Words from a World Champion

I came in to work today with a black eye, a fat lip, and claw marks on my left arm. Did I get into a fight? Was I in a car wreck? Did I attempt to stop a grizzly bear from mauling someone's grandmother? No, no, and no; I was in a blueball game that went into overtime. It was the first sanctioned blueball game in world history to go a full five quints and let me tell you, a triathlon pales in comparison to that. At least with a triathlon, you train beforehand. For blueball, you read the rules and think, "There's no way something this goofy can be that strenuous." And that, my friends, is where blue ball gets you.

We played for about two hours. That's 120 minutes of running, throwing, kicking, screaming, and accidental clobbering. (Predictably, I was involved in a disproportionate amount of the accidental clobberings.) That's a long time to play anything. Add to that the fact I was playing guys I've known for several years; as the game got more and more heated, I began to remember/hallucinate things about the opposing team like, "I bought that dude some McNuggets one time and he never paid me back!" Grudges surfaced, and the longer the game went, the more intense it became. By the time we hit the end of regulation, we had no energy but a ton of rage. It was absurd out there. We were a plane ride and a few cans of Red Bull away from taking this thing to the Middle East and making some serious strides in the War on Terror.

In the end, we won. Thank God we won. It's one thing to play a made-up game all afternoon, getting really beat-up, and win; it's sort of ridiculous, but it's funny. It's completely different to do all of that and lose at the end. That's something that could drive me to sell all my possessions and enroll in clown college. Afterwards, like most top-flight competitors, we drank a lot and boiled crawfish. All hail BlueBall: king of sports, sport of kings.