Tag: sports

December 26-29, 1997. I made another movie. (#157)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

Author’s note: I’m back.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to post weekly, like I’ve always tried to. I don’t want this project to become stressful. But I’ll do the best I can, and hopefully my small handful of loyal readers will stick with me even I take a week off here and there.

A month ago, when I went home to Santa Lucia County for Thanksgiving, I showed my family the Dog Crap and Vince movie that I had made with the kids from the youth group at church.  I first created the characters from Dog Crap and Vince when I was still in high school, with a lot of input from my brother Mark, and I have always credited Mark as a co-creator of Dog Crap and Vince.  They all enjoyed the movie.  Mark said that when I came home for Christmas, we should get together with his friends Cody and Boz and make another movie.

We did not own a video camera.  I had always wanted one growing up.  I had tons of silly ideas for TV shows and movies, sometimes Mark and I and some combination of his other friends would even act them out and even record the audio, but we never had the capability to record video.  Video cameras cost a lot of money back then, and it was never a priority for my parents to have one.  But Mark said that Boz had one we could probably borrow.

It was now the Friday after Christmas.  I was planning on driving back to Jeromeville either Monday night or Tuesday morning.  I was getting bored at home.  Three and a half years after graduation, I had lost touch with all of my high school friends.  There was not much to do at home except hang out at home.  The closest thing I had to friends at home were Mark, Cody, and Boz.  I was going to graduate from the University of Jeromeville in six months, and they were sixteen, still in high school.  This was less of an age difference compared to when I was seventeen and they were twelve, but they still did not feel like a primary social group for me.

Despite how bored I was, I had made no progress on this movie that Mark and I were supposedly going to make.  I had not done much of anything the whole time I was home.  We had our family Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa and the Lusks, who were in the area for the holidays.  Jane Lusk was my aunt, my mother’s younger sister; she visited every Christmas with her husband Darrell and their children, nineteen-year-old Rick and seventeen-year-old Miranda.  Uncle Darrell’s family was also in Santa Lucia County, so they spent a week going back and forth visiting both sets of their relatives. 

Mark had a new game for Nintendo 64, GoldenEye.  The game follows the story of the James Bond movie of the same name, which I had seen once.  The most well-known feature of this game was a multiplayer free-for-all mode, in which two to four players battle each other.  Rick and Miranda and Mark and I spent many hours of that winter break playing GoldenEye, as well as Mario Kart.  In both games, Mark almost always won, and Miranda almost always came in last place.

In those days, Mark would often record what he was watching on television on a VHS tape, so he could watch it again.  He watched Saturday Night Live regularly, because in the 1990s it was actually funny much of the time.  Whenever the show would run a sketch that was not worth rewatching, he would back up the tape during the next commercial and record over it immediately.  Whenever I would go home, Mark would share with me his Saturday Night Live highlights.

Saturday Night Live had been in the news recently because Chris Farley, a cast member on the show a few years earlier who was also in a few movies after that, had died of a drug overdose a couple of weeks earlier.  Two months before his death, Farley had returned to SNL as the weekly guest host, and Mark saved that entire episode.  Earlier that week, I had watched Farley reprise many of his past recurring characters.  He also portrayed an exaggeratedly intoxicated Hank Williams Jr. and the weather phenomenon El Niño, acting like a professional wrestler.  Throughout the whole time Mark and I watched the episode, Mom kept interrupting, commenting on Farley’s visibly poor health.

The next day, Mark and I watched other things he had recorded since then.  We watched what was then considered the final episode of Beavis and Butthead, although unbeknownst to anyone at the time, the show would be revived in the 2010s and 2020s.  After this, we watched another SNL in which a Bill Gates character announced that Microsoft had bought Christmas, and that Mac users were now Jewish.  Bill Gates then proceeded to spy on Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who was dancing to the song “Tubthumping.”  Oddly random, but hilarious.

Mark got home from basketball practice while I was eating dinner Friday night.  Mark got all of the athletic talent in our family.  He also had a great deal more artistic talent than me, and he and some of his teammates had begun a new tradition of drawing temporary tattoos on each other with permanent marker.  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the tattoo that someone had drawn on Mark today.

“A polar bear,” Mark explained.  “John McCall drew it.”  The polar bear on Mark’s arm was floating on a piece of sea ice, with the letters POLAR BEAR underneath in a style imitating the Old English blackletter font.

“And why do you have a tattoo of a polar bear?” I asked.

Mom and Dad were in the room with us.  “That’s the nickname the others on the team have come up with for Mark,” Mom said.

“And why is Mark’s nickname ‘Polar Bear?’”

Dad answered this time.  “Because he’s big and white!”

I laughed.  “That does make sense.”

Later that night, Mark and I were playing Mario Kart, and Mark said something that reminded me of something from Dog Crap and Vince.  As my brain started thinking of related things, I said out loud, “We never made that movie we were going to make while I was home.  Do you still want to?”

“I don’t know,” Mark replied.  “Do we have time?  How long are you gonna be home?”

“I’m leaving probably late Monday night or early Tuesday morning.  So we’d have about 72 hours.”  As I continued steering Luigi around the course, throwing banana peels behind me, I got an idea.  “I think this sounds like a challenge.  We have 72 hours to make a movie.  And we’ll call our production company ‘72 Hour Films.’”

“Sounds good.  I’ll ask Boz in the morning if we can go get his camera.  Boz was probably going to come over this weekend anyway.”

“Great!  And if Rick and Miranda are around, we can get them in our movie too!  So what’s it going to be about?”

“I don’t know.  This was your idea.”

“Well, you’ve been saying this whole time that you want to make a movie.”

“I do, but I don’t know what it’s about!”

I saw the GoldenEye cartridge sitting next to the Nintendo console.  “What about a spy movie?  Like GoldenEye?”

“Maybe, but it seems like that might be too hard if we only have 72 hours.”

I thought about other things I had done at home during previous school breaks, and suddenly it came to me.  “Moport,” I said.  “Let’s make a sports movie about Moport.  Like, maybe, there’s a Moport team that’s terrible, they finish last in the league, so they get the number one draft pick, but the player they draft ends up just making things worse.”

“That could work.”

“Ooo.  Better idea.  They accidentally draft the wrong player.  Like, the general manager gets the name wrong at the draft, and the player they pick is this weird crazy goofball.”

“But all the goofy stuff he does is so crazy, they still end up winning!” Mark said.

“Yes!  Perfect!”

“As long as we get Boz to play the goofy guy.  He’d be great in that role.”

“Definitely.”


Moport was a game my brother and I invented, based on a game I played in PE class in high school.  The game I learned combined elements of football and soccer; Mark and I added hockey sticks to the mix, and Moport was born.  For the last few years, we had held a two-on-two Moport tournament in the front yard with Cody, Boz, John McCall, and some of Mark’s other friends.

By the time Mark and I went to bed that night, we had a workable script, and we had decided to title the movie #1 Draft Pick.  I suggested that the team in the movie have a geographically appropriate, yet ridiculous-sounding name, like many actual low-level sports teams.  The Gabilan Valley in Santa Lucia County is known for growing vegetables, so we named our team the Gabilan Fighting Salads.  The movie would open with the Salads losing badly, finishing in last place again, giving them the number one draft pick for the following year.  After drafting the wrong player, as we had previously decided, we would show scenes of this player, whom we had named Evan, practicing and playing and still somehow finding ways to score.  We added implied references to Evan being on drugs.  I suggested that Evan played college Moport for North Coast State, because that was a well-known hippie stoner school, and it was also where Rick went, although Rick was not at all a hippie or stoner.

After the Salads’ first win, the team practiced the next day, and Evan accidentally kicked a ball that left the field and hit a supervillain-like bystander in the face.  The villain vowed to get revenge on the Salads and sabotage their season.  He sent a henchman to break into the locker room and plant drugs on Evan.  When Evan’s name was cleared, the villain hired another henchman to shoot Evan.  Mark and I both agreed that Rick should play this other henchman, since Rick’s side of the family were gun enthusiasts.  “But we should use the Nintendo Zapper as the prop gun,” Mark suggested.

“That would be hilarious,” I replied.

We continued brainstorming the ending of the movie.  Evan survived the shooting, so the villain drove his car onto the field and ran over Cody’s character, whom we named Bob.  Cody did not look at all like someone who would be named Bob, so we thought that was funny.  Bob needed to play injured since the Salads were out of replacement players, and they managed to score a goal on a ridiculously improbable shot.

“Then we should end by showing Fidel Castro dancing,” Mark said, laughing, referencing Saturday Night Live.

“Let’s name your character ‘Castro,’” I suggested.  “And at the end, you’re not there, and Evan and Bob talk about how you went to visit your Uncle Fidel in Cuba.”

“Yes!”


My least favorite part of doing a creative project with other people involved is getting everyone together at the same time.  Fortunately, the Lusks were already planning on coming over today, as was Boz.  Mark called Cody, and he was free to come over as well.  Ronnie and D.J. Lusk, Rick and Miranda’s other cousins on their dad’s side, lived about an hour drive away, and they were also in town for the day.  That gave us two more people to use as extras in the movie; Ronnie and D.J. played one of the opposing teams.

“Dad?” I asked as we started filming Saturday morning, shortly after Boz showed up with the camera.  “Can you be in our movie for one scene?”

“Ahh,” Dad grunted as he got up from the couch, faking being annoyed although I knew he was going to enjoy helping out.  “What do I have to do?”

“You’re the general manager of the Salads, but you get the player’s name wrong at the draft,” I explained.  I placed the script on the table where he would be sitting in the shot, so that he could glance down at his lines if he needed to.

I sat next to Dad, in character as Coach McAfee.  Mark and Boz faced us, with Boz holding the camera.  “Where’d you get the camera?” Dad asked.

“We’re borrowing it from the Bosworths,” I explained.

Dad turned to Boz and asked, “That’s your camera?”

“Yeah,” Boz replied.

Dad played his part perfectly, speaking in an absent-minded manner that would make it believable that he would select the wrong player.  As an added bonus, he called his own team the Lettuce instead of the Salads.  To this day, I do not know if that was intentional, adding to the mood, or if that was just Dad being Dad and actually getting the name wrong.  After Dad called Evan’s name, Boz ran into the scene, in character as Evan, doing a silly dance and hugging Dad’s character.  Evan wore a sleeveless top with his arms covered in tattoos, drawn by Mark with a permanent marker.

Next, we went outside and set up the Moport field in the front yard, with the same scoreboard and goals that we used for the actual Moport tournament.  When we got to the part with the supervillain getting kicked in the face, we filmed Boz and Cody, in character as Evan and Bob, kicking the ball around in practice.  Evan then kicked the ball so hard it flew off camera.  My plan was to have the villain, played by me in a different costume from Coach McAfee, looking out of a second-story window with the ball coming in from off screen to hit me in the face.  But I had to change clothes for this.

“What are you gonna wear?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me go look.”  I went inside to the closet in my old bedroom and dug around, not really sure what I was looking for, but hoping I would know when I found it.

In eleventh grade, five years earlier, I had to do a group project for history class, a presentation on one decade in American history.  My group got the 1950s.  We talked about President Eisenhower, the war in Korea, McCarthyism, and the Cold War.  We also included some references to the culture of the 1950s, which my classmates decided would include getting me to dress up as Elvis Presley and lip-synch and dance.  Mom got in on this, decorating an old thrift store shirt with fringe and sequins for my Elvis costume.  When my classmates recorded me for the class project, I could not keep a straight face for more than ten seconds, but we decided that would be enough, because the stuffy 1950s father would turn off the television after ten seconds and refuse to let his children watch that garbage.

I found the Elvis shirt in my closet, along with a trucker cap printed in a cow pattern, which Dad had gotten from a local auto parts store, and a pair of oversized sunglasses.  I walked to the window where my villain character would get hit in the face and opened it.  “I’m ready,” I said to Mark, Cody, and Boz, still outside below.

“What the hell are you wearing?” Mark shouted.

“It’s my villain costume,” I replied.

“How is that a villain costume?  You look ridiculous!”

“Hey, we’re not exactly trying to win an Academy Award for costume design.  I was going for something that would look different from my coach character.”

After we finished, I went downstairs, taking off my villain costume as I walked outside.  “Is that the Elvis shirt?” Dad asked as I walked past.

“Yeah.  You’ll just have to see the final movie when we finish.”


We had just as much ridiculous fun for the rest of that Saturday and Sunday as we finished filming.  For the scene where Rick’s henchman character shoots Evan, Rick wore a black cowboy hat and boots, with an actual holster on his belt.  We all had a hard time keeping a straight face as Rick, trying to be serious, pulled the Nintendo Zapper, the gun from the old Duck Hunt game, out of his holster, complete with cord dangling from the bottom.

Although we kept the plot basically the same, we added two scenes that were not in the original script.  In one, Boz, in character as Evan, wakes up in the middle of the night and has a vision of two-time Moport champion Mark Dennison giving him encouragement.  Mark Dennison was, of course, just Mark playing himself, wearing his Ice Monkeys uniform from the Moport tournaments.  Since this was an extremely low-budget film, many of us were playing multiple roles, and the audience would just have to accept the fact that Mark Dennison looked exactly like Evan’s teammate Ben Castro.  Although Mark Dennison had some encouraging words for Evan, he acted kind of obnoxious, eating Evan’s food and sitting right on top of him on the bed.  Pee-Wee the cat was in the room at the time, and Mark picked her up and started petting her.

