Monday, April 23

Professional Athlete? You Must Be Joking.

At the basketball game this evening I learned a couple of fun things...

The first was that in April, it is unwise to compete for three straight days giving close to maximum effort. I was dead tired. Even my teammates noticed it. My jumper was short, I didn't want to play defense and I threw it to the other team at least once.

The second was that playing in a tiny tiny gym is really hard if you're personally not all that talented going one-on-one. Especially when there is no three point line to hide behind and the other team is packing it is with a 2-3 zone featuring some truly tall guys (for rec-league ball at least).

The third is that we almost got booted out of the league for both not being professionals (the word professional is in the league name) and for being suspected of being professionals (at basketball). Odd. I guess it was the drubbing from last week that did it. We were all shocked as all of our team except for one guy definitely work in an office. The other guy... well... he might. I don't know what he'd do though. As far as I can tell he's the kind of guy who would get hired for a job by a friend and then get fired for being a goofball who didn't care who knew he wasn't doing a lick of work. And then eat a tiny bag of Skittles for dinner and play some ball.

So, anyway, in the game proper, we played a team that had beaten us pretty badly over the last season. This time around, it was about a 4-6 point lead for us through the whole game. Though we stretched it out at the end of the first half to a 10 or 12 point lead. I didn't play the second half because I felt that I was risking injury due to fatigue. As I watched from the bench and generally made snarky comments to no one in particular, I noticed that our lead was decreasing. I knew we couldn't lose this game, but how close would it get? Well, we ended it with a 2 point victory. White knuckles!

We also got whistled for 3 seconds approximately 700 times more than the other team. One of our guys asked why that was, and the ref responded with a grin: "It's clear that y'all know better. Them other boys don't."

Fair enough.

3-0 so far. Somehow with Pike and basketball I'm 9-0 in 07. If we include practice split-squads, I think I'm 12-0. In the words of Levitan to Constanza:

"You can't win. You can't beat me. That's why I'm here and you're there. Because I'm a winner. I'll always be a winner and you'll always be a loser."

I wonder if the first person to punch me in the face will be a member of Pike or a member of the basketball team? Or possibly a darkhorse? Either way, I think it'll be exciting.
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Workout Total:
22 Minutes Basketball

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