I say Porch, you say Overlord!

One nice thing about the same people coming year after year is that you can just re-use old photos. We're all about the recycling here at SP. Well, we're about laziness anyway.

So here I am, returned from another weekend of Flatball in Kansas. For previous recaps click here and here.

I would suggest a recap is in order if you don't know what ultimate frisbee is, because I'm certainly not about to explain it yet again here. If you're already ready, let's plow ahead.

This year's roster (folks with new nicknames will have them listed here): On the MN side of the roster we have Jake, Larva, Matty, Me, Reed, Paul, Joel ("Runt"), Matt ("The Darkness"), and Corey. On the IA side came Wiggins, Jesse, Saienga, Seiler, Garret ("Kool-Aid Man"), Grant, Kent, and Trent. Many of these folks are repeat offenders to our team, but very notably Jake brought along four of his high school coachees. Yes, Jake helps coach a high school team. No, it's not nearly as scary as it sounds.

Friday was a sweet day for a drive down - the weather was nice, and the car talk was animated. Matty and I yet again took up our mocking of the latest trends in American Motoring. This year's big question: What the hell is the deal with people hanging leis from their rearview mirrors? We saw more of them than any of the other supercar offenders. And I just don't get it. Have they replaced mardi gras beads? I have no answers, only questions. We also saw a personalized plate that read: DADS TWK. It was on a truck. Draw your own conclusion. The other big highlight of the drive was a thorough mocking of Larva after he let it slip that he and Gardner had actually dined at the Toot-Toot cafe on the trip down last year. Apparently they have hundreds and hundreds of swords on display there, and the food wasn't so great. But then we could've told him that from the place being called Toot-Toot.

"Hello, Toot-Toot!"

Speaking of re-used jokes, we've had one myth officially debunked. Matty noticed on the way out of town Saturday morning that the Washburn University sign in Topeka had something up there about the "Ichabods". Sure enough, we confirmed with Carol on Saturday night that the University mascot is the Ichabods, named after college founder Ichabod Washburn. This unfortunately knocks the Ichabod Laundra Bar out of the realm of the absurd and merely into the realm of the oddly spelled. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.

Let's get to the on-field action, though. Saturday morning we hit the fields 17 strong, which compared to last year's 9, is real good. Will (The tournament director) set us up with a 2 seed in our pool, the key to the water spigot at our park, and off we went. It's worth noting that we got to play at an actual park this year - not an industrial park, and not a state park. Kudos to Will on that one, especially since I suggested it (have I mentioned this is the 9th year Jake and I have gone? - We know a few things about the area by now). Here's the day one recap: First game was against a plucky team called Nucleus from KC or thereabouts. We won by two (something like 10-8) in a game controlled by the wind that was blowing straight up and down the field, which is always a pain in the arse. In the second game we played a team from Tulsa with the same painful wind, only this time we tightened it up a bit and won something like 13-9. Matty and I recognized one of their players as one of the Fayetteville, AK team members who we bought a bunch of whiskey shots for on a Saturday night in 2000 when we knew we had to play them the next morning. That's called "taking one for the team". It worked. He cursed us when we brought that up. But in a good way. Game three saw us get roundly mauled by a team from Colorado in a game where pretty much everyone was tired. I'm guessing our roster only beats theirs about every one in seven games anyway, so it didn't matter much, but it would've been nice to give them a better game anyway.

The fun note of Saturday was the way the team took to the (more or less) random team name of Porch Overlord. It all started with Jake pulling out the standard call-and-response: "I say Porch, you say Overlord! Porch! Overlord!". And so forth... only that wasn't enough for him, because he made it into a hilarious mental exercise by just yelling out the calls at random. So very often you'd hear from our sidelines the call:

Porch! Overlord!
Porch! Overlord!
Lord! Overporch!
Over! Porchlord!
Lord! Porchover!
Porch! Overlord!
And so forth... for as long as he wanted to yell them out. It was really, really entertaining for some reason.

In any event, a 2-1 Saturday and a held seed in pool is as good as our teams have done in some years, so post-game celebrations of whiskey poppers (an IA tradition!) and a game of Cower were in order. Good times, and a return trip to the Vogels' house for a wonderful cooked dinner. I will praise that family every chance I get - Jim and Carol are two of the nicest folks I've ever met.

Sunday morning around 2AM (curse you Daylight Savings Time - steal an hour of my sleep!) I emerged from the bathroom to see that Reed had returned from the party. He has this weird giggle on his face and says to me simply: "Monkey Gangs!". Apparently Larva and Matty had been telling him about the gangs of monkeys in India who were just roving the streets and mugging people. And apparently Reed found this amazingly humorous. I can't blame him. When this was all recapped to Jake the next morning he was like "Yeah! I heard they hung one of 'em last week!". You just knew Jake'd be up on his monkey news, after all. Personally, I doubt somehow that the hung monkey served as a lesson to the other monkeys, but then what do I know?

The other good party story relayed by Matty concerned a parking lot confrontation that featured a guy sitting on the hood of a girl's car, and the girl gunning it, hitting the brakes, and rolling the guy about 10 feet... and while it would've been fun to see, the sleep was glorious too. What can I say, I'm old.

Sunday's action featured us getting as far as we've gotten since 1998. We won our first game rather handily over Fayetteville, setting up a second round game against some combo team from like KC/StL/Denver, or something like that. They were quite good, but too physical. You're not supposed to be physical in ultimate. It says right there in the rulebook that we're playing a non-contact sport. So when one of their thugs bumped Seiler three times in a row while marking him, I thought to myself:

Jesus, why don't you just take off his underwear while you're in there?!"

Apparently I also yelled that out loud (damn lack of an inner monologue), because suddenly everyone on the sideline was looking at me and laughing, and Matty was making a follow-up crack about sticking dollar bills in Seiler's shorts. So that worked out well, and they toned it down a bit during the game, which was helped by the fact that we played well enough to be respected. We didn't play well enough to win, but it was gratifying to make a run in the second half that forced them to bring their starting lineup back in. Then we scored a couple more of the starters, finally bowing by something like 13-10 in what was a very good semi-final game. The only time we've been further was the 1998 finals, and both times, we could've won. But there's nothing about this year's game to hang our heads about, which is a definite upgrade from a couple of the past few years.

The other two great Sunday calls were: Jake's dubbing of Garret as "Kool-Aid Man". This came about because Garret is big and blocky (mind you, we're not saying fat-bellied, just big enough to pull it off), and he was dressed in all red. Jake started yelling " Oh YEAH!" when Garret would make a play. It was fabulous. The other money call came from Grant, after Seiler got hit from both sides during a jump disc. The call: "Dude - he got Manwiched!". I'll be using that one in the future...

And finally, on our way to Yellow Sub after the games (another tradition), Matty and I saw the sign for a Lawrence sporting goods store named... The Jock's Niche. Yet another place at which I wouldn't want to answer the phone.

In the end, I heard more people saying that they'd had fun this year, which I think is gonna have to be the plan going forward. In fact, Jake proposed the 10MN, 10IA plan for as many years as we keep going. I'm all in favor, especially if it produces the same fun and solid play as this year. Thanks to all involved, and if any of the high school kids read this, you're all welcome back any time.

And speaking of that, as one sort of a post-script side note: It occurs to me that our team in the finals in 98 had two H.S. kids on it. Maybe youth is the key... we'll continue that thought next year. I'm out. Peace.

04/07/2004