Greetings readers—I’ve been putting this article off all week because—well, shit—because we took 12th place or
something god-awful and the thought of re-living it on paper—and with any hope, some readership—really didn’t appeal to me all that much—also, I’ve just jetsetted down the east coast and back again before working 36 hours in the last 48 hours (more on this later.) Anyway, thanks in advance to anyone who reads this trash.
Worked all day in a dishroom at Uconn before shaving a ridiculous mustache onto my face( regretting to my core that the phrase “MAOstache” ever crossed my mind and rushing off) leaving a half drank glass of Jameson on my dresser and my plant unwatered with the blinds down. Linked up with Noah and Nella, and wrote haikus in the backseat with Greg on the drive down to the field, bumping dubstep at high volume the whole way—which led me to consider how crazy it is that we were to be playing on the HK field—who’d have thought producing “cool” could be so lucrative? We walked the field for a while and met up with the boys and walked some more then headed to the hotel and ate an exorbitantly priced dinner care of the Newcastle Sheraton—I don’t think we even got any paintball talk done—hell, I couldn’t get my mind past my 6 dollar pint of Yuengling (fucking criminals) but then there are definite advantages to the P.M. bracket and we lived it up. Also, Rick’s train didn’t arrive until like 6 a.m. Friday morning. And take my word for it friend: it ain’t a party without Ranger Rick.
MAO was about as perfect an event as you could ask for—OXCC is a fantastic venue, and it’d been borderline drought, pure blue skies the entire month of April—same for the weekend forecast. Considering we didn’t have to fly or rent a car or have luggage disappear or even crack our tanks, there were so many things going in our favor for this event that it really eats at me that we didn’t finish better. We had some issues—we couldn’t nail down any practices with higher level teams and we lost players just before the event; Granthony and Macari are both students and couldn’t make it, Spant was unable to play as well as Zirp—but there is a good deal of athleticism on our roster and we felt fairly confident running lean (also we got Fogarty back in the mix.)
Our first match was against Revo—for whatever reason, we still have some kind of rivalry or bad blood or something with these guys, reaching back to the New Jersey event in 2011—except for Carlos Beltran, he’s the man and to my knowledge the originator of the dirtstache intimidation factor at nationals. I went back to back the first few points so I don’t really recall what happened aside from blowing up their D1 runner on the overslide several times. I was playing the D side tower and it was a pretty simple job—Pierce would do most of the work in front of me and we had g’s early so we were in control the first half of the game. I sat my first point when the score was 3 or 4 to 1 and there was something like 3 minutes left in the game—this guy runs through on Fogarty in snake 1 with his gun inside expecting the move—the Revo guy has paint coming in across field and from Greg in the snake corner and Fogarty just tucks in to stay safe once he goes. The guy keeps running, talks after he’s dead and I see a flag fly, say, “damn right” then see the ref running to pull Greg and our remaining player. This was just one of a few calls that lit up the spectator side, which was notably packed with rowdy drunk New Englanders and I don’t want to get caught up in that just yet so I’ll just say the score went to 4-3. 10 seconds left in the game and we’re sitting out waiting for the point to start, and we wait and wait for about 20 minutes while there is some discussion going on and then end up coming off the field, signing the score sheet a 4-3 win and going on with our lives.
We scouted Denver Fury earlier in the day and know from past experience how good that crew is. Make no mistake about it, we absolutely did NOT underestimate this team. When we were 5 strong we were banging out with them but our midgame seemed to suffer the first couple points. We started getting hectic and switching jobs and changing plays—blah blah blah composure. Later on they were killing bodies early and we got a few midgame penalties that screwed us—their attacker on the Dorito side was really nasty and he chewed us up—I don’t think he sat a point all game. Long story short: we stepped on our dicks and got 0-5. Oh, and I almost forgot—2 minutes before the field goes live for this match we got word from the Ultimate Judge that they overturned our win from the Revo match (nearly an hour prior to this) and turned it into a tie. Fun Stuff.
This is as good a point as any to jump into some of the adventures we had concerning the officiating at this event—Primarily the Revo debacle: this stemmed from a no-point as called by the judges because the flag carrier stepped out of bounds before hanging the flag—there was another player left alive on Revo who could’ve hung the flag, only the score table thought the flag hang was just dirty or something and the 2 minutes ran. I do not dispute that the alive guy should’ve been able to hang the flag, but I take issue with a hypothetical flag hang turning into an actual flag hang when at the LAST EVENT we were on the receiving end of a similar situation and had no such sympathy. (If you didn’t read the DFW piece I’m referring to the PSP running our field 3 minutes short—more specifically, the L.I.F.T. match when Greg should’ve been awarded a flag hang leaving us to play the remaining time starting from a tie instead of down one point—I’m not saying we would’ve won on that but we did get knocked out because of a tie….just sayin’.) Anyway, I think we got our second official apology from the PSP.
