Friday will be the New Year, a new decade, and eventually a new season. I'm already thinking about being drunk in some uncut city park grass on a Sunday afternoon, working on a tan I'll never get.
Part of the reason i keep playing is the drinking and the friends, but the majority is I’ve always been a big fan of the underdog. We’ve talked about making a competitive team for the 2010 season, but part of me thinks we should still take a handful of randoms, a hibachi and some Sunday field space and make a competitive team – not assemble one.
The memories I hold onto are the ones in the playoffs, where the struggling outfielders who had little success all season come up with the big catches in the clutch moments, or when an unexpected frozen rope to the shortfield gap rips a close game wide open. All of this is never more fun than when its shoved down the throat of the planned teams, the kickball equivalent of a cul-de-sac community who never saw the team with a 7-3 record on the periphery, gaining ground and still having more fun than the rest of the teams out there. As they say in politics “David’s still getting good press for beating Goliath.”
I think what most teams miss about kickball is a community they’d ignore unless shoved in their face. I remember being invited to finish a cooler of “skip and go naked” another team was trying to finish before heading to the bar. We sat in the shade, watching the ice cubes melt into the grass, getting progressively drunker, while our future bar tab got progressively smaller.
I hope this isn’t one of those things where I remember it better than it was, but as I walked the overpass catching the wind from passing busses on the pike I for whatever reason went back to that grass in some tucked away park in Somerville, near a highway and a parking plaza and life felt better for some reason. I guess I’ll hold out until April to find out.
All the best,
Brow