The other scene that we added happened after the villain’s plan to plant drugs on Evan failed.  Boz played a double role as the henchman who planted the drugs, and only Boz and I were in the room when we filmed this scene.  The camera did not need to move, so I just placed it on a table.  On Monday morning, when I had finally finished editing, I watched the final cut of #1 Draft Pick with my family and the Lusks, and I had not yet realized that none of them had seen this scene, not even Mark.

“The plan didn’t work!” Boz’s hunchbacked henchman character shouted on screen.  “Evan was proven innocent, and he’ll be playing in tomorrow’s game!”

On the screen, in character as the villain with the Elvis shirt, I looked directly toward the camera and said, “Then it’s time for Plan B.”  The henchman walked off screen, tapping his fingers together.  A few seconds later, the villain reached over and pressed Play on a portable CD player.  Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” began playing as the villain began doing some kind of dorky, ridiculous dance.

As my family watched this scene, hysterically laughing, Mark looked at me, confused.  “That’s Plan B?” he shouted.  “What is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, laughing so hard I began crying.  “I was just doing something weird.”

“But… really?  That’s your Plan B?”

Mom and Dad laughed particularly hard at later scenes in the movie, like when Rick’s character shot Evan with the Duck Hunt gun, and when the villain drove his car onto the field.  “So that’s why you drove on the lawn the other day,” Dad said.  As the final scene played, with Mark and I in character as Ben Castro and Uncle Fidel, dancing to Tubthumping, then transitioning to the credits, I looked around the room to see everyone’s reaction.  “That was very good,” Mom said.

I made a copy of #1 Draft Pick to leave with Mark and packed the other one that night to bring back to Jeromeville with me.  Mark showed the movie to Cody and Boz the next time he saw them, and they both enjoyed it.  I showed it to a couple of my school friends over the years, but not nearly as many people saw this one compared to my earlier Dog Crap and Vince movie.  But, considering how quickly we had to put everything together, it turned out fairly good.  This was definitely the highlight of my winter break that year.

And of course, to this day, my family still laughs whenever we hear the phrase “Plan B.”

Rest in peace, Uncle Darrell. He lost his battle with cancer in 2023 as I was outlining this episode.

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September 12, 1997. My return to the baseball stadium. (#144)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 9 Comments

I was never an athlete.  My brother Mark got all the athletic talent in our family.  I played tee ball when I was six years old; all I remember is that we did not keep score, which I thought was dumb, and the coach made me cry once.  My high school football career lasted one day, before I realized that I was in way over my head and badly out of shape.  Despite that, though, I still grew up around sports, watching games on television and working the scoreboard and snack bar for Mark’s baseball and basketball games.

I went to my first professional sporting event, a Bay City Titans baseball game, in 1982, the summer after I finished kindergarten.  A few years later, the four of us in our family started going to games more regularly, a few times every year, until the summer of 1994.  By that time, several months of negotiations had failed to produce a resolution between the players’ union and the team owners on money issues.  The players voted to strike, and the last month and a half of the season was canceled, as well as all postseason championship games.  The strike was not resolved until a few weeks into the 1995 season.

I moved to Jeromeville for school during that players’ strike, and with no baseball that fall and no cable TV with which to watch games once baseball resumed in the spring, I stopped following baseball closely.  Besides, I was still upset that the previous season had been canceled.  One of my favorite players, Matt Williams, had 43 home runs at the time the strike began, giving him a legitimate chance to break the record for home runs in one season, which was 61 at the time.  He never got that chance, and he never hit that many home runs in another season.  Baseball had broken my trust.

The strike did not affect the minor league teams playing in smaller cities, and some national television networks began showing high-level minor league games.  A new independent league, with players and teams not connected to the big leagues, formed in the western United States in 1995.  This league included a team in Santa Lucia County where I grew up, the Gabilan Peppers.  I went to a few games with my parents over the years when I was home during the summer, and they were always lots of fun.  Unfortunately, the Peppers only lasted a few seasons before folding.

I did not think about going to a baseball game again until just recently.  I had stayed in touch off and on over the years with Mrs. Allen, my English teacher from both seventh and eighth grade.  Seventh grade had been a very difficult year for me, I was going through things that I could not share with anyone around me, and I did not really have friends.  Mrs. Allen had been a positive influence for me that year, someone who believed in me and showed me that school could be a safe place.  Last week, shortly after I moved back to Jeromeville for the fall, I got an email from Mrs. Allen, asking how I was doing.  Among other things, she asked if I had been following the Titans, because they had a chance to win their division and make the playoffs.  She was a season ticket holder, and she invited me to come to a game with her before classes started again for me.  I told her that I had not been following closely since the strike, but it would be good to see her, and good to go to a game again after three years.

It was mid-afternoon on a Friday as I left Jeromeville for the Titans game, driving west on Highway 100 toward Bay City.  The first half hour of the drive, as far as Fairview, was very familiar to me, because that was also the first part of the drive to my parents’ house.  But after Highway 6 split off from Highway 100 to the south, the next thirty-two miles of busy freeway from there to the Bay City Bridge was a road I had only been on twice.  The first time was that weekend trip sophomore year when I rode in Eddie Baker’s car and kept hoping for a chance to talk to Haley Channing, and the other time was last year seeing the other major sports team in Bay City, the Captains football team.

In Oaksville, as I approached the bridge, traffic slowed to a halt.  This was normal for this area, especially on a Friday afternoon as people tried to get home from work and get either away from or into the city for the weekend.  I had left earlier than I needed to, expecting to hit traffic.  I inched forward at a crawl for about fifteen minutes leading to the toll booths.  I gave the toll taker one dollar, which was the toll on most of the area’s bridges at the time before it increased dramatically over the next couple decades.

Oaksville and Bay City were separated by about four miles of water.  Most of my trips to Bay City as a child were to watch Titans games, and the stadium is at the extreme south end of the city, so that I would not see much else of the city on those trips.  I had also been to a few other places that required driving across the city from south to north.  This spectacular view I had now of entering the city from east to west, with all of the tall buildings of the city’s downtown rising from the water below, was one I had only seen a couple times before.  I did not grow up around buildings this tall, and the concept of such a densely populated city fascinated me.  I could not fully admire the view, however, because I had to pay attention to where I was going.  The freeway was extremely crowded at this time of day, and I had to make sure that I was not in an exit-only lane, and that I would end up in the correct lane to continue onto Highway 11 southbound at the point where Highway 100 ended, two miles after the bridge.

After taking almost half an hour to drive the seven miles from the bridge to the stadium, I found a parking spot in the vast asphalt lot, among the sea of cars surrounding the stadium, and began walking toward the entrance.  The Titans’ stadium was built in the 1960s, during an era when the construction landscape in professional sports was dominated by huge concrete structures on the fringes of cities with little character on the outside.  Being in Bay City, there was at least the view of the bay, but even this was removed from the inside of the stadium in 1971 when the Captains began sharing the Titans’ stadium.  New seats were added to accommodate the larger crowds for football, surrounding the entire field 360 degrees in a misshapen ring, distorted to account for the different shapes of baseball and football fields.

Mrs. Allen had told me to meet her outside one specific entrance to the stadium, and as I approached, I was surprised that I found her relatively quickly, considering the size of the crowd.  She looked pretty much the same as she had when I was first in her class nine years earlier, a heavy-set woman in her late forties, with long hair typical of one her age who had been a hippie in her twenties.  She wore a Titans jersey and jeans.  I waved as I approached her.  “I hope you weren’t waiting long,” I said.  “I hit traffic.”

“Hi, Greg,” Mrs. Allen replied, giving me a side hug.  “I haven’t been here that long.  I figured traffic might be bad coming over the bridge.  How are you?”

“Pretty good.  Ready to go in?”

I followed Mrs. Allen to our seats, toward the back of the lower level.  The evening air was cool, because of the bay nearby, and would only get colder as the night went on.  Night games in Bay City had a reputation for being cold, and the stadium had been built in one of the coldest and windiest parts of the city, simply because it was one of the few places in the city with open land at the time.  I had been carrying a jacket, the same jacket I got for the trip to Urbana last winter, but I was not quite cold enough to put it on yet.  I was a little sweaty from walking from the car to the stadium.

“So how was your time in Oregon?” Mrs. Allen asked.  “What exactly were you researching?”

“Quasi-Monte Carlo integration using low-discrepancy sequences,” I explained.  “I was looking at ways to efficiently approximate integrals that can’t be calculated exactly using conventional means.  ‘Monte Carlo integration’ uses random numbers to make this approximation; that’s why it’s called Monte Carlo, because of random numbers being associated with gambling.  We were looking at ways to choose numbers that give more efficient and accurate approximations than just purely random numbers.”

“That’s all a bit beyond me,” Mrs. Allen said.  “When would you use something like this?”

“Any time you need to calculate an integral that can’t be calculated using normal methods.  Integrals are used for finding area and volume of irregular shapes.  And for any problem where you have to multiply, but the things you multiply are changing.  Like, for example, you multiply speed times time to find distance.  But if the speed is always changing in some predictable way, you would use an integral to find the total distance.  And some integrals can’t be calculated using regular techniques like adding and multiplying, so we need efficient ways to approximate them, and we need to know how accurate those methods are.”

“I see.  So what did you learn from your research?”

“Honestly, I’ve been telling people that the most important thing I learned was that I don’t really like math research.  But I’m glad to have learned this now, before I go invest years of my life and thousands of dollars in a Ph.D. program.”

“That’s a good point.  Graduate school is a huge commitment.”

“I know.”

“So do you know what you’re doing instead after you graduate?”

“Even though I said a few years ago I never wanted to, I’m now looking at being a teacher,” I explained.  “One of my professors set me up helping out in a high school classroom last spring, and I really enjoyed it.  I know I need a few more classes I hadn’t planned for as prerequisites for the teacher certification program.  I’m taking one of them this next quarter, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get them all in during this year.  So I don’t know yet if I’m going to graduate in the spring.  I might have to wait to start student teaching until the fall of ’99.  I’m also going to look into options for other teaching programs besides Jeromeville, but one of the professors from the Jeromeville program I’ve met before, so if I stayed at Jeromeville, I’d have that familiarity.”

Mrs. Allen had a look of excitement on her face; I could see that she approved of this career choice.  “Good for you!” she exclaimed.  “I think you’ll make a great teacher.”

“Thank you.”  It was an honor to know that I had Mrs. Allen’s vote of confidence, since she had been such an influential teacher in my career as a student.

“I’ll have to tell Mr. Colby when I see him on Monday,” Mrs. Allen said.  “I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear you’re looking into teaching.”

“Yes.  Tell him I said hi.”

“He used to tell that story all the time about the time he had to step out of the room, and when he came back a few minutes later, you were teaching the class.”

“I remember that,” I said, laughing.  “Someone asked me if I knew how to do a homework problem, and I didn’t want to scribble all over her paper, so I went up to the board to do it.  And when I was done, I turned around and everyone was watching me, and they started asking me more questions.”

“That’s a great story.”

The baseball game had begun by then.  The opponent was the Dallas Armadillos, and because of the recent changes made to baseball scheduling, this was the first time the Armadillos and Titans had ever played each other.  Before this year, teams in the two baseball leagues did not play each other until the end of the season, when the two champions would face each other.  Dallas was in the other league, and they had never been in the championship, so they had never played Bay City until this year.

The Titans scored first with a home run in the second inning, but their lead did not hold.  Three Dallas players got hits in the fourth inning, and two of them scored.  The game was then boring for about an hour as the teams took turns not scoring for the next few innings.  Mrs. Allen and I used that time to catch up and make small talk.  I told her more about my new house and roommates, as well as volunteering with the church youth group and being in chorus last year.

“When do classes actually start for you?” Mrs. Allen asked.

“September 25.  But next week I’m going on two retreats.  Monday through Friday I’ll be in Pine Mountain with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  Then I’ll be leaving straight from there to a retreat with the youth group leaders from church, somewhere up near the Great Blue Lake.”

“That sounds like it’ll be fun!  A good way to spend the last week before school starts.  What classes are you taking?”

“Number theory, abstract algebra, writing in education, and chorus.”

“I’m glad you’re still doing chorus.  You were never doing anything with music back in middle school, were you?”

“No.  I was too self-conscious back then.”

“That’s too bad.  But I’m glad you found chorus eventually.”

“Thanks.”  

The crowd became more lively after the Armadillos’ pitcher threw two walks and gave up a hit, loading the bases for the Titans.  A new pitcher came in for the Armadillos, and the next Titans batter hit a ground ball and was thrown out for the second run of the inning.  The runner on third base was fast enough to score, giving the Titans a tenuous lead of three runs to two, and the crowd cheered loudly.

I stood and cheered, then sat back down a minute later. “It’s cold,” I said; more of my body’s surface area had been exposed to the cold night wind when I had stood, and I had no more layers of clothing to put on.

“It’ll be nice when the new stadium gets built,” Mrs. Allen said.  “The new location is supposed to be less windy.”