What ended up happening was that Revo bitched and argued (as well they should have) at the head judge until the ultimate judge came over and overturned the initial call 2 minutes before our next match. Call it weak-mindedness, nerves or making excuses on my part—that sucked some wind out of our sails. Hey, just for fun take a look at section 4.1.3 of the PSP 2013 rulebook. No shit, as in 413 the area code. I think I’ll just leave it at that for now.
A tie and a loss to start MAO. The image of Kraft stomping his feet and venting afterward with a sweat-smeared MAOstache drawn in eyeblack cracked me up again over drinks and wings later while we’re watching the Celtics-Knicks. We were in a Wild Wings and some frat-boy looking dude asked us to change the big screen to the Islander’s game then snidely said over the ginger in the Celtics shirt, “come on, they lost, guys” and almost had to eat his words when they came back on a 19 point run to nearly tie the game back up. They fell short in the end but I didn’t see it, because I was outside smoking and apologizing to a table of Korean (?) ladies who were rudely interrupted by some dude with a bunch of bro-tats and a Metal Mullisha sweatshirt leaning in to scream in their faces as he passed by their quiet table.
Paintball days like the one we had Friday really make you think about why we do what we do—you come all this way and spend all this money and so many things could go wrong—and then there are underpaid, overworked refs to get through. Every point Revo scored was on a penalty against our team or a wacky runthrough where they should’ve earned a penalty (and in some cases, both!). I can’t say shit about the Fury match, they whooped us—though the penalties didn’t help. Also I recall the pit sidelines lighting up over a blown call against an obvious face hit on the Fury dorito guy….Also I recall shouting something like, “THE GUY WHO IS HANGING THE FLAG HAS A FUCKING FACE HIT! EVERYONE SAW IT!” and maybe “Shame on you #21” (the ref not the player, of course.) The cool kids went out to a great little hipster bar called Homegrown and I ordered an 8 dollar pitcher of Yuengling and snuck Rick some beers (license expired by a single day, denied from every other bar, homegrown just drew a big x on his hand) and listened to this jam band that was pretty sweet. Tons of chicks, not a single guy in our bunch—well, Fogatron was on his game but…well……huh.
And then we have days like Saturday to completely erase days like we had Friday. Days that make you slap yourself for having been feeling sorry for yourselves from the day you had yesterday. At dinner we had discussed running Pierce toward the snake side and pushing me up into the attack, trading off with Noah and I’d back him when I needed a rest. Apologies in advance for bad journalism—I played A LOT of points on Saturday and recall very little of what actually happened. I know we absolutely shitstomped L.I.F.T.—I was beating their runner into D1, and Rick/Noah were locking them in from the tower. Someone was trapping their center shooters at home long enough for me to get my lane up on their secondary to the snake side and the image of dudes truffle-shuffling through my lane into the Boston (snakeside anvil) is making me smile as I write this. Also, I pooped in this dude’s lobby so hard he made a noise on the last point and then slid underneath their d1—and I heard the L.I.F.T. guys muttering that I’d been cheating the whole match and it made me wish I actually had been. Petty of me. Whatever—4-1 us. Dallas redemption complete.
The Playground Legends match was more of the same—we played with fire, knowing that if we didn’t absolutely crush it we wouldn’t make Sunday. They seemed to pick up on what I was doing and I felt more pressure in the Doritos—I’d look up and see 2 or 3 streams coming in over my head, then challenge whoever’s lane dropped first—then look over and see one of us sliding into the 50 snake and knew it was my turn. It feels good to win 5-0 period, but it feels better to win that big over a good team like PL. They were all sharp but it seemed like they just couldn’t beat our plan. Oh, also I got a hilarious penalty from my favorite (Judge 21, HK field)—I felt a shot, looked over and pointed—he nodded. I stood up. He threw a minor and I gave him the “what do you mean?” I attempted to get clarification after the point and he plain ignored me—the pit sideline thought this was as funny as I did. Anyways…we made Sunday and we were on another high on the emotional rollercoaster this event proved to be—the image of Kraft getting all misty-eyed hugging his older brother at the end of that day is also burned into my head.
That night at Buffalo Wild Wings (yes, again—I’m a glutton for punishment and the Thai Curry did me so dirty all day that I figured, what the hell, why not?) I felt pretty confident—we got to murder it in front of our families and friends and there isn’t much that compares to that. I did, however catch a synchronicity while simultaneously watching the Bruins lose and the undercard fight for Mayweather-Guerrerro—In a decision that could only be called criminal, Gabriel Rosado lost to J’Leon Love and the whole place blew up—I’m not a boxing fan but I know a bad call when I see one and in this case the wrong man won the fight. Mayweather also went on to win by decision—incidentally, both he and Love are under the same management. I didn’t get to see that fight, but my dad tried to from some wacky website, resulting in a ton of Malware on my work laptop, which I’ve only now recovered from enough to do some writing. At some point that night we found out we were playing Hustle and were just as eager to get some redemption from them as we were from L.I.F.T. (read the Dallas piece, already!)
