Late last month, I competed in the intramural table tennis tournament at IU South Bend. This was my 4th year in a row and each year I have come up short, finishing 4th, 2nd, and 3rd respectively. Ah, but like my colleague Peyton Manning, I was destined to get that monkey off my back. Okay, maybe that's a bit of a stretch.
My competition was all students. As you can see from the picture, I'm looking a little like Taylor Hicks next to all the students half my age. I think I kinda intimidated them when I walked in with my nice paddle in the nice case, then got out the spray cleaner, wiped it down, kissed it . . .okay, scratch that last part. Kinda funny watching their reactions thinking I was this table tennis ace, when I'm far from that.
The competition wasn't as tough this year. I won all my matches and only lost one actual game the entire night. I stress "night" because we played old school in that we played games to 21. After getting used to playing games to 11, going all the way to 21 seemed like an eternity. We didn't finish until about 10:30 p.m.
My great reward was the t-shirt in the picture to the right which has "champion" on the back in big letters. Lucky for me, two students by the names of Jared and Duc chose not to play, because they would have absolutely smoked me.
It was a lot of fun. I love working with students and having the opportunities like this to take a break from my professional persona and interact with them in a more laid back fashion.
No comments:
Post a Comment