It's Not Checkers

So, on the New York Times' website, the front and center story is about chess players. Specifically chess players who may or may note be cheating by having outside assistance hidden away in their private bathrooms. Now, I think that the Chess Boxing folks have it right, and we should just have these geeks fight it out. But, I have to say that I admire what's going on. Basically, Player A is killing Player B, but Player A takes a lot of bathroom breaks (which I guess is allowed, since Chess is really boring and players take forever to move). So, Player B protests. Tournament officials decide to lock both private bathrooms, and say that any player can take as many breaks as they want, but need to have a tournament official accompany them into a shared bathroom. Player A thinks that this is bogus, so he forfeits a game in protest, since he was up by 2 games anyway. Controversy ensues.

Now, I can see why Player A isn't fond of this. While I happen to enjoy having people listen to me give birth to little brown children on the toilet, many people get nervous when there's someone else in the bathroom with them. And in fairness, most people think that Player B's protest is just gamesmanship, and not a legitimate gripe. So, Player A's response to just give away a point (and, I'm assuming, proceeding to beat the crap out of Player B anyway) is pretty awesome.

The reason that I'm writing about this is because I have to admit that I've pulled this sort of stunt before. Tennis match back in high school. I was up comfortable against a guy who wasn't very good, but was sort of a punk. I thought that he was cheating me by calling some of my good shots out, but I was in control of the match. So, he was serving, and I called one of his serves out, and he starts moaning about it. So, I give him a replay, proceed to catch his next serve (which was in) with my hand, throw it back to him, and give him the point. Let's just say that you're not supposed to be able to catch a first serve that a guy hits with your hand. It's pretty much me telling him that he hits like a girl, and that I didn't even need a racquet to return it. Then I smashed a couple shots to break his serve, and ended the match soon thereafter. In looking back, it's sort of funny, but it wasn't the most sporting thing in the world to do. So, if anyone from Colonie HS in Albany remembers getting beat by a big Asian dude who was a punk during the match, I'd like to apologize. Of course, if we would have gone to Tennis Boxing, I would have owned him. Tennis players are generally sissies.

-Chairman

Back At It

So, I just spent 5 days out in NYC. Got in on Wednesday afternoon, and naturally the first thing we do after dropping our stuff off at the hotel was to go run a few games down at the park. Get off the plane, and go play streetball. Because we're good like that. Me and the (not so) lil' bro ran a few games, first with halfcourt, and then a game of full. Played alright. Decent defense. A little offense, though I have to admit that I'm definitely not a streetballer. I'm running around looking for screens away from the ball and back-cuts. My teammates are just looking at me funny. So, a lot of my effectiveness (e.g., passing to cutters, screening for cutters) was out the window. However, I did have a couple muscle plays where I get a board down low, head fake, and then jump up for a little reverse layup taking the 4 or 5 hands on me up in the air. The next day, the muscles were sore, but the knees held up alright. Which is always a victory for me.

The rest of the NY trip was fun. Visited the Met, like I always do. At a lot of good Chinese food. The reason that I went was actually for my cousin's wedding. The rehearsal dinner was pretty awesome. You had a Chinese/Vietnamese wedding. So naturally, you have the rehearsal dinner at a Greek restaurant. So, we ate way too much hummus, pita, gyro, souvlaki, saganaki, and whatever else they brought to the table.

The next day, the wedding was fun, and the reception was amazing. A legit 10-course Chinese banquet. Every course was good. This was incredible food. They were able to take beef and broccoli and make it transcendent. We even had some Shark's Fin Soup, which allowed me to throw in another tasteless Steve Irwin joke.

Of course, the flight back was a different story. I had a flag football game at 9pm back on campus. So, I had a 4:20 flight out of LaGuardia, and a 6:35 flight from O'Hare that would put me in to Champaign at 7:25. Plenty of time to get back, get unpacked, changed, and out to the fields at 8:30 to loosen up. American Airlines didn't quite see it that way. First, the plane coming into LaGuardia was late, so we didn's get seated until like 4:40. Then, the crew botched the luggage. We saw them unloading the original luggage from the previous flight, and we see them load luggage, which was supposed to be ours. Then a few minutes later, they start unloading luggage, and then take it away and load up different luggage. Whoops.

