Friday, September 05, 2008
Some quick thoughts as I think of Ultimate between classes.
Talking to a college buddy on Rhino after Labor Day, we discussed how much time has passed since our salad days in this sport. As he matched up his players on the D-line against Jam's offense, he pointed to one of his teammates. "You guard Hollywood," he directed.
"Who?"
"Hollywood."
"Who." came again the reply.
"Fucking A. Hollywood. The big guy over there that keeps catching unders and jacking hucks."
I remember when Hollywood was a name that everyone knew, even myself as a freshman at Wisconsin. Now we gotta point him out. Sorry Greg, don't know what this means for you. In with the new, out with the old, they say.
Also reminded me of, back when the UPA newsletter came in newspaper format, how Jason, Tyler, and I were so excited to find ourselves in a crowd on the cover picture, a shot of Oscar Pottinger laying out past Zip for a goal in their epic semifinals game. Now we've moved to a time where my program has won 3 college championships and I contribute elevated stats in the finals at club natties. Out with the old, certainly, but give us some time to enjoy our brief stints near the summit please. How I've loved my time playing this sport.
Unrelated but on my mind as i glance through RSD is Match and his madlib-template writing. "(name) was playing for (team) this weekend, but looked out of sync on (O/D). I am curious as to whether he'll be able to (cliche) and (cliche). He can play (positive adjective) but played (negative adjective). He better (generic sports improvement)."
I'm glad people have something to read: even I will occasionally flip through the pages of People or US to find out how fat Britney is now or who Lindsay Lohan is blowing these days. But his shit has the same credibility as a Page Six item. The point was driven home to me in his reflections on Chesapeake, where he claimed "it was weird to see Valdivia on the O-line when he was a D-line guy for Bravo." Then, when I pointed out the fact I played O-line for Bravo last year in the comments section, he defended himself by quoting me from an email i sent him a few months ago where i told him I played D "mostly", but clearly list my role as "get the disc to Parker in power position."
Now, based on one careless reading of my email to him, he writes as if he not only knows what I play, but is so familiar with me that it was weird to see me play O, as if the rules of his world had been rocked by such a foreign happening. It was then that the amount of 'information' he's passing off as observation became clear, that he's taking things he thinks he knows or heard and spinning wild tales of sports exploits to suit his imagination. To those who know, it's become a hilarious game of telephone we like to mock.
And that's just one example. I've mostly stopped looking in his articles for anything written of actual worth because it's so far proved to be a pointless exercise. For those too far away (like him at most tourneys he writes about) to watch, it must be nice to have something on Mondays to waste a few school or work minutes reading. To others like me, who were actually at the tourney...well, it seems that for the most part, I'm not really seeing the same things Match "saw". Greatest journalist in our sport, reaching the pinnacle? Debatable, but his skills as a master bullshitter cannot to be understated.
This weekend is the Chicago Heavyweight Championships, held at the concrete fields of Naperville. This tourney has bottomed out significantly in quality from its old Tune-Up days when teams from all over like Bravo, DoG, and Ring used to attend. Now the field looks more like "Central Regionals Lite". I wish we weren't going; Sub Zero needs more time working on specific team drills to come together and not another tourney weekend. It also gives most of the ambitious upstarts in our region a free shot at us before Delafield with nothing to lose. I hope the rain they've been getting softens up those fields. The hard surfaces at Chesapeake contributed to Muffin's broken foot, and we can't afford any more injuries with the clock winding down on the season.
Class calls. Out.
14 comments:
Hh:
Remember those famous words, paraphrased and taken way out of context here, that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. I am afraid you are giving Match too much credit here.
- An opponent and friend.
you seem to be upset that people don't have any interest in the history of the game or have respect for what people have brought to the sport over years of play.
yet when i invited you to play on our winter league team - a team with 6 upa champions with 15 championship rings from 8 different teams, you couldn't be bothered to come out to a game. I mean, you agreed to play and said you wanted to be on the team, then I'd see someone on game night who'd say "oh, I left hector sitting on the couch at home, he isn't coming." Here it was, a great chance for you to get to know some of the best players in LA, learn some local frisbee history and teach us a bit about the Madison scene, and you had no interest. Or your interest was to hang out with some younger frisbee kids who don't have history – the same ones that don’t know or care who Hollywood is.
the reason i was so annoyed at you going back on your word to play was not just you being flakey like people warned me you would be. It was because you showed zero respect for some old school (and current school) players - the same thing you seem to be moaning about here.
Oh shit Sanford!
First off is an apology; I did flake out. After my first foray into that scene, where it seemed like i'd stepped into some capulet-montague shit, and given the hour's drive to the fields, I decided it was best if I stayed out of any warring feud between friends. But I flaked. I did. I owe you shots.
