Ballin' Is a Habit Part Two

If you haven't read the first post on this topic, well honestly you're not missing too much. If you want to though, you can read up on the background athletic information. Quick recap: my room mate and I are decent at sports, and have played a lot of them. Hence, we've got a lot of stories about winning and/or losing horribly. Here come some more.

Sorry, this image was supposed to be for the post on cooking.

I'll start this post off with a brief tale of one of my more em'bare-ass'ing moments in sports. That's right, good for you! That not so subtle spelling alteration to the word embarrassing cued you in! This story is about pantsing!

For those of you who don't know what the term "pantsing" entails, it's a pretty simple concept. All you need is somebody with loose fitting pants/shorts and somebody else to pull those pants down. Now you can go pants somebody yourself! Let the merriment begin!

Huzzah!

For anyone who's ever played a sport against, played around with or simply been stuck in crowded elevator with a member of the opposite sex, you know that sometimes inadverdent contact is made.

Some times it's painful, like an elbow in the spleen. Some times it's awkward, like an elbow in the boob. Some times it's downright embarrassing, like pulling the shorts off a girl and exposing her rainbow colored panties to the entire intramural fields.

"Boy, I'm glad I wore underwear today."

That my friends is what happened to me, during one of my soul crushing defeats while playing flag football for Teaching Fellows during my undergrad years. For anyone who, for reasons possibly related to illiteracy (why are you pretending to read a blog?) or just poor imagination, the image below is an artist's recreation of the event I just described. In order to protect the identities of everyone involved, the rainbow panties wearing blond girl has been replaced with a cornrows wearing black man.

Also, the football was replaced with a rugby ball.

In my defense, those flag belts are actually more difficult for me to grab than it would be for me to actually tackle somebody. I have to repress a lot of training and frustration to just go for the flag. That's one of the reasons I dislike flag football. It makes me look like an impotent fool who can't even grab a silly piece of fabric dangling from a smaller man's waist. Outrageous, I know. Moving on.

It's not just sports that involve raquets, bats, wheels, frisbees, food or greased pigs that my room mate and I have played. He used to be quite the paint ball player. I've played like twice, one of those times with him. We were on a trip sponsored by NCSU's Cru or something and were playing some paintball. It was mostly rental style equipment, so nothing too pricey.

Not that cheap. Is that even a real paintball gun?

There about 14 or so people on the trip, so we had decent teams. We played in some nice woods, full of trees, creeks and underbrush. Now I had heard my room mate was good, but it was all from him and I sort of assumed that he was just bragging a bit.

The first game of capture the flag we played was over in like three minutes. I didn't see anybody. My room mate just walked back with their flag and said he got six of them. No big deal.

Artist's simulation of my room mate playing paintball.

This continued for the rest of the day. One time he had expended his 20-30 shots gunning down half the opposing team, turned to one he had just taken out of the game and politely asked the dude for some ammo.

The guy gave it to him.

To this day I'm not sure if the other guy did that because he was a genuinely nice guy or if the blood lust in my room mate's eyes terrified him that much.

He did say "please".

If you ever play basketball with my room mate and me, you'll know that there are few things we appreciate more than blocked shots. If you can pack somebody's jumpshot right back down to the ground, that's almost as good as dunking in our opinion. And since neither of us can dunk, looks like you're about to have your shot denied a time or two.

Don't forget the subsequent trash talking.

While neither of us are spectacular basketball players, we both believe in playing close, aggressive defense. Which doesn't work out well if we're on opposing teams and have to guard each other. Passes get stolen, shots get blocked, people get hurt. Mostly my room mate. He jokes that he has to call fair catch before going for a rebound against me.

What can I say? Football is my first love.

But even we draw the line when it comes to blocking the shots of people who obviously shouldn't be blocked in an aggressive manner. Like six year olds. Unless you are also of a single digit age, you should never think that it's cool to block a little kid's shot. Especially to the point where you knock him to the ground. I'm not going to go into detail about this, but let it be known that we know a girl that we call "Lebron" in memory of her rage blackout style play against a little kid.

"And give me your juice box while you're at it."

Ballin' is a Habit Part 1

Most people who know my room mate and me know that from time to time we've dabbled in a sport or two. The purpose of this blog post is to share a few amusing stories from our time on the court/field. Sometimes we're playing well, sometimes...not so much.

As a bit of background information, in high school I played football while my room mate played tennis, and we each look like somebody who would play those sports. But over the years we've spent in college and just being guys who like sports, we've played soccer, rugby, lacrosse, frisbee, golf, basketball, racket-ball, softball, bad-mitten, volleyball, shuffleboard, boce ball, bowling, competitive eating, darts, running, swimming, paintball, martial arts...you get the point.

Ironically, this may be the only sport we've never played.

The point is that we're both pretty athletic and willing to try new sports, but certainly not professional grade athletes. We can hold our own in the average pick up game. I'm going to try and mix up the stories so that there aren't two basketball stories back to back, or two tales of woe in a row, etc.

I'm going to start off chronicling the most extreme sports challenge that we've both accepted: the Krispy Kreme Challenge. Now, for anyone reading this who doesn't know what the KKC is, or perhaps thinks they know what it is but are actually mistaken, I'll give you the run down on what might be both one of the most difficult and most unique sporting events known to man.