Questionable calls aside—we weren’t getting it done during the Hustle match. We didn’t produce kills from either side of the field, and we didn’t get up the snake at all. On the third point we were in position to win a 2 on 2 and this dude ran down on me—I circled around the dorito right as it was happening and put paint on the guy’s face—he shot me on my side and back and I was so sure that I got him first I just bumped up to kill the last guy—red flag, score 0-3, and 4 on 5 the next point. We scored a 15 second point from down bodies the next point—I only remember running up the field rolling my gun then hustling off to air back up—then we scored one more point in about the same amount of time.
During that point I recall shooting the d-side tower on my run into their d1 and he didn’t move—he was standing in between myself and the last player alive so I ripped him apart for good measure as Greg hung the flag and we hustled off to do it again. The score was 4-2 and there was 15 seconds left and we couldn’t win, but we could at least make them hurt a little—negative: the refs said Noah was shot on his back, presumably by his own team and kept playing; swing point (presumably because there weren’t enough bodies to pull even though I saw 3 of us at least) 1-5 and tournament over.
Nobody cried or flipped out or refused to shake hands. Nobody argued about what could’ve been done. We just cleared our shit out of the pits, thanked our Eclipse tech and headed out to the parking lot—the only thing I kept thinking(and saying) was that it wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought Hustle was capable of winning this tournament, but I knew they weren’t and for some reason it frustrated me to no end. A team like AC402 would chew Hustle up when the tournament was on the line—Greg pointed out that AC402 was already knocked out and that snapped me out of it (I also almost had to eat my words during Hustle’s match for 1st and 2nd with DC Devastation.) I should point out at this point that I mean to take nothing away from Hustle, they played a good game against us and this was their event to win—with that said, there will be bloody, miserable, shit splattered hell to pay in Chicago.
I said my goodbyes, drove back to my parents house in Maryland and spent the night there before prying myself out of bed the next morning at 4:30 am to make a flight out of BWI to TLH to pick up my lovely, talented MFA-havin’ future sugarmama breadwinner—Kaitlyn. I Met up with her after some time-travel sleep, had great gnocci at a hip little place called Kool Beanz and would’ve fallen asleep watching The Hobbit were it not for the side conversations in the room that annoy me to no end during any movie—much less a movie that I actually want to see. We hit the road the following morning and did Florida to Maryland in about 15 hours, driving and smoking and listening to music and making sense of the fact that we haven’t seen each other for anything longer than a 2 week stretch in 3 years. We stopped at South of the Border and I bought all the same fireworks I bought when I was a kid and it was smooth sailing until D.C. as per usual—the rain started to fall and the drivers lost their minds and we were just concluding a long conversation about death and god and fate all that long trip shit when we came upon a massive accident—4 cars and an upside-down 18 wheeler a hundred yards further. I don’t remember getting in to bed, but I remember getting up to pee and my body feeling like an 18 wheeler had tucked me in to bed at full speed.
Maryland to Connecticut in about 13 hours thanks to rush hour crossing into CT, The Harp on Church in Willimantic for beers and bed for 5 hours before another couple hours of driving on either end of 6 hour work day—went home showered and my girlfriend is already gone again to her parents house—turned around and delivered pizza up at Uconn until 3 a.m., pried my contacts out of my eyes, slept 2 and a half hours before working my actual job 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
I woke up Saturday morning and it was raining—a hollow feeling between my ears where there should be the white noise of the highway or a jet engine or the inane gibberish of 8 crazy people or the din of a paintball tournament: dubstep and occasional weedsmoke on the wind muted by the eruption of noise following a buzzer sounding the start of a point. Its no wonder people get addicted to the traveling lifestyle—in another life I could be one of those dudes who follows a band around all summer in lieu of a static, “normal” life—following the strangeness wherever it goes. More and more I find myself feeling at home on a hotel floor or airport terminal dazing off to Com Truise and trying not to people watch too much—sunglasses on, try to write. My time on the road feels more and more normal and the transition back to “normal” intensifies. Home with a capital H comes crashing in on me the moment I return to my filthy room and unhappy plant and cloudy glass of whiskey I left behind. Still smells like my Vibrams and sealed in Husky Pizza farts in there. I checked the weather at every field near me hoping for some sun in the forecast and had no luck; ended up goofing around at Outback for a couple of hours before watching Iron Man 3(meh, shoulda watched Gatsby)—rain or shine, I neededto play; I was going to be reffing all day Sunday at the NEXL (note: congrats Invasion and Rod Squad!)
I’m presently writing this article from the warehouse at Uconn—I’m supporting an autistic man who keeps trying to shut my laptop because he isn’t used to all the funny looking paintball stickers I’ve stuck on it and I can’t say I blame him. No, wait it’s lunch time. This is as good a point as any to wind this thing down and stop wasting you’re time. You’ve got things to do. Go watch some paintball videos and snapshoot and STRETCH. Thanks again for reading and as always, questions comments complaints are all welcome. Keep your eyes open for the next one. Until then, you know where to find me.
Onward, upward…and… sideward.
And squidward.
#Chitown
- Josh
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