Win The Party

I was at an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Duesseldorf this weekend with Mother Tongue, the native English-speaking team. The tourney was called either "Splatsch" or "Splash" depending on which sign you walked past, but either way the location was appropriately placed next to a large indoor and outdoor swimming pool.

The weather was terrible on Saturday, but we won a few games and held our own against some high level opponents, including the eventual tournament winners, the German Masters. "Masters" in this case means they're all over 30 years old, which means they might have some aches and pains but they also have a boatload of experience. We, on the other hand, have mostly students, and at this tourney we even had Louis, the 11-and-a-half year old son of another member, Ian, playing. He scored his only point of the tourney against the German Masters, which seemed appropriate. After our 7-4 loss, we asked the Masters to add up their years of experience: 196. In comparison, our team had 70 at most. What can ya do?

Saturday night, after dinner at perhaps the only tasty Mexican restaurant in Germany, a bunch of the team gathered to sample some liquid wares. Some of the Duesseldorf team members were still up since they were hosting the tourney, but most everyone else had gone to bed by midnight for some reason. We had beaten the hosts that morning, but our first game on Sunday at 9:30 was scheduled to be a rematch, which explains why they were so generous when we started calling for free shots. Of course a plan like "let's make them useless for the game tomorrow" isn't hard to pull off when the "victims" are the ones who start demanding unlimited free shots. The best drink of the night was a Jaegermeister-style liquor called "Killepitsch," which as you might notice lends itself to a couple of crude mispronunciations, which as you have already surmised we exploited to the fullest.

As the night continued, Ben, Garrett, and I were the ones from our team clearly enjoying ourselves the most, and eventually were the only ones left. We noticed that there was only one other group of non-hosts still up. It was maddening because couldn't they see that WE were going to win this party? They were sitting around playing some strange card game and not even drinking, yet preventing us from being the last men standing. So we told our host/enabler, Nico, to bring a bottle over there and make them indulge. Allegedly they took a shot each and then accused us of not having done so, and things were just pretty strange, and at some point they left. Awesome, right? No, because then three more guys showed up.

Kyle, an American from Oregon who had played one game with us before some of our other teammates arrived, and two of his regular teammates had been swimming and now they were back, claiming that WE couldn't win the party because THEY were still at the party. After an extended standoff, we got the Duesseldorf hosts to declare us the winners for sticking with it the whole time. But to quell the protests of the other three, we magnanimously offered a final challenge: arm wrestling.

It was agreed, and we faced off at a picnic table. Let's put it this way: they had one guy who was either Danish or Dutch, I forget now although maybe Dutch since Ben kept calling him the Flying Dutchman, and he was the individual champion. He put down all three of us like infants. Unfortunately for him, his two buddies were featherweights even compared to us, and we ended up winning 6-3. PARTY WINNERS.

Our carousing and celebratory dip in the pool was enough to wake the dead, or at least every person camped out in a tent, each of whom knew at 5 AM that we three had won the party. Obviously they were delighted for us.

Then the next day we got destroyed by Duesseldorf. Before you say it, this actually had little to do with their plan of exhausting us since most of the team hadn't fallen for it/embraced it the way Garrett, Ben, and I did. We had plenty of subs and fresh legs and eager beavers. We just couldn't beat the same team twice. Nico spent almost the entire game just slumped in a lawn chair on the sidelines, engaging in some serious schadenfreude, until Ben roared across the field for him to get up and play a freaking point, which he sheepishly did.

It came down to the whistle for the last point, and when Duesseldorf got the frisbee on a turnover, Wayne called an audible, which resulted in everyone on our defense tackling Nico off the field. Annabelle, Ian's 8 year old daughter who was in since we were down 12-2 anyway, stayed on the field, apparently frightening the Duesseldorf team, beause they managed to drop the frisbee even with a seven against one tiny girl situation. We scored the final point, which felt like a victory after our satisfying tactic.

We ended up 13th out of 23 teams, and the announcer graciously reminded those gathered that although we hadn't won the tournament, we had won the party. Sometimes the highlights happen off the field.