Austin and I were brainstorming about what sport to take on our first week, and we decided that it had to be a men's team. There is a certain amount of small talk that is required in our profession and we could not deal with five more seconds of talking about women's rush. The only part of that process that we understand is that it is similar to the Sorting Hat in "Harry Potter" and that somehow it involves a 17-hour psychoanalysis of a four-minute conversation. We don't apologize (as Legends never should), but that would have been awful. Also, with much of the senior class (and those try-hard juniors and that one sophomore we saw) getting prepped for corporate recruiting at the job fair, we joined in and decided to play squash. We got in touch with the men's team co-captains, Fletcher Pease '14 and Chris Jung '14, and set up a time to play.
Neither of us had ever touched a squash racket and, both being from south of the Mason-Dixon Line, only recently learned that it wasn't a fruit or something that goes with butternuts and makes soup. Upon a quick search, we quickly realized that it was pretty much the same thing as tennis, and we play that all the time on the Wii and are straight cash. So how did we prepare, you ask? I mean, we were going to play the best player on a nationally-ranked team. These kids have been playing for years in tournaments against some of the best players in the world and poured blood, sweat and tears into this sport.
We figured the only logical way to prepare was to understand the sport at its core. To that end, we did a bunch of other country club stuff and got really into financial markets. We crushed golf balls, talked about the government shut-down, bought stock portfolios, read The Wall Street Journal (which we had to buy ourselves, Student Assembly) and then we sold the stock portfolios with amazing returns. Finally, we checked the weather along the New England coast. Blue skies and sailing weather. We were ready to play.
Unfortunately, our opponents were not. We met at the agreed upon time, at which point they claimed to "not be able to find a court" and cited other excuses like, "We start practice soon." All A.I. references aside, how you gonna talk about practice when we talkin' 'bout the game. We are franchise players and you talkin' 'bout practice? Whatever, we reconvened after "practice" and got down to business.
The challenge was a standard game to 11 points for each Legend. Austin went first. His goal was to figure out Chris' strengths and weaknesses so that I could exploit them. The consensus after six dropped points for the Legends was that there were a lot of strengths and not many weaknesses. But on point number seven, there was a glimmer of hope for our heroes (it's our story, we get to the be the heroes). Austin finally ripped one too low to be returned. The ball bounced twice and the Legends avoided the bagel. This defied expectations and the Vegas spread on the match, adding to the 12.1 percent returns from our portfolios. Cash. After that, Chris moved back to playing with his dominant hand and the rest of Austin's match went pretty much as expected. Whatever. Down but not out.
After watching Austin have a tough go of it, I felt confident that the two-minute scouting report I was able to get could pay off. Trash talking began as soon as I walked onto the court, and I assured Chris that my size would be an advantage. Chris, however, quickly assured me that "boxing out," was illegal in squash. After quickly loosing the first seven points, I was not concerned with "rules" or "courtesy," since in some corners of the ping-pong world, 7-0 is a skunk. I decided to step it up, and the only way I could do that was to start "unintentionally" pummeling Chris every chance that I could. It worked for a couple of points and momentum swung my way, until Chris had enough and put me away with shots that literally died right after they hit the wall. I swear the guy had special strings on his racquet, and I don't care if that's not a valid excuse, I'm sticking with it. I realized it was possible I was overmatched, maybe, but so too would have been 99 percent of squash players in the States. With that, I walked off the court with more trash talk, since if I could just get my form down, Chris would be toast. See you in the winter, Jung.
The Legends begin at 0-1-0. We aren't sweating it. Lots of teams did the same thing and went on to achieve greatness. The '69 New York Mets, '11 Boston Bruins and now the '14 Rec-League Legends. Next week, we redeem ourselves against the women's volleyball team. Spandex not provided, apparently.
