The Leaders Cup Pt. I - Friday Night (B)Lights

FRIDAY NIGHT:

A big group of us headed out to San Diego on Friday night via Amtrak. It was my first trip on Amtrak, and let me say this: it was highly enjoyable. You could walk around and talk to people, make phone calls, see the scenery and visit the diner car. Which, to be fair, featured microwaveable pizza and hamburgers, but you get the idea.

But the sights and the food were not what made this portion of the trip so memorable. No, dear reader, that would be Jim. Jim was traveling with his wife and two kids. And Jim was spectacular. Some highlights:

- According to Jim (har har), he wasn’t drunk, but for some reason the bartender at the train station told him that if he tried to order another drink “he’d be arrested”.

- Jim was a Steelers fan (complete with Terrible Towel), which lead to a lot of bewildering conversations with Scott and his friend Aaron (who came from Kansas City just to watch the tournament). My favorite was this:

“The Steelers used to go to Tennessee, and they’d lose every year. You know why? Because they used to go get that moonshine, that Jack Daniels, and get drunk the night before the game. Then Bill Cowher told them to stop drinking that and start drinking Gatorade, and then they started winning.”

The sad part is that Jim wasn’t kidding.

- About Jim’s outfit: he was wearing a pair of sleep pants that had the Coors Light logo all over them. Over his pants he had a pair of boxers that had the Miller Light logo plastered on it. He also had a sweater on, on top of which he put on his Marines T-shirt with a giant hole in the neck as he told us he was going down for the Marines’ birthday.

Needless to say, Jim was a special, special person.

We arrived at about 10:30 p.m. and decided to walk to our hotel. According to Google Maps, it was only 0.8 miles from the train station to the hotel. However, it didn’t say that it was entirely uphill the entire walk. Seriously, can’t Google maps include some sort of topography?

After checking in and meeting up with the rest of our team that was staying at our hotel, we decided to go get something to eat. We had Mexican food, and it was fine. Of course, it did provide our first bit of team drama for the weekend. The wait at the restaurant was about 20 minutes, which wasn’t too bad for 14 people at 11 p.m. on a Saturday night. However, Scott thought that we would be out too late, and not be ready to play the next morning. He tried to convince us just to get some pizza and take it back to the hotel, but was veto.

So, after sitting down and getting menus, we realized that Scott wasn’t there. It turns out that Scott just…left. While this is anti-social, it isn’t completely unexpected from Scott Jones. When questioned about it the next day, he claimed that he wanted to get to bed, and it would take to long if he said goodbye, and that people would try to talk him out of it…

I love Scott, but sometimes he is completely full of shit.

The whole incident wound up creating a bond with the rest of the team. Specifically, our team toast that night was “Fuck Scott Jones”, and we spent a good portion of the evening taking turns sending Scott nasty text messages and voice mails every 30 seconds.

By midnight, we went to bed, tired and dreaming of what was to happen the next morning. (Well, most of us – some people stayed up all night hitting the bars. And by “some people”, I mean Adam G., Adam J. and Scott P.)