“So did they decide on a new location for sure?” I asked.  The team had been trying to get this old, windy stadium replaced for a long time.  Five years ago, the old owners tried to sell to a group that was going to move the team out of state, but the other teams in the league voted the sale down.  The owners then sold the team to a group committed to keeping them in Bay City with a plan to build a stadium close to downtown and the bridge.

“Yes.  It’s the same place they’ve been talking about for years, near the bridge,” Mrs. Allen explained.  “But they had to go through a long process to finally get everything approved.  Construction is supposed to start later this year, but it’ll be a couple more years until it’s done.”

“That’s exciting,” I said.

Both teams scored again shortly afterward, and by the end of the eighth inning, the score was tied at four each.  No one scored in the ninth inning, and the game went to extra innings.  I shivered in the cold wind as I watched the game and continued to make small talk with Mrs. Allen.  Neither one of us wanted to leave the game early, but I felt miserable sitting outside in the cold, even with a jacket.  The jacket did not stop the wind from blowing into my face, and I only wore one layer over most of my legs.

But my persistence paid off.  In the bottom of the twelfth inning, a new pitcher entered the game for Dallas, and he did not seem to have a good command of where his pitches were going.  He walked the first batter he faced, then two batters later, with one out, he gave up a double to the outfield.  With runners on second and third base, the next Titans batter got a hit, scoring the runner on third and giving the Titans a win, by a score of 5-4.  I jumped up and began screaming and clapping loudly.  I reached over and gave Mrs. Allen a high-five.  “Someone’s excited,” she said.

“That was awesome!”

I walked Mrs. Allen back to her car.  “Thank you so much for inviting me,” I said.

“Tjhank you for coming!  It was so good to see you.”

“Yes.  Say hi to all my other old teachers.”

“I will.  Drive safely!”

“You too!”

Even though it was still technically summer, I turned on the heater when I got back to my car.  I was cold.  This was my first time watching a big-league baseball game in over three years, and tonight was the perfect experience to reintroduce me to the sport.  The Titans had gotten a win in dramatic fashion, and they had a good chance to make the playoffs.  This was also the first time I had ever stayed to the end of a night game that went to extra innings, and sitting through the cold made it feel more like I earned the win.

It had been a long game, and it was well after eleven o’clock by the time I got back to the car.  The drive back to Jeromeville would have taken about an hour and a half in good traffic, but traffic after a major sporting event is rarely good, so I did not get home until one-fifteen in the morning.  Traffic was mostly stop-and-go for the first couple miles, and it slowed down in other spots elsewhere in the city.  By the time I finally got to the bridge, traffic was moving again, and the rest of the drive home was smooth and uneventful.

The Bay City Titans did in fact end up with the best win-loss record in their division, but they lost in the first round of the playoffs.  It would be over a decade before I would get to see them win a championship in my lifetime, but I would go to many more Titans games over the next few years.  I was at the final game played in this stadium, and while I was not able to go to the first game in the new stadium, I was at the fifth one, the first Saturday game in the new stadium.  

Mrs. Allen is the only teacher from my childhood whom I have stayed in touch with semi-consistently for my whole life, although Mr. Colby did find me on Facebook when I was in my late 30s.  I tend to see Mrs. Allen every few years, through a combination of planned events and chance encounters when I am back in Santa Lucia County.  We met for lunch the last time I visited back home, in June of 2022; she is now in her mid-seventies, with much shorter hair, and has been retired for some time.

I have also been on the other side of some of those teacher-student relationships, since I grew up to be a teacher myself.  Many students I have never seen again after they finished their time at my school, or after I left their school, whichever the case may be, but there have been a small handful who have stayed in touch to various degrees.  I have watched some of my former students grow up and become parents themselves, I have attended three weddings of former students, and I have experienced at least one hilarious awkward encounter with a former student who knew I looked familiar but could not place how she met me.  All of those are stories for another time, but those stories are part of what keeps me going in the demanding and exhausting field of education.

Readers: Do you follow baseball? Do you have any fun stories about memorable baseball games you’ve been to?

I know I’m a day late this week, and it’s for a reason kind of appropriate to this episode: I was in Bay City yesterday at a Titans game, with my parents and the Kanekos, at that new stadium that got built a few years after this episode.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

August 24-25, 1996. The Moport tournament. (#98)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 12 Comments

When I was in middle and high school, everything in my family revolved around sports.  My brother Mark played baseball and basketball, and I worked the scoreboard and snack bar, because I had no athletic talent and not enough discipline to work out and eat well.

Mark and I made up some of our own sports to play in the yard.  Some were variations of actual baseball and basketball, modified to be played one-on-one in small spaces.  Some were combinations of existing sports, and some were just silly.  We would pretend to be playing as teams with multiple players, so that, for example, if a goal was scored from a certain part of the field or court, it would be credited to a different player than if it was scored from a different place.  I usually lost, since I had no athletic talent, but I enjoyed keeping statistics, such as who led the league in scoring or who needed to beat whom to make the playoffs.  We would draw posters, pennants, and trading cards representing our fictitious teams and players, most of which had names based on puns, inside jokes, poop jokes, or double entendres.

Many students will have a class at some point in which they strongly dislike the subject matter, but love the teacher.  For me, that teacher was Mr. Alfred Pereira, whom I had for physical education in ninth grade.  PE was my least favorite class.  Part of my grade was based on how fast I could run, how many pull-ups I could do (zero), and the like.  I participated every day, and I got Bs for it because I was not athletic.  But Mr. Pereira was funny, and he found ways to make his class enjoyable.  We played a game in his class called Pereiraball, which was basically soccer with hands.  A player could pick up the ball and run with it, but the other team could steal the ball by tagging the player carrying the ball.  A goal scored by throwing the ball into the goal was worth one point, and a goal scored by kicking, the normal way in soccer, was worth two points.  A header goal, hitting the ball into the goal off of an attacking player’s head, scored three points.

I taught Mark to play Pereiraball in our yard, using a Nerf soccer ball, and some old sawhorses I found in the garage for goals.  We decided to add another element to the game: hockey sticks.  All of the normal rules of Pereiraball applied, but players could also move the ball with the stick, as in hockey, and a defending player could tag a player running with the ball with the stick, as long as the tag did not aim for the head.  A goal scored off of the stick was worth two points, the same as by kicking, and just for laughs, we added a rule that a goal scored by bumping the ball off of the scorer’s own rear end was five points.

I needed a name for my modified Pereiraball, but I was embarrassed to name something after my teacher.  I called it “Modified Portuguese Football,” since Mr. Pereira had a sticker of the flag of Portugal on his file cabinet at school to honor his ancestry, and I quickly shortened that name to “Moport.”  Mom, who has a tendency to get names wrong, called it “Ball Soccer” the first time we played; after I corrected her, she called it “Mopo-Hockey” the next time.

In addition to our usual one-on-one games, we would sometimes play Moport two-on-two, with a slightly larger field, when Mark would have multiple friends over.  We used our own names as players when I kept statistics, but we had names for our teams.  Mark and Eric Kingston were the Ice Monkeys of Rage, wearing homemade uniforms of black and light blue along with matching light blue bandanas.  Cody Kaneko and Matt Bosworth were the Jammin’ Janitors; they also made uniforms, in red and navy blue.  Two of Mark’s other sports friends, Danny Tsao and Nate Fisk, did not have their own Moport uniforms, but they called themselves Team Discovery Channel, referencing a scene from The Simpsons.  Bart Simpson and his friends declare war on kids from the neighboring town, and tough kid Nelson begrudgingly pairs up with nerdy Martin, who calls their duo Team Discovery Channel.  I played with anyone who was left over not on a team, or I acted as referee and scorekeeper.  The Ice Monkeys usually dominated those games, and Team Discovery Channel had never won.

When I visited my family in June, I suggested to Mark that we have a two-on-two Moport tournament when I came back in August.  The players were Mark’s friends, not mine, but I was mostly looking forward to keeping score and statistics.  Mark liked the idea, and he found two other friends who were interested in playing, John McCall and Drew Schmidt. They did not have a name, I suggested the Unabombers, after the recently captured domestic terrorist with the wanted poster photo that I found humorous for some odd reason.   We would play the games on a Saturday and Sunday, with each team playing each other team once, and the top two teams after that playing each other for the championship.

Cody was the first to arrive, in his Jammin’ Janitors uniform, as I was outside measuring the field and placing the goals.  “Hey, Ogre,” he said, using the nickname that many of Mark’s friends had for me.  “Are you playing this year?”

“If someone doesn’t show up, I might.  Otherwise I’ll just referee and keep score like I always do.”

“Nice.”  Cody went inside to play Super Nintendo with Mark until the tournament started, and I watched them play after I finished setting up the field.

“When are you going to start playing?” Mom asked, walking into Mark’s room.

“As soon as people show up,” I said.

“I have chips and salsa, bananas, grapes, Capri Suns, and Gatorade.  I was going to make taquitos for lunch today and chicken nuggets tomorrow.  Does that sound good?”  No one said anything.

“Who are you asking?” Mark asked.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Whoever.  No one is saying no.”

Over the next half hour, Eric, John, Nate, and Danny showed up.  “Where’s Boz?” I asked.  “The Ice Monkeys are playing the Jammin’ Janitors first.  The game was supposed to start twenty minutes ago.”

“I don’t know,” Cody said.

“I have an idea.  There’s no reason the games have to be played in order, as long as everyone plays each other once.  I had the Ice Monkeys against the Jammin’ Janitors first, but what if the Ice Monkeys play Team Discovery Channel first?  Everyone is here for that game.  And if the others don’t show up soon, then we’ll figure something out.  I might have to play.”

“Whatever,” Mark said, shrugging.

“Eric?  Nate?  Danny?  Is that okay with all of you?” I asked.  All three boys replied in the affirmative.  “Let’s go, then!  Or you guys can finish your game first,” I said, turning to John and Nate, who were now playing Nintendo.

After they finished, we all went outside to start the game.  As referee, I dropped the ball at the center of the field, as in a hockey face-off.  Eric used his hockey stick to pass it to Mark, who picked it up and passed it back to Eric.  Eric threw the ball toward Nate, defending the Team Discovery Channel goal; Nate deflected it sideways toward Danny.  Mark quickly ran back to defend the Ice Monkeys’ goal.  In a two-on-two game of Moport, the positions had evolved such that the goalkeeper typically would run forward to participate in offensive plays, then quickly return to the goal once his team was on defense.  The forty-foot-long field was small enough to do this effectively.

Danny threw the ball toward Mark just as he got to the goal, and Mark missed it.  Team Discovery Channel was up 1-0.  Danny and Nate high-fived and cheered.  Team Discovery Channel’s good fortune did not last, though; Mark quickly scored a kicking goal, putting the Ice Monkeys ahead 2-1, and by halftime, the Ice Monkeys were leading 8-4.

Mom emerged from the house holding a plate of taquitos.  “Do you guys have a break coming up?”

“It’s halftime,” I said.

“And how long is that?”

“Five minutes, and each half is 10 minutes long.”

“You can eat after this game, then.”

“Sounds good.”

Boz arrived as Mom was talking, leaving Drew as the one remaining player we were still waiting for.  “Should someone call Drew to find out if he’s coming?” Mom asked.  I really hoped she did not mean me.  I hated calling people, and I did not know these people well in the first place  They were Mark’s friends.

“I will,” Mark said.  He went inside and came back outside a minute later, saying that Drew would arrive soon.

During the second half, Mark decided not to play with a hockey stick at all.  When Mark had the ball on offense, I noticed that he would dribble the ball and pass to Eric as if he were playing basketball.  The game of Moport had continued to evolve as different players brought different strengths and experiences to the game.  At one point, Danny attempted to pass the ball to Nate, but Eric intercepted it; Mark had already run down the field, positioning himself near the empty goal.  Mark turned around and bounced the ball off his butt into the goal just before Nate arrived.  Five points.  The Ice Monkeys went on to win the game, by a score of 21 to 9.

The Unabombers played the Jammin’ Janitors next; Drew had arrived in time.  He and John used their hockey sticks much more often than the Ice Monkeys did.  The Unabombers did not have matching uniforms, but Drew and John wore the same color, by coincidence.  Cody and Boz played a game heavy on passing, like the Ice Monkeys did, but their defense was not as good, and the Unabombers scored the first goal off of John’s stick.  Cody quickly scored a goal by throwing just seconds later, narrowing the Unabombers’ lead to 2-1.  “Yes!” Cody said, giving Boz a high-five.  The game stayed close throughout, but Cody’s speed proved to be just a bit too much for John and Drew’s stick and throwing skills.  The Jammin’ Janitors ended up winning by a score of 18-16.

After a snack break, the Jammin’ Janitors played again, this time against the Ice Monkeys.  Mark and Eric were collectively taller than Cody and Boz, and they often used their height to pass the ball downfield effectively.  The Ice Monkeys won that game easily.  The final game of the afternoon was between the Unabombers and Team Discovery Channel, and it was also the most unusual result of the day.  The Unabombers led by a score of 11-4 at halftime; five of the Unabombers’ points came on a butt goal while Nate left the goal unattended, just as had happened in Team Discovery Channel’s first game against the Ice Monkeys.  While most of us were snacking on chips and drinking Capri Suns through straws awkwardly poked into the plastic pouches, Danny and Nate actively discussed strategy.