We didn't leave the gate until 5:40, and didn't get in the air until 6:00. Not cool. I was real nervous about making the game. We needed all the guys we could get, plus I was running Q for us. Now, my flight from O'Hare was supposed to be 6:35. We certainly weren't going to make that, even getting the hour back going west. So I thought that I was screwed. We hit the ground at 6:50, and I hurry out the plane to check on flights down to Champaign. I saw a 7:20 flight that was boarding. So, I hustle down the H terminal and up the G terminal to make it to the gate in time to get that flight, which still had a few open seats. I hit the ground in Champaign at 8:10, and CJ picked me up at 8:20, to take me straight over to the football fields at 8:30. Now, you know where my priorities are.

Now, the flag football team that I'm playing for this year is a co-rec team. We had only had 2 practices, and neither of them were well attended. But, I had a good feeling. We had at least one guy who is a burner, and the girls seemed to be pretty athletic. I figured that with my experience back there, we'd be pretty good. I may revise this to say that we've got a shot at the title, if we can get another guy or two to play. Here's the story. We only had 3 guys show up. It's a 4 guy/4 girl league, so we played 8 on 7 the entire game. And we won 37-6. My favorite moment? I'm on defense (which is not a good thing), playing short zone. I drift back into coverage and the QB throws a duck. I see it wobble down toward me, and I decide that instead of drifting back to catch, I'd just jump up and knock it down, since it was 4th down. So, I jump, not quite as high as I figured, and a little earlier than I should have, and swing and completely miss the ball. But, I distracted the receiver behind me enough so that she dropped the pass, probably for fear of me landing on her and crushing her. Whoops. That's why you shouldn't let me play D.

Even without having practiced, and only having a few people with flag football experience, we actually looked pretty organized out there. Plus, we even managed to play defense with my slow ass out there. Of course, our two other guys were clearly the best athletes on the field, we probably had 4 girls more athletic than their best girl, and I'm still pretty decent back there at QB. Basically, we rolled. We punted once, but scored 4 TD's. Our other TD was a punt return in the first quarter, after we held them to 3 and out to start the game. I managed to throw two girl TD's to two different girls, and hit each of our guys for deep TD's, including a 66-yard play where my guy got behind the D, caught a throw that went just over the double coverage, and then just outran everyone for the last 20 yards. Now, this wasn't as cool as the 79-yarder to Randy back in the day, but this was a cool play, since it was the opening play of the 2nd half, and we were only up 16-6 at that point, and I had to talk my receiver into running the deep route, since he wasn't confident that our timing and accuracy was on for the deep ball. I guess that I can be pretty persuasive sometimes.

Overall, the legs felt good. I was able to push off and step into my throws, pain-free. I was able to roll out to both sides and outrun the defense (no sacks, if you can believe that). I even danced around a little bit, avoiding the pass rush. Not quite Ron Mexico-style, but maybe like Daunte Culpepper. Or Jared Lorenzen. Anyway, I was throwing a good ball - no picks, no balls that were close to being picked, and only one pass broken up by the defense. I made some throws in the pocked, and I made some designed throws on the run, as well as some off of the scramble. I had one throw slip out of my hand (that I think would have been big, since my receiver had already run by his man deep), and one throw that I just botched (to an open receiver in the endzone, no less). Other than that, I gave my receivers a good shot at catching the ball for just about all of the other throws. It felt darned good.

One thing that I find really interesting about me in co-rec football is that I'm not nervous at all. For men's games, I'm nervous and a little jittery because I know that everyone around me is depending on me and expects a lot. For co-rec, I'm doing as much teaching as anything else, since a lot of the girls that we get have never played before. So, I don't have time to be nervous, and whatever jitters may be there go away because I'm talking a lot. Or maybe, I just like having girls on the other team chase me around.

-Chairman

Back At It

So, I just spent 5 days out in NYC. Got in on Wednesday afternoon, and naturally the first thing we do after dropping our stuff off at the hotel was to go run a few games down at the park. Get off the plane, and go play streetball. Because we're good like that. Me and the (not so) lil' bro ran a few games, first with halfcourt, and then a game of full. Played alright. Decent defense. A little offense, though I have to admit that I'm definitely not a streetballer. I'm running around looking for screens away from the ball and back-cuts. My teammates are just looking at me funny. So, a lot of my effectiveness (e.g., passing to cutters, screening for cutters) was out the window. However, I did have a couple muscle plays where I get a board down low, head fake, and then jump up for a little reverse layup taking the 4 or 5 hands on me up in the air. The next day, the muscles were sore, but the knees held up alright. Which is always a victory for me.

