King of Corn

The good fellas who make up Campbler's Tooth won the 2011 Summer Cornhole League last week. We went 11-1 in the regular season and pretty much dominated the competition. It helped that half the teams featured people who had a hard time even getting the bag close to the board itself (let alone the hole), but we just stepped on necks each week. The core team was myself, Kelly, Dan, Dboy, Paxton and Mike. They "assigned" us three girls to play on our team, but those fools never bothered ever showing up, so they don't get to bask in the glory of the title.

Our main competition came from two teams, the DSLs and Cornholio. DSLs were a bunch of frat brothers from WVU who all had jobs in the DC area. They were decent against other teams but sucked mightily when facing the mighty Tooth. Cornholio was a monster team of guys who knew how to throw some corn, but their problem was that almost every week they never showed up. When they did, they crushed teams. We split the season 1-1 with them and expected to face them in the championship game, but they lost to DSLs in the semis when only two players showed up half-drunk and threw the corn like they had a Julia Roberts movie to rush off to see.

Our most stressful match was the semis as well. We faced a team we'd never played in the regular season and featured a coworker of mine who I randomly gave some playing tips to before their opening tournament match. She soaked up that knowledge faster than Neo and suddenly she was whipping my ass. Thankfully the rest of the team stepped up (Dboy especially, winning us the match in OT 13-11) and carried us into the finals, where we had another tense matchup with the DSLs but eventually wore them out and were victorious, 17-13. Dboy got a pitcher for being team captain, the rest of us got beer glasses, and we celebrated as any team should ... at a bar. No champagne or beer was poured on anyone's head, though. Kelly might have liked that, though.

My Return to Title Form

It's been almost a decade since I left St. Petersburg, Florida. I don't necessarily miss the job (because not many of us are missing the ever-shrinking journalism field) but I've always loved the people I met there. Thankfully, I've kept up with many of my former co-workers, and one of those ways has been playing in a fantasy baseball league. And though I was not there, naming my team after my office nickname was easy. When I worked there, during one of the morning shifts when we'd all been working the night before until 1 a.m. and then had to be back at work at 8 a.m., we often got a little punchy during those morning shifts. So Todd, Ecton and I had an oddly in-depth discussion of original Star Trek TV series. We all talked about the hilarious aliens Kirk had to fight, and one of m favorite was the Mugato, which basically was a gorilla suit painted white with a huge, inappropriately designed horn glued to the head. So when they gave me a stuffed animal version as my going-away gift, my legacy was born.

Anyone who knows me is well aware that baseball is far from my favorite sport. Far, far, far from it. I'm mocked for loving soccer devoutly and getting a little too excited about odd sports like curling. Nevertheless, I joined because I wanted to be able to stay in touch with these guys and gals. In a weird turn, I won the league back in 2003, and the other owners were stunned that someone who knew so little could pull off the win.

And now they must be hating me, because I won again. And I killed it. I think I moved into first place some time in June and never relinquished the lead. Ever. It was amazing. It was just total domination. Click on the roster to appreciate my success.