Skee trip

So as you know, when Steph isn't purchasing men, she's the captain of our skeeball team. Christy and I are the other players, Diane's our sub and Meg is our coach/cheerleader/statistician/future team driver. We play at the Winking Lizard and there are four different leagues: a Lakewood Thursday night league, a Lakewood Tuesday night league, Mentor league and Independence league. At the end of each skeeball season, there's a tournament. Everyone gets to play in it-no matter what league you're from, no matter your record.

This past Friday was our tournament, and I'm just going to lay this out there: we are terrible. If we aren't last in our particular league, we must be close. Let me quickly describe our individual style of play:

Steph: Only goes for 100's. 100's are nearly impossible to get and when you miss, you get a 10-the lowest number you can get besides 0. Steph has had some amazing scores. Steph has also had the worst scores of anyone on our team. Steph's motto: "I play skeeball like I live life." That prompts Christy and I to say things like, "You mean you fail a lot?" to which Steph's angry reply is, "No-I take chances. Dammit!"

Me: Opposite of Steph. I play it safe all the time only going up the middle because I've decided I can get a better score by trying for straight 40's. I usually get good scores, but I am truly boring.

Christy: Somewhere in between Steph and me. Mostly plays it safe;, branches out for 100's sometimes; not the highest scores, but a great consistent utility player.

Even with Steph's sometimes amazing scores, we are not good. Going into the tournament on Friday, we were in 37th place out of 52 teams. And we're completely fine with that. We've accepted our place in the annals of skeeball history. So our plan for Friday was to go to happy hour at the Winking Lizard where the tournament was taking place, meet our "fans" there (a group of our friends), eat some dinner, drink some drinks, play our first game at 7pm, lose and head out at about 8:30pm to go home and be old by falling asleep on our respective couches. Awesome plan for a Friday night especially since all of us were exhausted.

Here's what happened:
















Yeah see where it says Ball Busters? That would be us. We made it to the final fucking four.

Basically here is what happened: Christy became the Rain Man of skeeball. I have no idea how, but it's like her body was taken over by the soul of a kid who used to work at Chuck E. Cheese and spent all his breaks playing skeeball. She was unbelievable. I was unbelievable in the opposite way. I was absolutely atrocious. Like literally when I was 4 I played skeeball better than I played Friday night. But it didn't matter because Christy was on fire.

Folks at the place were calling us the Cinderella team and our previous opponents were sticking around to watch us play. But you know once you start winning, the haters come out, too. One group of guys accused us of cheating. And a team of bitter old ladies were talking smack about us. Matt had to almost get in a bar fight with them to defend our honor. They were just mad that we were in the final four and didn't care that we were. The bottom line, ladies, is that if you are that worked up over skeeball you need to take a minute and assess where your life went wrong.

With each win, our "fans" (friends) were losing their enthusiasm exponentially. Here is an artist's rendering of what that looked like:














That...is a pretty sweet drawing.

My favorite moment of the night was when Meg heard our third opponents say, "You guys won." She threw her purse down in disgust and angrily yelled, "Are you serious?!?" There is nothing like the support of your coach, you guys.

Now don't be too hard on Meg or our fans. We had all planned to be home by 8:30pm. At 12:15am, we were all wondering if our bracket busting would ever end...so we could sleep. It's too bad none of our fans drove their own cars to the bar and lacked the free will to leave at any time. Oh wait...

By the way, unrelated, my feet were hurting like a mothereffing bitch.

After our final four game, which we lost, we were told we had one more to go to determine if we got 3rd or 4th place. It was 12:15am. It had been 7 hours, and the final game would take 1 more hour. Would we forfeit our chance at 3rd place and let our exhaustion win? Or would we step up to the challenge-just like the Mighty Ducks did against the Hawks? You guessed it-we forfeited and took fourth place so we could go home. Look I love Meg with all my heart and soul, but she is no Emilio Estevez.

So after 7 hours of grueling skeeball play, blood, sweat and tears-okay there wasn't any blood but I did break a nail-what did we walk away with? Pride and this:





















A Miller Lite t-shirt in a Miller Lite glass. Worth it? Who's to judge? Me. And I judge: totally worth it. I love free t-shirts.

P.S. We are totally going to pitch an idea for a movie about our rise to skeeball glory to Disney. This is a can't-lose plan. Meg will be played by John Candy, and Steph, Christy and I will be played by Jamaicans. Hmm...perhaps my John Candy statement is a tad in poor taste, but I'm sorry-"Cool Runnings" jokes never go out of style.