“Game on!” I shouted when halftime ended, resetting the timer on my watch to ten minutes.  In that second half, Nate spent more time in the backfield playing defense, so as to make sure not to give up any more empty-net butt goals.  Danny used his stick to score more often, whereas Drew and John scored most of their goals by throwing.  With about twenty seconds left in the game, Team Discovery Channel had narrowed the Unabombers’ lead to two points, with the score 18-16.  Nate passed the ball forward to Danny, who passed it back to Nate, narrowly avoiding being tagged by John’s stick.  Nate passed to Danny, who put the ball on the ground next to his stick, and hit it toward Drew in goal.  Drew blocked the shot, but Nate kept trying to tap it in with his stick; eventually Nate scored, tying the game at 18 points each.  As I counted down the final seconds, Drew threw a desperation shot that went over Nate’s head and over the goal.

“Tie game,” Danny said.  “So does it go to overtime now?”

“No,” I explained.  “It just ends in a tie, and that counts as half a win for determining who will make the final round.”

“Did we make it?” Nate asked.

“I think we still have to play tomorrow,” John said.  “Right?”

“Yeah,” I answered.  “Everyone plays against everyone, so the Ice Monkeys need to play the Unabombers, and the Jammin’ Janitors need to play Team Discovery Channel.  Then after that, the top two teams play for the championship.  So far, the Ice Monkeys are in the lead with 2 wins, then the Jammin’ Janitors at 1-and-1, and Team Discovery Channel and the Unabombers are tied with one tie and one loss.”

“So if we beat the Jammin’ Janitors, we’ll move into second place?” Danny asked.

I thought about it.  “Yes.  But if the Unabombers beat the Ice Monkeys, then they’ll be tied with you for second place, and the goal differential, the difference between goals scored and allowed, will determine who advances.”

“So we need to score a lot tomorrow.”

“Definitely.”


The Unabombers did not beat the Ice Monkeys on the second day of the tournament, surprising exactly no one.  The Ice Monkeys finished the preliminary round of the tournament with a perfect record of three wins and no losses, guaranteeing them a spot in the championship game.  Everyone showed up on time today, much to my relief.  I got a bit stressed out waiting for Boz and Drew to show up yesterday, but it all worked out in the end.

Next, the Jammin’ Janitors played Team Discovery Channel.  The winner of this game would finish in second place and play the Ice Monkeys next for the championship; in the case of a tie, the Jammin’ Janitors would advance with the better record of the two.  Danny and Nate continued their strategy of playing defense and scoring stick goals, and they kept the score close.  With less than a minute left, Team Discovery Channel trailed 14-12, and Boz tried to kick the ball to Cody, to set up a goal, but Nate poked the ball away with this stick, right in the direction of Danny.  Danny ran down the field to the empty goal, turned to face Cody and Boz who were quickly approaching, and bounced the ball off of his rear end into the goal before Cody or Boz could get to him.  Team Discovery Channel led, 17-14.  “YEAAAAAHHHH!!!” Danny and Nate screamed as they ran back across the field to defend their goal.  They blocked two more shots in the little time that remained, and when I imitated the sound of the time-up buzzer, Danny and Nate jumped up and down, cheering, as their first win in two-on-two Moport history advanced them to the final round.

“What’s going on?” Mom said, bringing a plate of chicken nuggets outside.

“Team Discovery Channel got their first win,” I explained.  “And with their tie yesterday, that’s enough to make the final round.”

“That’s Nate and Danny?”

“Yeah.”

“Good job!”

Since there were only three games today, instead of four, we took a break for about an hour to eat and let our food digest.  Someone had brought a portable stereo and was using it to play rap and hip-hop.  Dad’s pickup truck was parked in the street, and when it was time for the game to start, John, Drew, and Cody climbed in the back to watch, bringing the stereo with them.  Boz sat in a lawn chair next to the truck, and I sat on the porch next to the scoreboard.  Mom occasionally stepped out onto the porch to watch too.

Before the game started, I went into the house and came back outside holding a small trophy, about nine inches high, made from cardboard and aluminum foil.  I took the trophy to the center of the field, where Mark, Eric, Danny, and Nate had gathered.  “This is the Big Al Cup, given to the champions of Moport,” I said.  “It will be awarded to the winners of this game.”  I did not tell them why it was called the Big Al Cup.  It was named after Mr. Pereira, but no one actually called him Big Al; that was an inside joke regarding something my mother said once and some of the inappropriate humor that my family seemed to enjoy so much.

 “Shake hands and get ready for the face-off,” I said.  The boys each shook the hands of both of their opponents, then moved into position to take the face-off.  I dropped the ball and moved out of the way.  Eric hit it backward slightly with his hockey stick, where Mark was ready to pick it up.  He dribbled and passed it to Eric, who got open just as Danny was about to tag Mark.  Eric passed it back to Mark, who threw the ball toward the goal.  Nate caught it and passed it down the field to Danny, who made a throwing shot that Mark blocked.

As I watched the game and ran the scoreboard, I noticed how I had always explained Moport to people as a hybrid of soccer, football, and hockey, but now the game had evolved to the point that Mark and Eric were playing it more like basketball, and Mark was not using his stick.  They were breaking no rules.  On an actual soccer field with healthy well-watered grass, like the one we played on in Mr. Pereira’s class, it would have been more difficult to dribble the ball, but real sports sometimes have different quirks depending on what field or stadium hosts the game.  This was the same sort of thing.

I made a loud buzzing sound with my mouth ten minutes after the game started.  “That’s the half,” I announced.  “Team Discovery Channel is leading, by a score of nine to eight.”  If Moport fans existed, this score so far would have shocked them.  The Ice Monkeys had always been the dominant team when we played two-on-two Moport, and before today Team Discovery Channel had never actually won a game.  But now, Team Discovery Channel was just ten minutes away from the championship, if this score held.

When the second half began, Team Discovery Channel moved the ball forward using hockey sticks, leading to a shot on goal that Mark blocked and picked up.  Mark and Eric began advancing down the field, passing the ball to each other to avoid Danny and Nate’s tags, but Nate blocked Mark’s thrown shot.  Both teams played defense well, and no one scored again until four minutes had passed, when the Ice Monkeys tied the game.

“Come on, Nate, we can do this,” Danny shouted as Nate passed the ball using his stick.  Danny faked a shot as Eric ran toward him, then stepped toward the goal and shot the ball off of his stick; the shot caught Mark off guard and went into the goal.  Each team scored a few more times as the game continued, and with about thirty seconds left, Team Discovery Channel led by a score of 16-14.

“Thirty seconds!” I called out.  Mark dribbled the ball and passed it to Eric, who held it waiting for Mark to get closer.  As Eric looked to the side of the field toward the street, waiting for the right moment to pass it to Mark, Danny approached Eric from the other side of the field and tagged him with his stick.

“Tag!” I exclaimed.  “Discovery Channel’s ball!”

“Aw, man,” Eric said as he dropped the ball to the ground.  Danny picked up the ball and threw it behind him to Nate, who then threw it back to Danny.

“Five seconds!” I called out.  Danny threw the ball up in the air vaguely in the direction of the goal; all he had to do at this point was stall for time, since his team led.  Mark caught the ball just before I made the sound imitating a buzzer.  “That’s game!” I exclaimed.  “Team Discovery Channel are the champions of Moport 1996!”

“Wooooo!” Danny shouted, hugging and high-fiving Nate.  The two of them ran to the porch and held up the Big Al Cup.

“Wait,” I said.  “If you’re going to pose with the Big Al Cup, you need to wear these.”  I ran inside and got out the gold medals I had made from string and yellow paper, and strung them around Danny and Nate’s necks.  “Good games, everyone,” I announced.  “Thanks for coming, and we’ll do this again next year!”

Team Discovery Channel, the perennial underdogs of two-on-two Moport, had won the championship.  It was their only championship; we did this tournament a total of three times, and the Ice Monkeys won both of the other ones.  I was glad that Moport was over for the year.  I had a lot of fun, and the players seemed to as well, but it was stressful getting everything organized and worrying that some of the players might not show up, especially yesterday.  That happened the following year; Drew did not show up the second day, so I got to play in one game for the Unabombers.  We lost that game.

Although we played Moport off and on for several years, to my knowledge no game of Moport has been played since the 1990s.  But many important life lessons can be learned through sports.  Never give up.  Do not underestimate anyone, especially someone who is determined to succeed.  Most importantly, though, I noticed that some of the teams had changed their strategies depending on what their strengths were, like Mark and Eric bringing moves from basketball into Moport.  My future seemed uncertain, but I knew that my strength was being good at school, particularly at mathematics.  I had two years left as an undergraduate, and I needed to start thinking about my strengths, so I could make a decision about what I would be best suited to doing after I finished my degree.

June 27, 1995.  The most stereotypically 90s of all sports. (#44)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 21 Comments

A trendy new sport took the world by storm in the 1990s: roller hockey.  Inline skates, roller skates with the wheels arranged in a line rather than the traditional arrangement of two wheels in front and two wheels behind, became popular in the late 1980s.  Soon after this, people began playing hockey on these skates. I was terrible at any kind of skating, but I enjoyed watching hockey, and when professional roller hockey came to nearby San Tomas last summer, we went to some games as a family.  Tonight, I was going to be watching this most stereotypically 90s of all sports with someone else.

Plumdale is a semi-rural town spread across a hilly area, and because of this, I often felt isolated from my friends.  My closest friends in school lived far away from me, so I never saw them outside of school. After I was old enough to drive, I had a little more of a social life, but still not much.  I had no idea where many of my high school friends lived, which is why I was a little nervous tonight. The house in front of me now was a place I had never been before. What if her parents wonder who I am?  How does this work anyway? Is it okay to do things with friends who are girls? What if she thinks I like her and this is a date? What if I realize I do like her, and she does not like me back? I nervously knocked on the door.

“Hey, Greg!” Rachel said, opening the door.  She was of average height and build, with straight medium brown hair, and she wore jeans with a dark green solid-color shirt.  “You ready?”

“Yes.”

“You have the tickets?”

“I’ll buy tickets there.  They don’t get a big enough crowd to sell out.”

Rachel stepped onto the porch and gave me a hug.  I smiled.

“Do you know how to get back to the highway from here?”

“Yes,” I said.  I worked my way from Rachel’s house to Highway 11 north, passing through hills dotted with oaks and houses on large lots.  Highway 11 passed through much of this same hilly oak woodland environment as we continued through Plumdale and entered the next county.  The grass on the hillsides had died and turned brown already by this time of year.

“So do you go to a lot of these games?” Rachel asked.  “What’s the team called again?”

“Mountain Lions.  I went to one with my family last week.  And we went to two last year.”

“I didn’t even know there was such a thing as professional roller hockey.”

“It’s new.  I hadn’t heard of it until last year.”

“Interesting.  And who are these players?  Do they just have tryouts? I don’t think there are school roller hockey teams, are there?”

“A lot of them are minor league hockey players, like regular ice hockey, and this is their summer job.”

“That makes sense.”

After about ten miles, Highway 11 entered the end of a long valley, approaching a small city called El Ajo.  It was after six o’clock by the time we got to El Ajo, and most of what daily commuter traffic remained at that hour was headed in the opposite direction from us.  Traffic was smooth as we headed north through El Ajo, another small city called Morgantown, and the large sprawling metropolis of San Tomas. We arrived at the arena in downtown San Tomas about fifty minutes after leaving Rachel’s house.

“This stadium is new, right?” Rachel asked, looking at the large glass wall at the main entrance to the arena.

“Yes,” I replied.  “It just opened a year ago.”

“I think this is where my parents saw the Eagles.  They said it was really nice.”

“Probably.  They’ve been getting a lot of big concerts here.”

After buying the tickets, Rachel and I walked into the building.  The main entrance led to a very wide stairway leading up to the concourse.  From the concourse, walkways led down to the seats on the lower level, and small stairways led up to the seats on the upper level.  I found section 128, and we walked down to our seats, just a few rows up from the court.

“These are good seats,” Rachel said.

“Yeah.  The most expensive seats for these games are only fourteen dollars.  Like I said, they don’t draw a huge crowd. They only use the lower level.”

“Who are the Mountain Lions playing?” Rachel asked as the players from each team began warming up on the court.  The players skated on a surface made from blue plastic tiles that had been placed where the ice usually was during Stingrays ice hockey games.

“The San Diego Breakers.”

“San Diego,” Rachel repeated.  “Who is in the Mountain Lions’ league anyway? Do they play teams from all across the country, or are the teams just out west, or what?”

“The league has teams across the country, and a few in Canada too.  But there are separate Western and Eastern Conferences that only play each other.  So we only play teams in the western half of the US and Canada. The Western and Eastern champions play each other at the end of the season.  I think that’s late August.  It’s a short season.”

“I see, Rachel replied.  I then proceeded to name all eight of the other teams in the Western Conference, but I sensed that Rachel was getting bored with me.  I decided not to continue on and name the teams in the Eastern Conference.

The Mountain Lions scored a goal about a minute into the game; I stood up and cheered as the red light behind the goal came on.  “That goal came fast,” Rachel noticed out loud.  “Do they always score quickly like that?”

“Sometimes.  Roller hockey is usually higher scoring than ice hockey.”

“Is that because the goalies and players on defense aren’t as good?  Or because of how the skates and puck move on the court differently from on ice?”

