"There's a bunch of dudes on this bus!...Where's the chicks!?"
It had begun. And we were only on the shuttle bus to take us to the 45th Annual Over The Line Tournament.
Over The Line is a San Diego Sport that is a cross between sloshball and Cricket. Three people on a team and you can't use a mitt. I'd explain the rules, but the game is really inconsequential. Sure, there are players who are really into it and teams that have corporate sponsers (OTL was even a scheduled PE activity at my Jr. High), but the OTL tournament is one Sporting Event where the "Sporting" is secondary.
Let me try to explain. Sometimes rednecks find themselves living in beach communities. And sometimes these beach communities don't host Monster Truck Shows as often as they should. So OTL is a place where the assholes can get together to swill beer and look at boobs. Apparently there are people who party as if they were High School Seniors for their entire lives: Balding, pot-bellied men carrying 12 packs of Budweiser cans around in the sand, screaming "Show us your Tits" to anything lacking a penis. (No, no one screamed that at me. Shut your pie hole.)
Am I judging the event too harshly? One of the highlights of the two-weekend frolic is the Miss Emerson Contest. As in, "Em ' r some Big Tits!"
Women get a free T-shirt if they'll strip down to put it on.
There are two rows of playing fields with a large walking area between the rows. Very few spectators are watching the games. The majority of beach chairs are facing the walkway in the middle. Because people walking by are much more likely to flash you than the competitors on the field.
The crew of tanned, under-groomed men chanted,
It was like Southern California's sad, sunburned attempt at Mardi Gras.
The local strip clubs often send dancers to the Tourney to act as walking billboards. Occasionally the breast wielder will drop their top and let pandemonium ensue. Its crazy. Immediately A crowd rushes to the focal flesh. It's like the scuttling of fans around a fly-ball in the bleachers. A mass of men huddle around, jockeying in hopes of seeing aureole. Men hold their cameras in the air and click blindly with hopes that their camera will catch a booby angle that their straining necks cannot.
I wonder why women would go to this event. I guess because any woman, no matter how close to her Neanderthal roots she looks, will get flattering attention. Boobs = attention.
Maybe I'm just getting older and crankier. Maybe I don't know how to have fun. But after the 4th drunken comment about my hair looking like Kenny G, I start to get a bit uneasy. My brother commented that there seemed to be a different attitude than in years past. Apparently, "Less Tits, More Aggression" was the unofficial motto of the '98 Tourney. This crowd was the kind of guys that like to drink cheap beer and get in fights. And their coolers were getting close to empty.
The overt misogyny combined with the constant threat of being beat-up made it hard to embrace the scene or the people. After 45 minutes, my anthropologist curiosity was sated and wanted nothing more than to be very, very far away from this place.
However, there is one redeeming factor to the event. The names of the teams are worth a gander. Its OTL tradition to name your team something really obnoxious and tasteless. Its like a gross-out contest. Word is that several years ago a major Television network wanted to televise the tournament and asked the organizers to clean up the names a bit. Screw that, they said. OTL isn't OTL without at least one team named "I Ate Out A Pregnant Woman and a Tiny Hand Grabbed My Tongue."
You think I'm joking?
Here are some actual names from the three-person teams in this year's Tournement:
Its great to hear a no-nonsense announcer over the PA system: " 'Well Hung Studs' will be playing 'The Announcer Is A Fag' on Court 8."
Maybe next year I'll enter a team named:
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Prehensile Tales enjoys drunken boob-fests as much as the next guy. |