The rest of the NY trip was fun. Visited the Met, like I always do. At a lot of good Chinese food. The reason that I went was actually for my cousin's wedding. The rehearsal dinner was pretty awesome. You had a Chinese/Vietnamese wedding. So naturally, you have the rehearsal dinner at a Greek restaurant. So, we ate way too much hummus, pita, gyro, souvlaki, saganaki, and whatever else they brought to the table.

The next day, the wedding was fun, and the reception was amazing. A legit 10-course Chinese banquet. Every course was good. This was incredible food. They were able to take beef and broccoli and make it transcendent. We even had some Shark's Fin Soup, which allowed me to throw in another tasteless Steve Irwin joke.

Of course, the flight back was a different story. I had a flag football game at 9pm back on campus. So, I had a 4:20 flight out of LaGuardia, and a 6:35 flight from O'Hare that would put me in to Champaign at 7:25. Plenty of time to get back, get unpacked, changed, and out to the fields at 8:30 to loosen up. American Airlines didn't quite see it that way. First, the plane coming into LaGuardia was late, so we didn's get seated until like 4:40. Then, the crew botched the luggage. We saw them unloading the original luggage from the previous flight, and we see them load luggage, which was supposed to be ours. Then a few minutes later, they start unloading luggage, and then take it away and load up different luggage. Whoops.

We didn't leave the gate until 5:40, and didn't get in the air until 6:00. Not cool. I was real nervous about making the game. We needed all the guys we could get, plus I was running Q for us. Now, my flight from O'Hare was supposed to be 6:35. We certainly weren't going to make that, even getting the hour back going west. So I thought that I was screwed. We hit the ground at 6:50, and I hurry out the plane to check on flights down to Champaign. I saw a 7:20 flight that was boarding. So, I hustle down the H terminal and up the G terminal to make it to the gate in time to get that flight, which still had a few open seats. I hit the ground in Champaign at 8:10, and CJ picked me up at 8:20, to take me straight over to the football fields at 8:30. Now, you know where my priorities are.

Now, the flag football team that I'm playing for this year is a co-rec team. We had only had 2 practices, and neither of them were well attended. But, I had a good feeling. We had at least one guy who is a burner, and the girls seemed to be pretty athletic. I figured that with my experience back there, we'd be pretty good. I may revise this to say that we've got a shot at the title, if we can get another guy or two to play. Here's the story. We only had 3 guys show up. It's a 4 guy/4 girl league, so we played 8 on 7 the entire game. And we won 37-6. My favorite moment? I'm on defense (which is not a good thing), playing short zone. I drift back into coverage and the QB throws a duck. I see it wobble down toward me, and I decide that instead of drifting back to catch, I'd just jump up and knock it down, since it was 4th down. So, I jump, not quite as high as I figured, and a little earlier than I should have, and swing and completely miss the ball. But, I distracted the receiver behind me enough so that she dropped the pass, probably for fear of me landing on her and crushing her. Whoops. That's why you shouldn't let me play D.

Even without having practiced, and only having a few people with flag football experience, we actually looked pretty organized out there. Plus, we even managed to play defense with my slow ass out there. Of course, our two other guys were clearly the best athletes on the field, we probably had 4 girls more athletic than their best girl, and I'm still pretty decent back there at QB. Basically, we rolled. We punted once, but scored 4 TD's. Our other TD was a punt return in the first quarter, after we held them to 3 and out to start the game. I managed to throw two girl TD's to two different girls, and hit each of our guys for deep TD's, including a 66-yard play where my guy got behind the D, caught a throw that went just over the double coverage, and then just outran everyone for the last 20 yards. Now, this wasn't as cool as the 79-yarder to Randy back in the day, but this was a cool play, since it was the opening play of the 2nd half, and we were only up 16-6 at that point, and I had to talk my receiver into running the deep route, since he wasn't confident that our timing and accuracy was on for the deep ball. I guess that I can be pretty persuasive sometimes.

Overall, the legs felt good. I was able to push off and step into my throws, pain-free. I was able to roll out to both sides and outrun the defense (no sacks, if you can believe that). I even danced around a little bit, avoiding the pass rush. Not quite Ron Mexico-style, but maybe like Daunte Culpepper. Or Jared Lorenzen. Anyway, I was throwing a good ball - no picks, no balls that were close to being picked, and only one pass broken up by the defense. I made some throws in the pocked, and I made some designed throws on the run, as well as some off of the scramble. I had one throw slip out of my hand (that I think would have been big, since my receiver had already run by his man deep), and one throw that I just botched (to an open receiver in the endzone, no less). Other than that, I gave my receivers a good shot at catching the ball for just about all of the other throws. It felt darned good.