“That might be part of it.  Also, the court is the same size but there is one less player on the court, compared to ice hockey.”

“I see.”

Another rule difference between this roller hockey league and most ice hockey leagues is that roller hockey games are played in four quarters, instead of the three periods in ice hockey.  A few minutes before halftime, with the score tied at three goals each, Rachel nudged me and pointed to the right, to the section next to us. “What’s going on?”

I looked in the direction she was pointing.  A group of four teenage girls was screaming and cheering.  One of them held up a sign; I could not read it because it was facing away from me, toward the ice.

“It looks like some teenage girls being silly,” I said.  “And one of them brought a sign.”

“I can’t see what it says.”

“Me either.  Probably something about the team or one of the players.  That’s what those things usually say.”

“Yeah.”

“Probably not with the name of the TV station, though, because these games aren’t on TV.”

“TV station?” Rachel asked.  “What do you mean?”

“You know, like how people will hold up signs at games, but they’ll use the name of the TV station on the sign, to try to get on TV.”

“I’ve never seen that!”

“I’ve just started seeing this the last couple years.  Like, say, if there’s a Chicago Bulls game on NBC, someone will make a sign that says ‘Nobody Beats Chicago’ and have the N-B-C at the start of each word prominently highlighted.”

Rachel took a second to think about this.  “That’s clever!”

“The best one I ever saw was on a football game on Fox.  Someone made a sign that said ‘Steve Young is a FOX.’”

Rachel laughed.  “Wow,” she said. “Steve Young?  That’s one of the players, right?”

“Yeah.”

The game continued; a San Diego player got a penalty for roughing, and the Mountain Lions scored on the resulting power play.  “What does power play goal mean?” Rachel asked.

“San Diego got a penalty, so they have to skate one fewer player on the court for two minutes.  That gives them a disadvantage. And if they get scored against with fewer players on the court because of a penalty, that’s a power play goal.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed.  “I’m sorry I’m asking so many questions.”

“It’s ok,” I said.  “I don’t mind.  I’m sure I’d be asking you questions if we were watching volleyball or running track.  Those are your sports.”

“I didn’t know you were this into hockey.”

“I didn’t grow up with it.  It’s just been the last few years, since the Stingrays came along.”

Halftime came shortly after the power play goal.  “I want to buy a T-shirt,” I said. “You want anything?”

Rachel looked confused.  “You want to get me a T-shirt?” she asked.

That was not what I was trying to ask.  “I’m not going to pay for it, I didn’t mean that,” I blurted out.  “I just meant if there was anything you needed while I was up.”

“No, thanks, I’m okay.”

I walked to the souvenir stand feeling confused and ashamed.  Words are hard sometimes. I was just trying to ask if she needed anything while I was up.  I had not planned on buying her something expensive. And the way I answered made it sound kind of mean.  My mind seemed to work differently those of from people around me, and sometimes it felt hard to explain things in ways that people understood.  I hoped that Rachel was not mad at me or hurt in any way.

I got back to my seat just before the third quarter started.  Rachel did not seem to be bothered by my poor communication earlier, which was good.  The silly teenage girls in the next section were just as entertaining to watch during the third quarter.  In addition to holding up their sign, they started performing cheers and dances. They apparently caught the attention of the arena audiovisual crew; a camera operator now sat near them and showed them on the big screen on the scoreboard during stoppages of play.

“Look,” I said to Rachel, pointing at the girls on the screen.  “It’s those girls in the next section.”

“Yeah,” Rachel laughed.  “They’re funny.”

The camera zoomed in on the girl holding the sign.  She was short and thin, Asian, with straight dark hair, wearing a Mountain Lions shirt similar to mine and face paint in the Mountain Lions colors of purple and gold.  The PA announcer said, “Hey, Mountain Lions fans, let’s give it up for our Fan of the Game, Elizabeth Santiago!” Rachel and I cheered, along with the rest of the people in the arena.

“Elizabeth Santiago,” I said after the crowd quieted down.

“What about her?” Rachel asked.

“One of my friends from Jeromeville, he lived upstairs from me in the dorm, his name is Taylor Santiago.  I wonder if he and Elizabeth are related? They look like they could be.”

“That would be funny.”

“Yeah.”

By the middle of the fourth quarter, the Mountain Lions were leading by a score of eight goals to four.  I was not paying attention to the game as closely as I had been earlier, since the Mountain Lions appeared to be in position to win.  Besides, Elizabeth Santiago and her friends were more entertaining.

Each team scored one more goal; the Mountain Lions went on to win, nine goals to five for the Breakers.  As we walked along the concourse toward the exit, I noticed Elizabeth Santiago and her friends walking near us.

“There’s the Fan of the Game,” I said to Rachel, gesturing in Elizabeth’s direction.

“Are you going to ask her if she’s related to your friend?” Rachel asked quietly.

“No.  That would be too weird.”

“Yeah, it might be.”

We walked back to the car.  It took several minutes to get out of the parking lot.  “So when you do leave for school?” I asked Rachel as we sat in the idling car.

“The middle of August.  I’m excited and nervous at the same time.  It’s a weird feeling.”

“I know how that is.  I went through that last year.  Do you know what you’re going to study?”

“I’m thinking something like psychology or sociology or something like that.  I’ve always been interested in that kind of stuff.”

“Makes sense.”

“You said you’re working at that bookstore this summer?”

“Yeah.  I got that job through a friend of my mom’s.”

“How do you like it?”

“It’s okay.  It’s not very busy there.”

“Makes sense.  Sounds like a good job for you.”

“Yeah.  Are you working this summer or anything?”

“No.  Just trying to make the most of the summer before I leave, and hang out with friends as much as possible.  I’m having lunch with Paul tomorrow.  Things were a little weird last time we talked.  I haven’t seen him since he got back from Santa Teresa.”

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know.  I couldn’t tell.  I just got a weird vibe.”

Paul Dickinson had been in my class at Plumdale High; I had known him since seventh grade.  He and Rachel had gotten together and broken up several times over the years, and I had given up trying to keep track of whether or not they were together at any given time.  It seemed like they were not currently together. Paul had just gotten back from his freshman year at the University of Santa Teresa, about 200 miles south of Plumdale; I wondered if the weird vibe was because he had met a girl there and not told Rachel.  Or if Rachel had met a guy and not told me.

Rachel and I talked about life and school and other things for the rest of the drive home, down the San Tomas Valley through Morgantown and El Ajo and into the hills separating the San Tomas and Gabilan Valleys.  It was a little after eleven o’clock when I pulled the car up next to Rachel’s house.  I wondered what to do now.  Do I just say good night?  Do I walk her to the doorstep?

“I’ll walk to you the door,” I said hastily, opening my car door.

“Thank you,” Rachel replied.

We walked up the walkway to her house and stopped at the door.  “Thanks for coming with me,” I said.

“Yeah!  I had a lot of fun!  I didn’t even know roller hockey existed.”

“Now you do.”

“Yeah.  I’ll see you soon, Greg.”  Rachel gave me a big hug.

“Yes.  Have a good night,” I said as the hug continued for several seconds.  Rachel let go and turned around. “Good night,” she said, smiling, turning back toward me.

“Good night,” I answered, walking back to the car.  As I started the car, I could see Rachel walking through her front door.  I backed out back to the road and drove toward home.

I turned the radio on; the R.E.M. tape I had been listening to before Rachel got in the car came back on.  Rachel was a good friend. I could not tell if she was interested in being more than that.  I felt a little ashamed of some of the awkward moments from tonight, especially the conversation about the t-shirt.  I just did not understand girls and how all that was supposed to work. Was tonight a date? Not really. Probably not.  Maybe. I didn’t know. How does everyone else know all of these rules? Was I even interested in Rachel like that? I wasn’t when we were in high school, but she was always nice to me, and she was one of the few high school friends still keeping in touch with me regularly.  I did not understand girls, but I seemed to understand something about being friends with girls, so maybe that’s what I should be right now.  That still did not change the fact that I wanted a girlfriend. This was all so frustrating. Girls and relationships were, to me, like taking a test without ever having been to class.

When I got home, I said hi to Mom and telling her how the game went.  Mom had fallen asleep on the couch in front of the TV and woke up as soon as I walked in.  I went straight to bed after that and closed my eyes, trying to shut out from my mind all of these frustrating and confusing thoughts as I drifted to sleep.

(By the way, Elizabeth Santiago is in fact Taylor’s younger sister.  I found that out the next time I saw Taylor; he asked me what I had been up to, and when I mentioned the Mountain Lions, he said that his sister was at a game and they made her Fan of the Game.  Small world.)

mountain lions

March 3, 1995. Throwing the box. (#28)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 19 Comments

As a child, I read a book called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.  In the book, everything goes wrong for Alexander, from the moment he wakes up until he goes to bed.  Some of the bad things involve his older brothers or kids at school, and some of them are just freak accidents.  Alexander repeatedly makes comments about wanting to run away to Australia, presumably to leave his bad day behind.

I felt like Alexander today.

I had math class in the morning, and I had to turn in an assignment incomplete. The problem in the textbook used something called Lagrange multipliers, another way to do minimization problems.  The example in the book was to find the dimensions of a can that has minimum surface area for a certain volume, which I already knew how to do a different way. Lagrange multipliers in the example looked simple enough, but the technique didn’t work at all with this one problem on the homework.  It was possibly the first time in my life that I didn’t understand something from math class. I sent emails to my instructor, and to everyone I knew who had taken the class before. Pete Green, who was two quarters ahead in math instead of one quarter ahead like me; the Interdisciplinary Honors Program was full of students who were ahead in their college coursework.  Gurpreet, the RA down the hall who was a computer science major. Megan McCauley, the cute RA with the green hair from Building K who was a chemical engineering major. And a girl named Mary Heinrich whom I had only met twice; she was the President of the Math Club, a senior, and also an alumna of the IHP. Pete had told me that he never understood Lagrange multipliers either, and Gurpreet said that his instructor skipped that lesson.

After math class, I went to the library to work on that paper for the South Africa class that was due in less than a week.  A couple years before I started, the UJ library stopped using a physical card catalog and switched to an electronic system. I remember feeling frustrated last quarter, trying to figure out how all that worked and how to find materials in a large university library that used the Library of Congress classification system rather than the much simpler Dewey Decimal System used in local and school libraries.  By now, though, I had figured it out. I wrote down the locations of a few books that would be helpful.

When I went to look for these books, though, two of them were already checked out, and the others had very little information that I could actually use in my paper.  I asked at the circulation desk when those two books would be back, and found out that one of them was due back next week, the day before my paper was due, and the other most likely wouldn’t come in by then.

I was having a bad day.

 

My day felt like it was starting to turn around when I got to chemistry class.  We had gotten a midterm back, and I got 100%, better than I had done on the first midterm.  After class got out, I was hungry, so I dropped off my backpack in my room and walked to the dining hall.  After I got my food, I looked around for a place to sit. Megan was sitting with a few other girls, probably some of her residents from Building K; she saw me and motioned for me to sit with them.

“Hey, Greg,” Megan said.  “Come sit with us.” She gave me a friendly smile, which I tried my best to return.  Early this quarter, Megan had cut her hair short and dyed it green; I liked her hair before better, personally, but I wasn’t going to say so out loud.  Her natural color, on the darker side of blonde, was growing back at the roots, and there was something strangely familiar yet out of place about that combination of hair color.

“Hey, I got your email about Lagrange multipliers,” Megan said after I sat down.  “I don’t think we learned that. I still have my Math 21 book, and I looked through that section, and none of it looked familiar.”

“A guy in my building who is ahead of me in math said the same thing.  He took 21C last quarter, and he didn’t remember learning it either.”

“Yeah.  But you said it was on your homework?”

“I don’t understand why it would be on my homework if no one learns it.”

“Me either.  Sorry I can’t help,” Megan said.  “How’s your day going other than that?”

“Honestly, it’s been a frustrating morning,” I explained.  I told her about not finding the book I was looking for in the library.  While I was telling the story, suddenly I made a connection in my mind that caused me to have to put a lot of effort into holding back a giggle.  Fortunately, I was smart enough not to say out loud what I had realized.

Megan’s hair, with the fading green and the roots growing back, looked like lawn that needed watering.

“I’m sorry you’re having a rough day,” Megan said.  “But hopefully it’ll start to get better. And it’s Friday!  Are you doing anything this weekend?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.  “Probably working on that paper, if I can find any sources that aren’t already checked out.”

“Just relax and take it easy.  Or do something fun with your friends.”

“We’ll see.  I don’t know if any of my friends will be around.”  Besides, I thought to myself, I don’t really know how to make plans with friends.  I kept this thought to myself.

“We’re going to head back to the building now,” Megan said when I was about halfway done with my meal, and she and the others had all finished.  “I hope your day gets better, Greg.”

“Thank you,” I replied.  “Have a good weekend.”

“You too!”

A few minutes later, as I was climbing downstairs out of the dining hall, I saw Andrea from Building B, who was in my math class, with a guy wearing a sweater, looking more well-dressed than the typical college student.  “Hey,” she said, seeing me.

“That problem on the homework today with the Lagrange multipliers,” I said.  “Did you get that? Because I didn’t.”

“I had no idea what was going on with that problem,” she said.  “I don’t think she ever went over that in class.”

