well, be professional, then. Anyhoo, we rendezvoused at Aaron's place for shower's and then headed to Alpine for a late night pizza meal - yes, we ate yet MORE pizza, being TMNTs and all. Dhein and I were lucky enough to score a place to stay at Skunk's dad's cabin in the Flagstaff woods, so when we got zapped at around 10:00, we went to grab Skunker, Lindsey and Big Nate and head out to the woodlands. We grabbed them at a Flag eatery where Tricky had just attempted to eat 10 "Ghost Chili" wings in thirty minutes - the Ghost Chili is that weaponized pepper I heard about on NPR once, something along 10^6 times hotter than tabasco - and failed badly. Glad we missed that, as "badly" involved some updog*. We headed out, drove about 25 minutes through the wow-I-forgot-about-that starlit night, and stayed at one of the best free tournament lodgings I've ever had the pleasure of occupying.
* - What's "updog," you ask? Not much, man, what's up with you? No, really, he vomited, that's all. Then recounted the event repeatedly in exquisite detail. Tricky likes the attention.
Here's the view from Skunk's dad's back porch:
Tres bien. It's a gorgeous, self-contained and sustaining (energy-wise) log cabin in the middle of nowhere. Fantastic. Skunk's dad was also kind enough to fix us pancakes and bacon in the morning, bringing our pizza-for-meals streak to a grinding halt. Those, too, were tres bien. I loved this, as you can tell, because I cannot camp to save my life - I've tried at a few Ulty tourneys, and ended up so stiff-backed for Sunday that I couldn't play. So thanks again, Skunk and dad, for a bed and a great night's sleep.
Sunday, to bring this thing to an end, was a little more promising on the play side. We came in seeded low thanks to our 1-3 Saturday, but upset the higher seed to make it to the semis. Didn't hurt at all to have Dixon and Marisa in tow for Sunday. We generally played more crisply, created more space, and had a bit better what-do-you-call-it FLOW that day. Nice to remember how to play. It also perhaps did not hurt that most of us, your narrator included, elected to go without costume and without minty ooze shots and just play some disc in normal style clothes. It didn't stop us from having fun, natch:
Despite how Monkees-esque that may look, this is indeed the final step to a TMNT movie dance. Or so I hear. Anyways, we brought the same fighting spirit to a tense semis game featuring some of our good, hot-headed friends from Utah (see Daweena) - we gave them a fight, but again succumbed to some superior talent. Fun but tough times, and we finished 3rd/4th, which was right about where we were seeded. So I suppose we kissed our sister, but what with the World Cup being all the craze lately, that seems just fine.
Dhein and I booked it out of there pronto, electing to skip the finals in favor of early returns to our SLFs. Beck was sick all weekend, so I did my best to get home qickly and take care of her. This largely involved bringing her fluids while she slept through an NBA finals game. Party! So there it is; a fun, goofy weekend in Flagstaff, written up rushedly, but hopefully now Dheintime and Keith will ease up for a bit. Sheesh!
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