One thing that I find really interesting about me in co-rec football is that I'm not nervous at all. For men's games, I'm nervous and a little jittery because I know that everyone around me is depending on me and expects a lot. For co-rec, I'm doing as much teaching as anything else, since a lot of the girls that we get have never played before. So, I don't have time to be nervous, and whatever jitters may be there go away because I'm talking a lot. Or maybe, I just like having girls on the other team chase me around.

-Chairman

The Diagnosis

Well, one thing that I finally figured out today at basketball was that I'm old. I need to get the knees loose before I can actually play. And once they're warmed up, they're okay. So, it was funny - I needed a few minutes on the exercise bike before we got going. I felt like TO out there. All I needed was a bicycle helmet and a Team Discovery jersey.

So, today's game was a lot like last week. Good play, overall. Very solid defense (against a pretty good player who played both inside and outside). Was able to move around. And I even hit a couple spot-up jumpers from the baseline, a couple long jumpers, and even one litle bank shot off the dribble. The downside - I've lost the pull-up. I need to get that back. The funny thing is that I was able to get open in the lane, from about 10 feet. And as I pulled up to shoot, I would get spooked by guys flying at me. Granted, they would fly into me some of the time, but that never used to really bother me. I think that I'm afraid that they're going to crash into my legs. I think that I can get over this in a couple weeks, though.

I was browsing through the Sports Guy's latest post. And I was reminded that Nick Curran was the name of the Michael Douglas character in Basic Instinct. That's hot. Also, Michael O'Donnell was the name of the alleged altar boy that was raped by a Catholic priest in Primal Fear. That's also hot. All I know is that if I ever write a movie, I'm writing all of your names in there as various seedy characters.

Actually, I've sort of done that already. In one of my journal submissions, we have a qualitative piece where we use interview transcripts from our research to tell a story (here, it's the retail shopping experience for low literate consumers). Now, we can't use the real names of our respondents. So, part of my job as the co-author is to clean up the interview transcripts, and to make up names. And that's where you fine folks come in. So people like George, Christian, and Michael have made it into my articles. And future articles will get more of you into the archives of academia. As functional illiterates. How awesome is that?

Now, I'm thinking that it's about time to jump ship on the ol' Reds. Now, a couple times earlier this season, they've swooned, but have bounced back. We'll see if they can do it one more time. They're on probation right now. Maybe things get better if Guardado comes back to close. If not, the Yanks are looking pretty darned good right now. If Mussina comes back healthy, and Unit keeps throwing like he has of late, this team should bring things home. They owned the Tigers, White Sox, and Twins in the second half. And they'll be too good for Oakland (though the A's are probably the 2nd best team in baseball right now).

To close - our Illini are 1-0, after owning... well, Eastern Illinois. I mean, they were ranked 16 in Division I-AA. But a W's a W. Only 5 more wins until bowl eligibility. Instinctively, I figured that we'd have 3 wins. But, if all the breaks fall our way, maybe we can sneak out a bowl bid. Hear me out. We got Eastern. Figure that we get Ohio, as well. We have Rutgers and Syracuse. If we can pull out both of these, we'll have 4 wins. I think that we can get Indiana for Homecoming. And if we don't get both of the Big East teams, maybe we can get a W when Purdue comes to town. Or maybe even at Michigan St. But the game that I figure that we can get Northwestern. Afterall, they've got a rookie coach, after Randy Walker died. I'd like to think that we have a shot against Northwestern, after their coach dies. Ideally, we beat them even with out their head coach dying (after all, it's friggin' Northwestern). But at this point, we take what we can get, right? So, if all the breaks go our way, we may be able to get that bowl game, after all.

Of ocurse, I'm calling the over-under at 3.5. I don't really like our schedule. We need to take a page out of Jim Boeheim's non-conference schedule. We need to get more of those directional MAC schools to come here. No more of these Big East teams that want home and homes. We need to bring in bad teams, pay them $500K, and send them home with a loss. If we set up our non-conference schedule right, we can get 4 W's before the Big Ten season starts, and then need to beat Indiana and Northwestern to get a bowl.

We'll see.

-Chairman