“I know.  I’m confused too.”

“Greg?  Have you met my boyfriend, Jay?”

“Hi,” I said, hoping the disappointment wouldn’t show in my voice.  “I’m Greg.”

“Nice to meet you,” Jay said, shaking my hand.

“Have a great weekend!” Andrea said.

“Thanks.  You too.”

 

I walked back to my room and lay down on the bed, face down with my head in the pillow, for a few minutes.  The cute girl from math class has a boyfriend. And the cute older girl couldn’t help me with Lagrange multipliers.  So much for the day starting to turn around.

I got off my bed after about fifteen minutes and checked my email.  None of the girls in other states and countries I’d been talking to had written back.  I had one message, and it was from Mary Heinrich, the president of the Math Club.

From: meheinrich@jeromeville.edu
To: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 1995 12:44 -0800
Subject: Re: Lagrange multipliers

Hi Greg!  I’m pretty sure my professor skipped that section… sorry I can’t be more helpful! :( Hopefully I’ll see you at the Math Club meeting next week.

-Mary

So there it was.  Everyone I knew to ask about Lagrange multipliers couldn’t help me.  Shelley Bryce, the instructor for the class, hadn’t gotten back to me yet.  Her office hours were exactly the same days and times that I had the South Africa class with Dr. Dick Small, so I wouldn’t be able to go there either.  I never did figure out Lagrange multipliers, by the way.

Maybe my day would get better if I did something else.  It was time to go on an adventure. I got in the car and headed east on Highway 100, toward Capital City.  Mom had given me an errand last night when we were on the phone. My brother Mark’s youth basketball season was ending soon, and the kids’ parents wanted to get a present for the coach.  The coach’s favorite player was future Hall of Famer Mitch Richmond, who currently played for the Capital City Royals. The Royals had just changed their logo and color scheme for this current season, and Mom got the idea of all the parents chipping in to get the coach a Mitch Richmond jersey with the new color scheme.  Mom told me that, since I live near Capital City, I could go get the jersey for her, and bring it home at spring break, and she would pay me back. Normally I would be a little irritated at Mom sending me to do something that didn’t concern me, but this time I didn’t mind, because I had the money, and it meant I got to explore somewhere new.

I crossed the river into downtown Capital City on a high freeway bridge.  I saw the original Capital Drawbridge, with its two tall towers and triangular girder pattern, about half a mile upstream.  The Drawbridge was no longer the main route into Capital City; it was bypassed in 1966 by the freeway I was currently on. I could see the tall buildings of downtown Capital City on my left.  The older neighborhoods of Capital City were known for having old, tall trees along the sidewalks, and a sea of these trees, with islands of rooftops on tall Victorian and early twentieth century houses, spread out to my left between the freeway and the even taller buildings in the distance.

After passing through downtown Capital City, I turned north on Highway 51 and got off four exits later at the mall.  This mall was two stories high, over twice as big as the one back home in Gabilan. I parked the car and walked in, looking around and taking in the fact that this mall was huge compared to what I was used to.  I went through a phase in my early teens when I liked going to the mall in Gabilan, but I wasn’t so much interested in shopping as I was in the video arcade there and this really yummy cookie shop. In fact, in 2005, I just happened to be in Plumdale at my parents’ house when I read in the newspaper that the cookie shop was closing for good.  I drove into Gabilan and bought one last dozen cookies there, and I never did tell my family about that because I didn’t want to share.

I walked up and down the entire length of the mall, just to browse, and also to people-watch, or in my case, cute-girl-watch.  I walked into a music store to do more up-close browsing, and I ended up buying R.E.M.’s Monster and Soundgarden’s Superunknown.  There were a few other CDs I wanted to buy, but I didn’t feel right spending all that money.

Upstairs, I found a shop that sold sports merchandise.  I looked through the basketball jerseys and found some with names of many of the best players of the day: Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Scottie Pippen, Karl Malone, David Robinson, Charles Barkley.  But no Mitch Richmond. That didn’t make sense. The Royals had just moved to Capital City about a decade earlier, and Mitch Richmond was the best player who had ever played in Capital City so far. He was an All-Star, and moreover, he was the only All-Star from the local team.  What kind of store doesn’t carry merchandise of an All-Star player who plays just a few miles away?

“Looking for something?” a store employee asked me, walking up next to me.

“Yeah,” I said.  “A Mitch Richmond jersey.”

“Hmm,” the guy said, with a look on his face that suggested he knew little about basketball, and that the name did not ring a bell.  “Let me go try to find one for you.” He walked into the back room. I didn’t really follow basketball all that closely in 1995; basketball was Mark’s thing.  Baseball was still on strike, and hockey wasn’t very big here in the Valley, so Bay City Captains football was the only sport I followed closely at the time. But I knew enough about basketball to have at least heard of Mitch Richmond.

“Yeah, we don’t have that,” the employee said when he came out of the back room.

“He plays for the Royals!  We’re in Capital City! This store doesn’t make sense!  It’s like a store in Chicago that doesn’t sell Michael Jordan jerseys!”  I turned my back and left the store in a huff.

At the other end of the mall was another store that sold sports merchandise.  I had the opposite problem here: there were numerous Mitch Richmond jerseys in many different sizes and in all three designs that the team used this year.  I didn’t know what Mark’s coach would want. I didn’t even know what size he wore.

“May I help you?” the guy behind the cash register said, noticing that I seemed to be having trouble with this.

“I don’t know,” I said angrily.  “I was sent here to buy a gift for someone I don’t know, and I’m not sure what he wants or what size he wears.”

“Hmm.  What is it that the person wants?”

“A Mitch Richmond jersey.”

“You kind of need to know the size for that one, don’t you.  Can you find out?”

“I’ll be back,” I said, again storming out of the store.  I hated this. I didn’t understand what I was looking for, and I didn’t need to have been sent on this errand in the first place.  I was in way over my head, and I didn’t even ask to do this, and I wasn’t even going to get anything new for myself. Well, I got the two CDs, but I could have gotten those at Tower Records without having to leave Jeromeville.

I was having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I think I’ll move to Australia.

I could ask Caroline for some pointers, since she was from Australia.

But I didn’t go to Australia, or to another store in the mall.  Instead, I went to a pay phone. Back in 1995, only the extremely wealthy had cell phones, and long distance phone calls cost money.  Fortunately, my parents had something called a calling card, where they could make a call from any phone in the country and have it billed directly to them.  They gave me the PIN number (PIN number is a redundant expression in the same sense as Arroyo Verde Creek), so I could call them from anywhere and they would pay for it.  I did this now.

“Hello?” Mom said, answering on the second ring.

“Why did you send me on this stupid errand?” I shouted, starting to cry.

“Whoa.  Where are you?”

“I’m at Capital East Mall, in Capital City.  I came here to look for a Mitch Richmond jersey, like you asked me to.  I don’t know what size he wears, or what design or color he wants.”

“Don’t worry about it!  If you don’t want to get it, I’m sure we can order one from that catalog Mark gets all his sports stuff from.”

“I’m all the way here.  I don’t want to leave empty handed.”

“Get any of the designs.  I’m sure he’ll like it. And he wears extra large.”

“But I don’t want to get him something he doesn’t like.”

“I’m sure it’ll be okay.  And it’s a gift. He’ll appreciate the gift.”

“Maybe.  I’ll go back to the store and see.”

“You do that.  It’s okay. How was school today?”

“I’ll call you sometime over the weekend from home, so it’ll be cheaper.  And I don’t want to have a personal conversation out in public.”

“Good idea,” Mom said.  “Are you going to be all right?”

“I think so.”

“I’ll talk to you this weekend, then.”

“Okay.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

I hung up the phone and sat on a bench.  I tried to wipe my eyes so it didn’t look like I’d been crying.  It didn’t work. But I went back to the last store where I had been anyway.  I got a Mitch Richmond jersey, size extra large, and I picked out the black one.  Mom said get anything, so if the coach didn’t like it, it wasn’t my fault anymore.

 

The rest of the night was pretty boring.  I sat alone at dinner. I didn’t meet any cute girls on IRC.  There were no new interesting conspiracy theories on the Pink Floyd Usenet group.  I listened to my new CDs. They were good, but R.E.M. seemed to be going in a different direction from what their last two albums sounded like, and the Soundgarden album generally sounded darker as a whole than the two songs that were familiar to me.  I read for a while. I went to bed at the usual time, between 11 and midnight, and fell asleep quickly.

I woke up with a start when I heard voices and laughter.  They were coming from the hallway. The clock said 1:21 AM.  Whoever was talking was doing so after hours and thus breaking the rules, and I was furious because they woke me up.  Could this day really get any worse? I lay in bed for a few minutes, but the voices were just loud enough that there was no way I’d be able to go back to sleep.  Who were these rude people who wouldn’t let me sleep? Probably those weird stoners and partiers who lived upstairs at this end of the third floor.

In one corner of the room near the closet was a large cardboard box, shaped like a cube about two feet on each side.  The box had originally held my computer, but now all that was inside was the foam packing material. I used the box as a small table now.  There was nothing on it, and more importantly, it was the first non-lethal object I could find to throw at whomever was being so inconsiderate outside my doorway.  I picked up the box and opened the door, squinting at the sudden brightness coming from the hallway.

Taylor, Pete, Caroline, Charlie, Krista, and Sarah were sitting in the hallway.  This was not at all who I expected to see, not the partiers from the third floor.  And in a way, this made the whole experience feel even worse, because these people were some of my closest friends.  And they couldn’t even be considerate enough to let me sleep.

I threw the cardboard box at the wall as forcefully as I could, while glaring angrily at the others and screaming incoherently for about two seconds.  The box hit the wall and almost fell on Sarah, bumping against her shoulder. Sarah looked at me, stunned, as did the other five. I ran across the hall to the stairwell and stomped off downstairs and out of the building.

It was cold and dry outside, and it smelled like poop because the dairy barn was nearby.  I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything now. Without thinking about what I was doing, I walked to the car.  I knew I had blown it. I had made a big mistake, and everyone had seen my true colors, my inability to control myself.  It didn’t matter that I was a successful student at a prestigious university anymore. I was just that scared little kid who blew up and lashed out when life got to him, just like I had been all through elementary school.

I was having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

I think I’ll turn on this car and drive all the way to Australia.

I had always struggled with these kinds of outbursts all my life, although not as often as I did when I was in elementary school.  I was constantly bullied and teased all through school, called horrible names for no reason other than that I was an easy target, because I was different.  No one ever taught me to stand up for myself or to fight back. No one ever taught me how to be confident or how to find people who would build me up. So I would take it and take it and take it for days, for weeks, until I would finally explode, throwing furniture, and pushing and hitting people (and I would often get hit back even harder).  Then my teacher and my parents would scold me and say that I needed to learn to control myself, and once I got old enough that school suspension was an option, I would get suspended for a few days. That happened all through elementary school, and twice in high school as well.

I had been that kid all my life, and I always would be.  And there would always be people around me to tell me condescendingly that what I did was wrong, as if I didn’t know this already.  And some adult authority figure would come along eventually and tell me that I couldn’t do this, and that I needed to be pumped full of pills to fix me.  And the pills wouldn’t work either, because they never do, just like they didn’t work before when I was younger.

This year was supposed to be different.  I was finally free of everything that held me back in Plumdale, and I could make a fresh start in Jeromeville.  But this wasn’t a fresh start. It was the same old dumpster fire that my life had been for eighteen and a half years.  I didn’t know why I was here or what I wanted to study. I didn’t have a girlfriend. And neither of those things would change as long as I kept making mistakes like this.

I didn’t drive to Australia, obviously.  I sat in the car for about another fifteen minutes, thinking about these things and trying to calm myself down.  I closed my eyes for a while. I opened them again. I took a deep breath. Whatever I messed up tonight, whatever mistakes I made, giving up wasn’t going to make things any better.  I had nothing to lose by learning from this and moving forward. This experience really wasn’t worth quitting school over.

I was ready to put this behind me for the night.  It was late, and I was tired, and it was time to go back to bed.  I would apologize to everyone in the morning, but I knew it probably didn’t matter.  I had blown it in front of my new friends. They had seen me for what I was. I knew that what I did was wrong, and I also knew that they were all going to tell me anyway that I was in the wrong, and make me feel worse about it.  I had violated the rule about quiet hours, so Amy or Gurpreet, or both of them, would probably get involved. And I deserved all that. I was just going to have to bite the bullet and let them scold me and tell me how badly I had behaved.  I just hoped I wouldn’t get kicked out of the building, or kicked out of UJ entirely, for this.

I stepped out of the car and took a deep breath of the aromatic dairy air.  I walked back to Building C, like a dog with my tail between my legs, ashamed of the way I had behaved.  I got to the front door and scanned my key card. The door clicked, and I pulled it open.

And nothing I had seen or experienced in my eighteen and a half years of life so far had prepared me for the scene that was waiting for me in the lobby.

To be continued…

compaq box
I still have The Box in 2019.  It’s in my garage, storing a bunch of old T-shirts with too much sentimental value to get rid of.

