I'm having big time issues with formatting on this blog site, so I apologize for the appearance:
I stumbled across a crazy show on one of those Wildlife channels the other day. These dudes were "hunting" Canadian geese. Let me get this straight. These are grown men, presumably. For fun, and in the name of sport, they spend their weekends staging about 50-100 fake geese in an open field. These things look like yard ornaments. Then they hide in the brush and blow a duck whistle over and over. The idea is to get a flock of geese to fly in your general direction. As soon as the geese are directly overhead, you blast them out of the sky from about 10 yards away with a high-powered rifle. Listen, I understand the perils of an overpopulated society of geese. But these unevolved degenerates have the audacity to refer to themselves as sportsmen. THAT, I cannot tolerate.
Let's get back to the matter at hand. A real sport. OUR chosen sport. A sport that dates back to the Chinese as early as 2300 B.C. That's right 2300 B.C.!
Two thousand three hundred years before Jesus himself blew out his first birthday candles and brought us this wonderful season of family feuding, Michael Bublé, and awkward gifts from co-workers. I'm talking, of course, about gambling. More specifically, gambling on the athletic prowess of 18-22 year old young men. Unlike the Hatfield & McCoy lunatics who blast helpless ducks out of the sky, our sport has continued to reinvent itself in parallel with other societal developments. With the help of Al Gore's world wide interweb, a Paypal app on a handheld device, and a few simple functions in some spreadsheet software, we can match wits against some of the finest sports minds in this great nation. And we can put our hard-earned dollars* on the line to do so.
*By hard-earned, I mean we woke up, potentially even bathed, put on an ugly Christmas sweater with a turtleneck underneath, drove to work, and leveraged our company's payroll budget to research upcoming bowl matchups.
Response this year was out of control. 114 entries. Here's what the payouts look like:
1st $500
2nd $295
3rd $175
4th $100
5th $50
AGLOA $20 held back for the Angie Guidi Lack of Achievement Award, which comes in the form of a t-shirt.
Demographics of this group include:
The I-71 corridor in Ohio is extremely well represented.
Kevin Dietz & Matt Neugebauer from Chicago, IL
Ryan Stewart from Phoenix, AZ
A pair of twins, Sean and Jimmy "Hotpicks" Davis from Boston, MA
A Guidi from Dallas, TX and a couple more Guidis from Northern California
Hostetters, including a brother/sister tandem, from Thousand Oaks, Ca, along with Clay, who started doing this pool when he was a pre-teen. Now the kid is a junior in high school and has a job.
Ed Jones out of Ft. Myers, FL
James Skidmore from Brooklyn, NY
Doug & Lindsay Rice out of Indianapolis, IN
Matt Jones from Vail, CO
Jeff Crouse & Johnny Jenkins from Philly. JJ is our token black guy! Before you entered, this was the largest congregation of white dudes since the Republican National Convention. Thanks for being my Michael Steele.
Entire families, like the family of Peter Mueller & Amanda Ford, whose daughter's Sydney & Emma have joined. Also the LaCommare family, whose kids have grown up in this pool and even finished in the money before, buying themselves a new TV for their basement!
My wife, my dad (reigning champion), my father in-law, and both of my brothers in-law, neither of whom were married to my sisters in '06 when I ran the first Pick 'Em.
A whole bunch of current and former co-workers and friends.
And finally, a whole bunch of people I've never met in my life.
Thanks for sending $1,140 to a complete stranger.