Outside of base-jumping/ironing that is.

Begun in 2004 at that illustrious bastion of academic and athletic prowess that is North Carolina State University, the Krispy Kreme Challenge is two parts race and one part competitive eating. Competitors begin at the Bell Tower, run two miles to the local Krispy Kreme, consume a dozen glazed doughnuts, and then run back to the start. Proceeds go to the North Carolina Children's Hospital and the event grows in size every year. Last year had a limit of 6,000 participants and received television coverage from local news, ESPN and newspapers around the nation. Over the years it has spawned several imitators, none of which stack up to the original.

Just to summarize, that is roughly 2,400 calories (what the FDA lists as a full day's eating) and four miles of running. All in under an hour. Not too bad you say? The record is 24 minutes and 31 seconds, held by Auburn Staples. That equals two sub six minute miles, twelve rings of dough and sugar in a few minutes and then two more sub six minute miles on a very full stomach. Not to mention if you're not a front runner, you have to dodge piles of displaced stomach contents.

All too often competitors end up like this on the way back.

My room mate has completed it once and I've finished it twice, but barely failed to cross the finish line in under an hour the first time. There are many different methods of training and competing that people utilize, but the most important part is to be sure you can pound down a dozen doughnuts and then waddle back to campus. Trust me.

This athlete uses the Michael Phelps Diet.

The first time I tried it I was just coming off a run conditioning class and had run a 10k the month before, and thought I was good at eating but the doughnuts really stumped me. The next time I competed I wasn't in running shape, but I was definitely ready for the eating. I finished twenty minutes faster and didn't even have to run too fast on the way back, even cockily accepting another doughnut from a bystander halfway back.

How I felt on the way back.

While I was in my undergrad, I played a lot of intramural sports. One of those was flag football. I have a love hate relationship with flag football. On the one hand, it is football and a competitive sport, both of which I love more than Hitler hates that Hannah Montana was canceled after only three seasons.

"How will I find out if Hannah and Oliver ever hook up?"

On the other hand, it is flag football which means there are silly rules, lack of contact and the ubiquitous shitty intramural referees.

The role model of choice for intramural referees.

I often played with other people in my scholarship program, which was a mixed bag. I liked most of them, but every time I played on a team with them a small piece of my soul died, so I was always sure to play on a dorm team in an attempt to salvage my love of the game. Crushing defeats, lack of practice, crushing defeats, not living up to potential and sometimes even forfeiting due to lack of team mates was a regular occurrence with them. Did I mention the crushing defeats?

Each year we won our first game handily, usually like 30-0, boosting our hopes and dreams for a successful season. And then we promptly proceeded to free fall down into the depths of defeat. Once, we lost a flag football game 74-0.

No, that's not a typo. We lost 74-0.

We were down 52-0 at half time, and so we asked the referee when he was going to call it on the mercy rule. He said that he couldn't call it until the third quarter was over because, and I quote "You guys could make a comeback."

Maybe if we had T-Mac on our team making it rain.

And the sport was basketball. And we were only down by four scores instead of seven. And if the referee would call any fouls.

Seriously? Who the fuck thinks that we could make a comeback from being down by more points at halftime than an average team scores in an entire game? And the other team was getting the ball first in the second half.

Icebox is not impressed with the odds.

Alright, enough failure. Back to winning. And winning big. And winning without class, style or grace. Which is the best way to win. Or is the only way to win? I'm often confused about what constitutes sportsmanship. So I just look to my role model.

Pictured: one step above the taunting we've dished out.

Although my room mate and I aren't the best at basketball, we aren't terrible. We have some games where we're just on. And sometimes we're just physically better than our opponents, like that time we played 2v2 against these two random 7th graders. If you think I'm just saying that, feel free to corroborate my story. Not only did we play them, but we beat them.

This was one of those times. It was a 2v2 half court game against two sophomores who both weighed in at an impressive 5'4" and 140 lbs or so. I'm 6'1", 230 lbs, give or take a half an inch and a few pounds. My room mate is 5'12" and about 165 lbs. Needless to say we were their physical superiors in a game where size (height especially) is important.

Not that big of a difference, but it certainly helps.

We played them once, and it was a fairly close game despite our height advantage. I think that the final score was like 10-7 or something. Since it was a close game, and not particularly physical, we decided to run it back. This time it wasn't so close. Final score was 10-4. Convincingly.

I might have mentioned in a previous post that my room mate dreams of being able to dunk a basketball. During our rout of the wee folk, I got down on one knee and placed my hands in the classic "boost up" position, calling out "Come on, dunk it!".

The wee folk were not amused.

Now one of the kids was a bit pissed. I guess he fancied himself a bit of a baller, and didn't exactly enjoy my room mate and myself not only beating him and his friend, but mocking them as well. He demands a rematch, which of course we give him since we've been mopping the court with them. He starts to play hard, setting picks, driving to the basket, really hustling out there. To no avail. Final score was 10-6.

Update:

Months later we were at the gym, playing some pick up basketball and one of the people on the other team was the angry little guy. We weren't sure if he remembered us or not. But he certainly did. I had the ball and was about to go up for a layup when my room mate yells "Look out!". Angry wee man packs the shit out of my shot. He remembered that day, and it had obviously been rankling in his heart.

"Vengeance shall be mine!"