 

January 28-29, 1995. Captains and Toros and resident advisors. (#22)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 14 Comments

Growing up, I watched a lot of sports with my family.  We went to Bay City to watch professional baseball games a few times every year, and I had been to one basketball game and two hockey games as well.  I had no athletic talent myself, and my list of athletics experience included one season of tee-ball the summer after kindergarten and one day of football practice in high school before I decided I couldn’t handle it.  Mark got all the actual athletic talent in our family; he played baseball and basketball all of his life, and I worked the scoreboard and snack bar.

Surprisingly, considering that I had never been to a professional football game, football was the sport I followed the most closely during my first few years at Jeromeville.  Baseball and hockey were simultaneously on strike during my freshman year. The entire baseball playoffs were canceled, as was half of the hockey season, with hockey games having just begun a few weeks earlier instead of in October.  I liked basketball, but both of the nearby pro basketball teams were terrible, and going to basketball games wasn’t really something I was used to. But Bay City Captains football games were on TV every Sunday at home, and they had won four championships in my lifetime.

In 1995, the Captains were in the big championship game that would be watched by almost a hundred million people in the USA, and many more worldwide even though American football was not a major sport in other countries.  The Captains would be playing the Texas Toros. These two teams had both been very successful in recent years, with each team having won two championships in the last six years. This year’s game was expected to be close, with both teams evenly matched.

I walked into the stairwell to go to dinner the night before the game.  The two stairwells in Building C (and presumably the eleven other identical dorms in the South Residential Area) each had chalkboards where the RAs would write announcements, and I saw Gurpreet writing something on the chalkboard.  I read the announcement that he had written so far:

Want to be an RA next year?
Meeting Wednesday 2/1 7:00 
in t

“Hi, Greg,” he said.  “Want to be an RA next year?”

I hadn’t thought about my plans for next year at all.  Being a resident advisor could be interesting. I could continue living in a dorm and not have to make my own food, and other students could look to me, so that I could be helpful to someone else in the way that Gurpreet and Amy had been helpful to me.  “I might,” I said. “Where’s the meeting?”

“DC downstairs study room.  Seven o’clock.”

“Thanks.”  I climbed down the stairs as Gurpreet finished writing on the board and walked outside.  It was a damp Saturday night, and it was already dark, even though it was only six o’clock.  It had been raining earlier in the day, and everything was still wet although the sky seemed dry for now.

In the dining commons, I saw Megan with three girls I didn’t know at a table with empty seats.  As I was walking toward them, Megan said, “Hi, Greg! You want to sit with us?”

“Sure,” I replied.  I set my dinner tray down at the table next to Megan and realized that I recognized one of the other three girls.  She was plain looking and just a little on the heavy side, with straight light brown hair.

“Do any of you know Greg?” Megan asked the other three girls.

“You’re in Math 21C with me, aren’t you?” the one I recognized asked me.

“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t know your name.  I’m Greg.”

“I’m Tiffany,” the girl said.

“Nice to meet you.”

“And this is Maria and Brandy,” Megan said, gesturing toward the other two girls.  “They’re all on my floor.”

“Hi.”

“I was just telling them that I’m going to my friend’s place tonight because we’re going to do something crazy with my hair.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked.  “What’s that?”

“I can’t tell you.  It’s a surprise. But this,” Megan said gesturing toward her hair, “you won’t see for a while.”

“She’s been teasing us all week by not telling us,” Tiffany said.

A few minutes later, Maria said something about the upcoming meeting for prospective RAs for next year, expressing interest in going.  Megan said that she would be good at it. “Hey, Greg?” Megan asked me. “Did you see that announcement about RAs for next year?”

“I did,” I said.

“Are you interested in being one?”

“I might be.  I’m going to come to the meeting.”

“Good!”

“Are you going to be an RA again next year?”

“I’m planning on it.”

“Good.”

That night, I kept thinking about this idea of being an RA.  It seemed perfect. I wouldn’t have to find a place to live next year.  I could stay on campus and have all my meals provided. My building had become my community, and even though other buildings didn’t have the extent of community that Building C and the Interdisciplinary Honors Program had, my new building where I was in charge would become my new community.  I would make new friends. Sure, there would be work involved, but the work would involve a position of leadership among my new friends and community, and this seemed like the kind of work I could get behind. Maybe I could even follow in Amy and Gurpreet’s footsteps and be the RA for next year’s IHP, since I had experience with the IHP program already.  I knew that former IHP students were often chosen to be the RAs for the IHP building; Amy had been a student in the IHP last year. And, of course, being an RA meant I would probably be seeing Megan around a lot, especially if we ended up in the same one of the three campus residential areas.

 

The next morning, after I got up but before I showered, I checked my email.  I had one message:

From: swimgirl17@aolnet.com
To: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 09:31 -0600
Subject: GO TOROS

How was your weekend? Mine was pretty good. I just hung out at my
best friend’s house last night after swim practice. I need to go
help my dad get set up for our football party.  We have about 10
other people coming over to watch the Toros win the championship!
Your Captains are going down because the Toros are the better team,
and you know it! GO TOROS!!!!!!!

-Brittany

Swimgirl17 was Brittany, whom I had met online shortly before I left for Jeromeville.  She was a high school senior who lived in Texas, and that made her the enemy today because she was a Toros fan.  Most people in this part of the state who followed football were Captains fans, since they were the closest team geographically, and some of the Toros fans I knew around here could be real jerks about this sometimes.  I liked Brittany, she was nice, but I didn’t like the fact that she was a Toros fan. Of course, she had a reason to be a Toros fan since she actually lived in Texas. I decided to wait until the game was over before replying to that email.

Around the time the game was supposed to start, I wandered down to the common room, where there was a television with a rabbit-ear antenna.  Nowadays, with cable and Netflix and all the other options out there, many people don’t seem to understand how antennas work, or that they can still be used to get local television channels.  The way they work is that TV stations broadcast signals over radio waves that a TV can pick up and turn into moving pictures, much like how radio stations do the same thing and a radio turns them into sound.  The TV in the common room could get all of the major networks on stations out of Capital City, although some of them came in a little fuzzy. For the game today, the picture was good enough to watch.

Mike Adams, Ian, Gina, Karen and Pat, Taylor, David, Pete, Mike Potts, Keith, and a guy from the third floor whom I didn’t know well named Yu Cheng were all watching the game.  I took a seat on a couch next to Taylor. “I see you’re on the right side,” he said, noticing that I was wearing the one Captains shirt I had. “Yu and Ian are the only Toros fans.”

“It’s not my fault!” Yu said.  “I lived in Texas until I was 8!”

“And my family has always been Toros fans,” Ian explained, much more quietly.

“Chips?” Taylor asked, passing me a bag of tortilla chips.  “There’s guacamole and dip over there.”

I took a few chips, without dipping them in anything, and passed the bag to the next person, which was Pat in a chair to the left.  Television talk show host Kathie Lee Gifford was singing the national anthem, which I tuned out, not out of disrespect for my country but out of dislike for Kathie Lee.

After that, the game began with the Captains kicking off to the Toros.  The Toros scored on the first drive, after which Ian applauded and Yu screamed, “YEAH!”  The Toros scored again midway through the first quarter.

“Damn,” I said

“It’s still early,” Taylor replied.  “The Captains are playing pretty well.  They just need to finish their drives. They could easily get back in this game.  Of course, throwing that interception didn’t help either.”

“I know.  It’s just that this girl I met online lives in Texas, and she was taunting me about the game in an email.”

“Who cares?  It’s just a game.  And if this girl really cares about you, that won’t matter.”

“I guess you’re right.”

The scoring slowed down in the second quarter, with both teams held to one field goal each.  The Captains were down 17-3 at halftime. “I’m not enjoying this game,” I said.

“Remember the game against Philadelphia back in September or October or whenever that was?” Taylor asked.  “The Caps lost that one so badly, but that lit a fire under them, and they haven’t lost a game since. The same thing could happen here.”

“Yeah, but that was a whole game they lost.  We only have halftime to get that momentum back.”

A few people had left the common room during halftime, but everyone else had trickled back in by the middle of the third quarter.  They got there in time to see a Captains defensive back intercept a pass and run all the way back for a touchdown. The Captains intercepted another pass late in the third quarter, leading to a field goal on that drive.  Going into the fourth quarter, the Captains were still down, but the deficit had been cut to 17-13.

“See?” Mike Adams said.  “Taylor was right! The Caps got the momentum back after halftime.  This game could still go either way.”

“I know,” I replied.  “But I’m nervous. This is for the championship.”

“I told you,” Taylor said.  “It’s just a game.”

The Toros scored a field goal early in the fourth quarter, but their quarterback had lost the sharpness that he had played with before halftime.  He threw another interception, and the Captains tied the score 20-20 with a touchdown a few minutes later.

“YES!” I shouted, along with similar reactions from the other Captains fans.  I high-fived Taylor and Mike Adams and Gina. “WOOO!” I shouted. I nervously watched the Captains score again with just under two minutes left, leading to another round of cheering and high-fiving.  Then, even more nervously, I watched the Captains’ defense trying to close out the game in the final minutes, which they did. I jumped up and shouted as the clock ticked down; the Captains had won, 27-20.

When I got back to my room, still grinning excitedly, I checked my email.  At first I wasn’t planning on gloating in response to Brittany’s email. I wouldn’t want her to have acted like that had the proverbial shoe been on the other foot.  I was going to reply and say something about the game, for sure, something to the extent that it was a good game, and that the Toros played well and made the game close and exciting.  But when my new messages came up, I again had only one, and it was from Brittany. The date and time on the message showed that she had written it during halftime.

From: swimgirl17@aolnet.com
To: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 18:57 -0600
Subject: Re: GO TOROS

17-3 so far… the Toros are playing great!  I told you the Toros
were the better team! Have fun watching us win the championship!

She’s totally asking for this, I thought.  I’m not being mean.  I clicked Reply and typed one sentence:

So how’d that work out for you?

I went to dinner, still feeling excited about the Captains’ big win.  Danielle from down the hall was there, sitting by herself, so I sat with her.

“Were you watching the game today?” she said.  “I saw there was a big group down in the common room.”

“I was!” I said.  “The Caps won!”

“I heard.  I didn’t watch it.  We never really followed football when I was growing up.”

“I’ve been a Captains fan as long as I can remember, but I didn’t follow football as closely as baseball growing up.  I had friends encouraging me to play football when I was in high school. I quit after the first full day of practice, I was in way over my head, but that experience of learning more about the game really has helped me enjoy watching football more.  I understand the game better than I did before.”

“That’s neat.”

I caught something out of the corner of my eye as Danielle said this.  Someone with bright green hair, cut short like boys’ hair even though the person had boobs and a feminine figure, walked through the door and swiped her ID card.  I turned to look more closely at this person with bright green hair, and realized with a shock that it was Megan. She made eye contact with me, and I waved, my mouth open in surprise.  She walked over to me.

“So, what do you think?” she asked me, grinning.

“It stands out,” I said.  “It’s unique. I like it.”

“Thanks!  I was going for unique and standing out, so I guess it worked.  I told some other RAs that I was going to sit with them, so I should go find them, but I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Yeah.  See you later.”

“Who was that?” Danielle asked as Megan was walking away.

“Megan.  She’s an RA in Building K.  She said last night that she was going to do something different with her hair.”

“It certainly is different.  How do you know her?”

“I’ve just seen her around here a lot.  I think Amy introduced us earlier in the year.”

“I see.”

“Oh… so the funniest thing happened today.  I know this girl online who lives in Texas, and she sent an email teasing me about the game, saying that Texas was going to win.  After the game, I had another message from her that she sent at halftime. She was teasing me because Texas was winning, acting like they had already won… but that didn’t work out for her so well!”

“That’s great,” Danielle said.  “You don’t ever want to count on something happening until you know it’s going to happen.  Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, they say.”

“Or don’t count your Toros before they’re… calved.  Is that a word, calved?”

“I’m not sure.”

After I finished eating, I walked back to Building C and Room 221, thinking about today.  Brittany apparently learned a valuable lesson about celebrating prematurely and counting on something uncertain.  This was a lesson that I should also keep in mind. Sometimes life throws unexpected curveballs. Some of these are minor and insignificant in the long run, like when a team that is winning falls behind, or when a friend unexpectedly dyes her hair green.  But sometimes these surprises can have major ramifications for the future.

A few weeks after this football game, I had an unexpected occurrence in my life that changed my plans for the future: I was not chosen to be an RA.  I completely bombed the interview. The current RAs and housing department staff member who interviewed me asked a lot of questions about how I would handle certain situations, and my answers seemed shaky and uncertain.  I had a very sheltered childhood, and many of the situations they asked about, such as dealing with students with substance abuse problems or gay and lesbian students being excluded by others, were not things that I had ever come across in my life.  That which I had assumed my life would revolve around next year had not happened, just as Brittany’s assumption that the Toros would go on to win did not happen. I was going to need to make new plans, eventually.

November 5, 1994.  The Drawbridge Classic and Tube Sock Madness. (#12)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 10 Comments

In many parts of the US, college football is a huge deal.  Thousands of fans pack parking lots for elaborate tailgate parties.  At these parties, someone will set up a grill and barbecue meat as people sit around in lawn chairs and consume large amounts of meat and beer.  Then, eventually, they will head inside and watch the football game. Some college football games will draw crowds of close to 100,000 people.

Jeromeville is not in that part of the US.

