Luckee Mee Follow-Up

Wayne, chief strategist, tireless organizer, and fearless leader of Mother Tongue Ultimate (new homepage eventually here), left an interesting comment on a recent post, "Luckee Me." It was refreshingly concise compared to his post-game speeches (no offense, but unless I'm caught standing between two beautiful girls, I'd rather wrap things up quickly and get a drink of water!), but I'll still cut right to the most important part, regarding Robert Pesch, whom you might remember as one of the best players in Europe:

"Sure he's good to play with; I just wish he'd smile every now and then! :-)"

This comment, combined with my second Mother Tongue tourney from this past weekend, did remind me that while playing with the Mainz experts is like attending a private, prestigious Ultimate University Grad School, playing with a motley crew of middling to excellent Mother Tongue pick-ups is like attending a public, partying Frisbee State U. And I was never one to keep my head in the books at the complete expense of my personal enjoyment.

Case in point: another triumph for personal enjoyment.

Maybe it's my skill level, maybe it's that my last couple unfortunate years of track gave me an aversion to strictly organized team sports (or maybe it's my injured foot right now), but whatever it is, I get more kicks playing in tourneys in the more relaxed MT atmosphere than I do playing in tourneys with the highly focused Mainzers.

That's not to say I don't try to win when I'm with MT or that I don't have fun when I'm with Mainz. But when it comes to certain things, especially leisure time activities, I'm less competitive by nature than some people. And Frisbee is a strange mix of intense training/competition and casual socializing where I lean toward the casual aspect. If it involves throwing a disc around and it happens on a weekend, it still feels like having a picnic or hanging out with friends at the beach.

Maybe I'll get to the point where I'm completely focused on training and winning, but it's more likely I'll continue in this vein, similar to my sister with her various weekend sports, playing as much as I can but more for the camaraderie and cocktails. As I said, I enjoy a fierce struggle and a well-earned win, but it doesn't kill me to lose on the field as long as I'm enjoying the whole experience, which is easier with some groups than with others.

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.

Luckee Me

Having played Ultimate Frisbee since October now, I'm slowly realizing what it means to play here in Mainz. It helps to be talking to Alex about it -- he's been immersed in the Ultimate culture in America for a couple of years, so he knows a lot more about the sport than I do, and that kind of outside experience is useful for seeing how amazing the guys around this area are.

Feldrenner, the top Mainz team, is certainly one of the top teams in Europe, and they've done well when they've played at Worlds too. This is a team that used to run itself ragged on the field, giving everything but never making it to the championships. So they sat back, invented the Isolation strategy to truly minimize their running on offense, and then went on to win about seven of the last ten outdoor German Championships.

Alright, you don't play Ultimate in these parts without hearing some hushed whispers about their achievements. And I had practiced with some of them at the advanced training even though I'm far from advanced. But before yesterday, I had never seen so many of them, nearly all of them, in one place. Hustling around the field or watching from the sidelines, I finally got a real sense of how fortunate I am to even be watching these guys, let alone practicing with them.

Robert Pesch, for example, is arguably the top player in Europe, and he can play with any team in the world if he wants. And I got to scrimmage on his team. When you start playing a new sport, you never expect that during your formative first year you'll be getting training time with some of the best players in the world. That's one of the coolest things I've seen about Ultimate: it's such a fluid, generally informal system that anyone can potentially play with anyone.

Of course it's unlikely these guys were quite as happy to be playing with me as I was to be playing with them -- I had my moments, but I had many more mistakes. Heck, I dropped multiple passes from arguably the top player in Europe. But that's the other coolest thing I've seen about Ultimate: these are genuinely good, supportive people. Am I ready to practice with them? Maybe not. Do they whine and moan and get angry about it? Not at all.

It's really about improving, which means getting as much disc time as possible and with the best people you can, and it's about having fun. I don't try to intrude on their tournaments and there aren't many others at my lower level who go to the advanced training, which means they still get to have their fun and I get the best learning experience I could hope for. Hopefully by the next time I'm in Germany, I'll have gotten my skills up to the point where I can actually join them on the field of organized competition.