As to your reading of my story, I'm hardly bemoaning our passing times. I still know Greg Husak, and he still gets my due respect. I just found it funny in the course of conversation with my buddy that the scene is shifting an entire generation forward, and seems to be outgrowing some of the people who haunted my nightmares as an on-field noob. I believe we call that progress, or time passing, whichever.
Still Corey, I didn't play on your winter league team. I missed out on meeting great people. And lest you think this apology is less than sincere - don't. I mean it. I'm sorry.
you think the times are a changin, but you don't know nuthin yet!
go look at jacob's posts on rsd now about "average players" and the list of people he remembers. now those are people who's time has past. some dumb rhino kid and greg have nothing on all the people that will never know who amos is - regardless of him having one of the greatest marks in the history of ulty.
it's all good, and i will someday take you up on those shots.
jacob who?
i keed, i keed.
match is heard because hes one of the only ones who takes the time (however little he takes) to write (however inane it is) about all these college and club teams that people want to know more about. if there were more bloggers who covered as many tournaments and games as he did, people would read him too.
also, people give him too much credit bc hes a blogger and writes as if he knows what hes talking about, we all do, so do you. we're not right about everything, just choose to read selectively
keep up the good writing. we could use even a few more posts: remember, every post you publish is a 100 less match fans
"my program has won 3 college championships and I contribute elevated stats in the finals at club natties."
a little self-aggrandizing here, dare i say frank-esq?
Silly anonymous Sep 5:
First, Frank doesn't have any actual stats. he pontificates from the stance of "You haven't seen me so you don't know how good I am!"
You can see Hector's rings and stats in last year's finals. Or, you could just watch it and see that he balled. Just cause you didn't see it didn't mean it's untrue.
Oh, and sign your posts or no one cares.
dear "handy",
i made no claim about how well he played. he probably played great.
if he did play well, he's not the only one to have done so, or have "elevated" stats, in an "important" game. nor is he the only one to have been a member of a successful college program.
admittedly i haven't been paying attention for too long (and could be very wrong here), but the only two ive read writing about their ultimate accomplishments (however justified it may or may not be) are frank and now him.
and me not posting a name doesn't change the validity of my point, nor does you putting a name change the stupidity of yours.
rememberin when the upa newletter was in newspaper format?????? pfft, your a child. I remember when they uped the dues from 5 bucks to 7 bucks per year. Youll join the ranks of "the has beens in a sport that never was" soon enough. So why you so hung up on match? i guess theres something to the ole saying "the truth hurts".
Part of the reason why bloggers like Match are the only ones writing about the sport is that it is near impossible for anyone who knows how to report and write to get in touch with teams and players. Emails and phone calls have gone unreturned for years now. Interest from relative outsiders looking for a gig to write about nationals or other tournaments usually encounters a dead-end or, worse, bullshit cockiness from a kid who'd rather try to fuck with a writer than help publicize his sport. Or you could just continue to have features reporters write the same story about "this odd hybrid sport" year after year after year.
Anonymous Sep 05,
No need for quotations, ask for Handy, you'll find me. I don't want to start a fight on Hh's blog, which I enjoy reading, so I'll stop after this. Your own (self-noted) ignorance about the existing writing out there hardly defends your perspective. Usually when people make a point about "what's out there" they talk about how much they've read, not how little. Case in point, even in the limited reading you've done you've failed to notice that Frank has never, once, spoken of his accomplishments in ultimate, as he has none. In fact this is prevailing mark against him.
As for my signature, it's not about "stupidity," it's about when I put my opinion out there, you know who said it; I don't take pop shots from the shadows of internet anonymity. To say that credibility isn't affected by signing, or the lack thereof, is simply erroneous.
the point of putting quotes around your name apparently wasn't blunt enough - ill try again:
your name, handy, means nothing to me. i dont know you, and most likely will never meet you, so it really could be any name there. what matters are your ideas. i never wrote that your signature was stupid. i wrote that your responses (now both of them) are.
did you not read rsd in the months after potlatch? frank extensively wrote about was how good of a game he played in the showcase game against sockeye at potlatch. a middle aged man with no turnovers and a layout d against one of the top teams (i think he said world's best, but we've been corrected). since despite the audience no one has refuted him, i guess that probably means it actually happened, right? hooray frank!
who cares? probably not you, and certainly not me. but yet he continued (and continues, you know its coming..) to write and write about how good he played, despite both better players and performances in the game.
if i had a better grasp of ultimate literature, would it change the self aggrandizing nature of this blog post or of frank's? does it make it more or less true? better and/or more acceptable?
Naperville's fields are nice, don't call them concrete.
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