Tuesday, September 25, 2007

roll the balls

our company is having their second annual bocce charity challenge.

last year i participated but my team didn't do very well. none of us were very experienced, in fact, 2 of us had never played before. then one of our team members went on vacation the week of the tournament and we had to use an alternate. although we only won one match, we had a great time.

this year, we tried to go with the same team, but again had a personnel issue. our alternate from last year had an injury, so we had to get an alternate-alternate. (the guy we originally tried to use last year was on vacation again.) i talked to one person, another team mate recruited a different person. even though i'm the captain, i deferred to the other choice because he's a higher ranking person in the company. when we left for our first match, he got called back by his boss, so we went with my choice anyway.

our first match was a cake walk. even though we were rusty, we came out with some good plays. the other team clearly was not taking this match seriously. they were out to have a good time away from their desks. we got out to an early lead and never looked back. we won 21-5.

our next match was the following day. it was a bit of a grudge match against another team from our floor. normally we'd be friends with these guys, but this is a competition. we played it cool, very nonchalant, while they were comically aggressive, performing leaping chest bumps in an asinine display of testosterone. it was a see-saw battle all the way through but we finally pulled it out at the end of a sweltering hour. 21-19 was the final score.