Organized sports are for the Bourgeoisie.

I blame a lot of my current problems on my childhood. It’s so much easier. When I was a kid, I wanted to play organized sports like little league or organized basketball. Even if it was crime, I wanted to be involved in something organized. Alas, I never got to do it during my years as a young’in. I think I said this before: we were immigrants – my parents didn’t believe in that “Canadian stuff”:

“Pay money to play with other kids? We have a perfectly good TV…go watch TV instead”

And so I did.

I think I’ve seen every episode of “Tailspin”

So my childhood was robbed of organized sports and it stuck in my psyche for a long time. I never really knew what it meant to play in a tournament. Not even the Scott tournament of Hearts!

That all changed last week when I entered a tournament- I entered the CCYAA 3 on 3 Shootout sponsored by Pepsi.

How did I muster the courage to enter a tournament? All it took was 2 words and one contraction: “Why don’t you?”

Flug you.

What happened was: last year, I went to the same tournament but I was only a spectator. I was watching my friends play in the tournament (I wasn’t asked to play because I’m not good enough) and so I was relegated to the sidelines amongst the player girlfriends. I started talking to one of them and I indicated my childhood desire to play in organized sports (I said it with a sigh) and she simply said: “Why don’t you?”

I had this big-universal changing thought and I decided to improve myself by trying something new. I said the following sentence in my head (censored for PG readers):

“Flug it, why not?”

So when this summer came along, I decided to make my own team. The trick with forming a good team is to choose people better than you. This way, they make you look good – so I did my best Fat Joe impersonation and recruited good basketball players. The only problem was that we never played together before and we didn’t have a chance to practice. We decided to just “wing it” on that day – like that ever works.

Entering the Forbidden Palace

On June 16^th, I woke up early to get to “Splendid China Center” for my first ever tournament. I was so excited, I didn’t bring a basketball to a basketball tournament. I signed my team up for the competitive division because Clem told me so. So I did. It turned out that everyone else signed up for the recreational division so my division was actually slim pickings. We won our first game easily. In fact, it wasn’t even close:

The other team didn’t show up.

Win by default. That was easy. I guess half the battle in winning is to show up. Later on, I found out that there were only 4 teams present which meant that we all qualified to the playoffs the next day. The pressure was off. We still wanted to win games however because we didn’t want to come all the way for nothing.

Our first real game really sucked for us because the other team kept getting the lucky bounces. The rim was really loose so all you had to do was hit the rim and it would fall in. It was also our first game ever playing together so we were adjusting to each other. We were pretty pissed because we felt that we had a good chance of winning against this team. We lost. Bah bah black sheep.

We were pretty steamed about losing and felt a tremendous amount of pressure to win because our next opponent looked as vulnerable as you can get – they were smoking cigarettes before the game and didn’t bother warming up. If we lost, I would have gone home and taken up Sodoku. This team had this really big fat guy who was easily over 200 lbs. He was like the Chinese Tractor Traylor – whenever he turned around for a shot, he was so wide that you couldn’t get a good shot of blocking him. Luckily, we won the game…by 1 point.

Holy Hell – 1 point.

At the end, we won by just fouling them till time ran out.

Who cares, a win is a win.

As for the third game, we stuck with our strategy of showing up and alas, we won by default. We were now 3-1 with one game left.

Our last game was versus the Kagers – which was one of the best teams in the league. They’ve been playing basketball for a long time now and so we were the heavy underdogs. I went in not expecting to win but I think it was our “We don’t give a flug” attitude that made us play harder. The Kager players were okay in their attitude except one dude who loved calling fouls. If the ball didn’t go in, he’d just yell “foul” or if he wasn’t calling fouls, he’d be saying “And one” like he was a spokesperson for the company.

I hate that.

Well, we lost 15-11 but I thought we played really well.

Sunday

Being the genius that I was, I didn’t put on any sunblock on Saturday so when Sunday rolled around, I had sunburn. It really friggin hurt but I had to man up and play our playoff game. When I got to the court, only two of my teammates managed to show up on time so we played our game with no substitutes. Finally, my friend showed up and we inserted him right in (since he’s way better than me) and I got to cheer from the sidelines. We played the first team we felt we could beat again…and we lost…by 1. ARGH.

That’s organized sports for you.