Football is not as much a part of the culture here as it is in other parts of the country.  A few universities in this state have storied football programs, but UJ is a few notches down the football ladder.  They are a Division II team, two steps below the schools that most professional football players come from. They do not offer football scholarships, or at least they didn’t in the 90s.  And the media does not pay much attention to UJ football, beyond the school newspaper, the local Jeromeville newspaper, and occasionally a little blurb six pages deep in the sports section of the big newspaper from Capital City.

Despite this lack of attention, UJ had its annual rivalry game against Capital State University, another Division II school.  The UJ and CSU campi were less than 20 miles apart. Before the freeway bypass of Highway 100 was built, the old route of Highway 100 was a street called Capital Avenue, which crossed the Capital River on a beautiful lift drawbridge, built in the 1930s, with two tall towers and a clear view of the State Capitol Building as you crossed it.  The bridge (known simply as “the Drawbridge” to locals) is still there, still used as a main city street, and also as a symbol of Capital City. Since this bridge separated Capital City from Jeromeville to the west, the rivalry game between UJ and CSU was called the Drawbridge Classic, and the annual rivalry trophy was fashioned from an actual piece of steel removed from the Drawbridge during routine maintenance in the 1970s.

On the afternoon of the 1994 Drawbridge Classic, I came back in from the dining hall to see two people in the common room, Jared and Jonathan, playing Scrabble.  Jared lived on the third floor. He was a little on the short side with bushy blond hair, and his mannerisms always struck me as being a little odd.  Jonathan was taller, with curly brown hair.  He lived on the first floor; his roommate was Pete, who taught me Risk a few weeks earlier. I didn’t know Jared or Jonathan very well.

“Hey, guys,” I said, looking at the board.

“Hi, Greg,” Jared replied.

“Who’s winning?” I asked.

“Jared is,” Jonathan said.  “He usually does.”

“I won a big Scrabble competition back home,” Jared said.  “Last year I was ranked third in the state among youth Scrabble players.”

“That’s pretty impressive,” I said.  I never did know if that was actually true, but a quick glance at the board suggested that some of the words played in this game were played by an extremely skilled player who knew the game well and knew lots of obscure words with unusual letters in them.  “Are you guys going to the football game? I asked.

“Nah,” Jonathan said.  “I have reading to catch up on.”

“UJ has a football team?” Jared asked.

“Yeah,” I said.  “This week is the big rivalry game against Cap State.”  I just had no concept that someone could be a student at this school and not know this, especially considering how the game had been hyped for the entire last week.

“Okay,” Jared replied.  “I’m not going.”

I walked back up to my room.  I spent the next four or five hours doing some combination of math homework, reading, taking a nap, and replying to two emails from girls I had met on IRC chat rooms, not necessarily in that order.  As I was trying to lie down for my nap, I kept thinking about the football game. I wanted to go; that was a given. But I was debating in my mind whether I should just go by myself and sit with random strangers, or go ask people in the building if they were going.  Sitting with people I knew would be fun, but finding out who was going would involve getting out of my introvert comfort zone, and possible rejection, such as the complete lack of interest I got from Jared and Jonathan when I asked them if they were going.

Fortunately, the decision was made for me.  That night, at the dining hall, I saw Mike, Keith, and David sitting at a table with empty chairs.  More specifically, I heard them before I saw them, because Mike can be kind of loud, but in a good way.  I asked if I could sit with them, and they said yes.

“Is Kim meeting us there or is she coming here first?” Keith asked.

“She’s meeting us there,” Mike said.  “Right outside the entrance. She doesn’t have her Colt Crew shirt yet, so she’ll get there early to get in line for that.”

By this point, I had figured out what they were talking about.  “The football game tonight?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Mike said.  “Are you going? Wanna come with us?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Meet in my room after you’re done eating.  We’ll all walk over together.”

“Sounds good!”

 

By the time I met everyone in Mike’s room, a few more people had joined the group.  Taylor was there, along with Charlie and Pat, who were roommates at the opposite end of the second floor from me, and a girl from upstairs named Karen.  In order to reach the football field from the South Residential Area, we had to walk diagonally across the campus. We started out going much the same way that I went to math class, although they walked around and not through the creepy cluster of portable buildings. They walked next to the tall buildings that seemed to hold labs where research on biology and agriculture and genetics happened.  They walked past Wellington Hall, where I had both math class and Rise and Fall of Empires.

“Karen is surrounded by a bunch of guys,” Mike said, laughing.  “That sounds about right.”

“And I’m the youngest one in IHP,” Karen replied.  “I’m underage, so does that mean you guys are all pedophiles?”

I was curious about that last comment.  “You’re the youngest one?” I asked Karen.  “When is your birthday?”

“May 27.”

“But my birthday is August–”

“1978,” Karen interrupted.  “I told you I was the youngest.”

“What?  But… how?  How are you in college if you’re only 16?”

“I skipped a grade in elementary school.  And I took a bunch of junior college classes during high school so I could graduate in three years.”

“Wow,” I said.  “That’s pretty impressive.”

“I guess.  I don’t really think of it that way.  I knew what I wanted to do, so I went for it.”

“Makes sense.”

By this time, we were at the edge of the Quad, walking around the Memorial Union toward the entrance to the football stadium at the northeast corner of campus, on the corner of 5th and A Streets.  The stadium was next to a large athletic field used for intramural sports and team practices, with fraternity houses facing the stadium on the off-campus sides of both 5th and A Streets..  When we got there, Mike waved to a thin girl with brown hair, who stood next to a tall blond guy who looked just like Pat. The girl walked over and kissed Mike; he introduced her as Kim, his girlfriend, and Pat introduced the other guy as his twin brother, Nate.  Kim and Nate lived in the same building in the North Residential Area.

All UJ students get into all UJ Colts sporting events for free, and the student cheering section is known as the Colt Crew.  The Colt Crew called itself the largest student cheering section west of the Mississippi River. I suspected that that claim was based on the fact that, once per year, all students could get a free Colt Crew T-shirt, making them members of the Colt Crew, but many students just showed up once to get their free shirt and then left without actually watching any part of a UJ athletic event.  College students are always looking for free stuff, after all.

I had been to two football games already this year, and I had changed into my Colt Crew T-shirt before we left.  The ten of us were able to find seats together, five in one row and five just behind, but we were sitting near the front in a section of bleachers along the end zone that had a much better view from higher up, so the seats were not all that great in terms of being able to see the game.  With this game being the major regional rivalry game, a large crowd was expected.

The Cap State Hawks took the field first, among a chorus of boos, sprinkled with cheers from the Cap State fans who had made the journey across the Drawbridge for this game.  Then the Colt marching band played as the Colts took the field.

Taylor was sitting next to me.  “Hey, Greg,” he said. “Did you get one of these?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied, as I looked at the paper he was holding.  It appeared to be lyrics to the songs that the band played during football games, as well as a list of specific situations in the game when they play specific songs.  Whenever we score, the band plays the Colt Fight Song. Whenever we recover a fumble or make an interception, the band plays Sons of Jeromeville. Stuff like that. Reading through the lyrics, some of them seemed a bit strange to me, as if they probably referred to events in the school’s history or traditions that had been lost to time.  Others just seemed like nonsensical cheers. Moo moo cow cow, buzz buzz bee bee… what did that even mean?  I had heard the band and the Colt Crew student leaders doing that cheer before the game; there were hand motions and a little dance that went with it.  I had no idea what was going on.

“STAAAAATE SCHOOL! STAAAAATE SCHOOL!” the Colt Crew students began cheering.  I joined them. This cheer clearly referred to the fact that UJ was considered a more prestigious school than Cap State.  This state had two separate and independent systems of public universities. The University of the Bay was the first research-oriented university in the state, and most of its sister schools, including UJ, had their beginnings as research facilities and branch campi of U of the Bay.  These schools grew into the State Higher Education System, some of the most prestigious public schools in the USA. Cap State, on the other hand, was part of the State Colleges and Universities, a group of schools that began as teacher training colleges that still to this day do not offer doctoral degrees.

Cap State scored the first touchdown, prompting the “STAAATE SCHOOL!” chant to begin once again.  As it died down, Mike said to no one in particular, “So what do Cap State fans chant to taunt us? UNIVERRRRRRRSITY?”  Keith and David laughed. I wanted to point out that, technically, Cap State was a university also, but I didn’t bother saying anything.  It was too loud to explain anything like that right now.

During the second quarter, when the clock was stopped, one of the MCs who was leading chants for the Colt Crew got on the microphone and started speaking.  “Hey, Colt Crew!” he said. “It’s time for HAMBURGER MADNESS! Get loud for free hamburgers from Wendy’s!” I looked up and saw someone dressed in a costume as Wendy from the Wendy’s Hamburgers logo tossing rubber balls into the crowd with coupons attached to them.  Seeing the unexpected costumed Wendy approaching, I laughed, while the crowd became more loud and raucous. I didn’t catch a hamburger coupon, and neither did any of my friends who were sitting near me.

At halftime, the score was tied 10-10.  The marching band took the field to perform; someone was narrating their show, but I couldn’t hear very well with the loud crowd around me.  I noticed that Mike and Kim had gotten very cuddly, with Mike’s arms around Kim, and I also noticed that Karen had gotten cuddly with Pat. Or maybe it was Nate.  I looked a little more closely; I was pretty sure it was Pat. Although they looked very much alike, they weren’t identical, and I was pretty sure I could already tell them apart even though I had only met Nate a couple hours earlier.

Just before the third quarter started, the Colt Crew MC told us to get loud for “CANDY MADNESS!”  A group of Colt Crew leaders started throwing candy into the crowd. I got loud, but I didn’t catch any.  A few plays later, the same Colt Crew leaders started a cheer where everyone in the Colt Crew section yelled “GO!” and everyone in the sections that were not for students yelled “COLTS!”  This repeated about ten times. That was a fun one.

The game continued with each team scoring a few more times, but neither team building up a big lead.  With about five minutes left, Cap State scored to go ahead 24-20. After that score, the Colt Crew MC said, “Okay, Colt Crew, let’s get loud for TUBE SOCK MADNESS!!!”  I watched, confused, as the Colt Crew leaders, one of whom was now wearing a cow suit and another a banana suit, threw tube socks into the crowd.

I turned to Taylor.  “What is going on?” I asked.  “Why tube socks?”

“I don’t know!” Taylor said.

“It’s like they just found something random to turn into a free gift.”

“I know!”

Just as Taylor said that, I looked up to see a rolled-up pair of tube socks heading straight for me.  I reached out and caught them. “WOOOOOOOOOO!” I screamed, holding up my tube socks for everyone around me to see.

“Good job!” Taylor said, patting me on the back.

“Greg caught tube socks!” Mike shouted, and everyone from IHP sitting near me, as well as a few strangers, started cheering for me.

With about two minutes left, the Colts had the ball near Cap State’s 20-yard line.  UJ’s quarterback threw a short pass to a wide-open tight end, who ran all the way into the end zone.  The crowd loudly exploded into cheers and shouts as the Colts took the lead, successfully kicking the extra point to make the score 27-24.

“All right, Colt Crew!” the MC said.  “The Colts need to make one last defensive stand!  So everyone needs to GET UP ON YOUR FEET AND MAKE! SOME!  NOOOOOOIIIIIISE!!!!!” I stood up and started screaming, as did most of the students around me.  I screamed as loud as I could. It didn’t matter what I was screaming, as long as I was making noise and making life difficult for the Cap State team.  I screamed for several minutes straight, only taking quick breaks to breathe. I kept screaming even when I felt myself get light-headed and my voice begin to strain.

And it worked.

Cap State threw an incomplete pass, ran the ball for a six-yard gain, and threw two more incomplete passes to turn over the ball on downs.  Cap State was out of timeouts by then, so Jeromeville just ran out the clock and won, 27-24. The Colt Crew section erupted in cheers and shouts and high-fives.  I high-fived everyone I came with, plus some people sitting next to me whom I didn’t know. Only at a sporting event is it appropriate in that way to high-five total strangers and feel a bond in doing so.

I don’t remember the outcome of every game I’ve ever been to.  But, by going to Colt football games during my first few months at UJ, I learned one of the most memorable aspects of university life: traditions.  Time passes. Life changes. People get older. UJ grew and reclassified its athletic programs to a higher division in 2004, attracting better talent but also playing more challenging opponents.  A new football stadium opened in 2007. But, despite these changes, the traditions remain. I stopped going to Colts games after I graduated and didn’t get in free anymore, but I started going again in 2005, and the first thing I noticed was how many of the traditions were still around.  Even today, the band plays all the same songs. The same clichéd sporting event music plays over the PA system, although of course a few new songs have entered that rotation. Colt fans still do the GO! COLTS! cheer back and forth between the two sides of the stadium. And at the beginning of the game they do the Moo Moo Cow Cow cheer, which is still just as strange as ever.  The Colt Crew still throws free gifts into the student section. Even Tube Sock Madness is still a thing.

I still have my first pair of Colt Crew tube socks, along with a few others I’ve caught over the years.  I mostly just save them as trophies and rarely wear them, since they don’t fit me all that well. I never did get my own copy of that lyric sheet, and I really wish I had one, although these days the lyrics to the traditional campus songs can be found online.  I will forever be a University of Jeromeville Colt alumnus, and no matter how far my life moves on beyond my university years, these traditions will remain with me.