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Miranda

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Vengeance was a Football Team

The price of vengeance is exactly $760.  That’s how much I paid anyway.  $760 to form a co-ed football team for the River City Sports and Social Club.  It’s been over a month since my last blog and in that time my life has been consumed with one goal: winning. 

Much to my father’s dismay, I have never been the athletic type.  Not to say I haven’t tried—I gave it a few shots (pun intended).  My parents signed me up for tennis camp when I was little and when I realized that all the other girls already knew how to hold a racket and connect it with the ball, I cried my way home.  In high school, I joined the lacrosse team and the coach let me stay on out of pity once he saw that I was physically challenged in the hand/eye coordination department.  I never even received a number or a shirt and in the team picture, am standing awkwardly on the outskirts with a wind-breaker zipped up to my neck to hide lack of shirt.

The guy I used to date (not sure he was ever a “boyfriend”), is a different story.  He lives, breathes and eats sports for breakfast, lunch, dinner and any snack-time in-between.  To say that he is a sports fanatic is a gross understatement.  Between playing on a basketball league, football league and watching March Madness (and these are solely the “real” sports he partakes in—not even going on the video-game, fantasy rant), to say I would be neglected were we still together right now would also be a gross understatement.  When he’s watching a favorite team lose on TV, he actually puts his head between his legs and says things that would make your grandmother faint.  But I digress. 

Before things really got rocky between us, SuperFan (we’ll call him that) tried to put a football team together for the Richmond co-ed league I mentioned earlier.  He corralled many of MY friends together in an attempt to get players for his team.  Now, his timing also coincided with our breaking-up.  I, in turn, decided to form my own team.  I pictured a rogue team of misfits similar to the Little Giants, formed by destiny, the under-dogs, who would arbitrarily reign victorious in the play-off championship game against SuperFan’s team.  I asked my friends, co-workers, people in bars, anyone I could find who had two arms and two legs. 

So I pulled together a team of about eighteen players, give or take a few who can’t shake their hangovers in time for the Sunday games.  We call ourselves The Sneaky Weasels and are playing against teams with names like Dude, Where’s My Ball? and The Not So Tight Ends.  My official title is Captain Morgan and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.  We’ve played one game and it was on the muddiest field in Richmond.  I dipped, ducked, and dived into mire so thick that my once white sneakers looked like brown clodhoppers by the time we finished.  Nine players showed up that day—half our team.   Our opponents, The Hungry Cardinals, had about twenty people, enough for both a defensive and offensive line.  They beat us four touchdowns to our two.  We held our own though, and by the next day I felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to my thighs. 

However bruised and battered I was physically, it was nothing compared to my ego.  But having a couple weeks to get over it, I’ve realized that being in this league is no longer about vengeance to me.  Though I took some of SuperFan’s players and initially wanted nothing more than to beat his team, ironically enough, we’re not even scheduled to play each other.  And I’ve realized that this team isn’t about him anymore.  I’m having fun and the bitterness from our past relationship is slowing wearing off, and in its place there’s a newfound sense of pride for my group of misfits (and for overcoming my fear of balls).