I doubt I’ll ever make the NFL. There’s an outside chance that I could become one of the team of scurrying attorneys who insure that every consonant, vowel and punctuation mark that comes out of the commissioner’s office is unlikely to bring a multi-million lawsuit… but that’s a far cry from standing in the end zone with my arms raised in the air, listening to 50 000 fans yell out my last name over and over again. (That job belongs to Phil, of San Diego Charger fame.) My life path just doesn’t end under Sunday night lights. For sheer intensity, it will have to end under the megawatt stare of a Supreme Court justice.
But for one glorious shining moment, I had a bunch of tired, sore and totally insane law students yelling Rivers on the sidelines as I lay in the end zone, bemused, stunned and happy.
Law Games 2008 is basically an Olympics for people who will only ever appear in the sports section as someone’s agent or attorney, attempting to explain why dogfighting, domestic abuse, steroid use and fraud are the God-given rights of professional athletes, or at the very least about how they’re so very sorry that the people they trusted just happened to lead them down a path with “unfortunate and unforeseen consequences”. Needless to say, its nice to be on the other side of the equation.
Roughly 1000 law students from more than a dozen law schools came together in Montreal to participate in basketball, soccer, flag football, a bizarre cross-breed of volleyball, dodgeball and yoga known as “Kinball,” and other events. This Kinball, and Ultimate Frisbee, more commonly known as ‘disc’ or just plain ‘Ultimate’, happened to be my main events for the week.
I’ll be honest: I haven’t really felt like part of the UVic Law community to this point. Since I normally could connect with anyone, be they 70 year old Hungarian nuns, truck-driving transvestites or Alex Creamer. So it was with some satisfaction that I just happened to go out on the first day of competition and prove myself both competent at Kinball (I was dubbed the “Kinball Wizard” by another UVicer) and show that my East Coast ultimate training was up to the West Coast standard. I don’t remember exactly how I did, but it was good enough to help get both teams into the playoffs of their respective events two days later. I even got mentioned at the team meeting that night and was given a good cheer.
Fast forward 36 hours or so, to 8:30 in outdoor January Montreal weather. (In case you were watching the fast forwarding, you would have seen the following from UVic: silver parachute pants dancing to Vanilla Ice on-stage; two suits wearing rabbit heads walking into a formal moot court; $450 of alcohol somehow disappear; Wildcat Straub’s rear-end hanging out of his onesies; Wildcat Straub tackle a Christmas tree; and Wildcat Straub cover himself in silver paint. Entirely.)
UVic vs. Mcgill. Semi-final. Loser goes back to the hotel. Winner goes to the final. I’d already made two points off of beauty passes into the back of the endzone, leading to wild cheering from UVic as we took the lead. Then I got marked up by the other team’s captain on defense. He burned me like a Roman candle, shaking me like San Fran in a quake and putting the exclamation point on the sentence in the end zone with his catch.
We re-marked, worked the disc upfield until we were about a third of the field from the McGill end. My coverage lost a step on a cut, so I took off for the end. The pass came in around shin height and fast directly behind me. I dropped to my stomach, rolled to my back, tracked the disc to the point of contact until I overspun and stuck my hand out blindly behind my back, hoping I’d read it right.
It hit. And stuck.
I hit the brick wall of the school we were playing up against and came to a rest. Four different law schools were going off their rockers making noise. Not a single person near the field wasn’t clapping or screaming. And all of UVic was being led by Dickie: raising their arms up and down and chanting “Riv-ers! Riv-ers!”
I don’t care if it was the semi-final of a sport invented to be a distraction from the munchies at an event that was filled with people for whom the most athletic part of many days is a rousing intramural game. It was, from what I’ve been told upwards of forty times, a catch worth cheering for.
And they’ve all got no idea how much I appreciated it.
Water Rushing West 