THE HAPPY CAMPERS: Barlympics

Friday, November 14, 2008

Barlympics

I play volleyball in a bar league every Tuesday night in the summer. I have played for years for the same bar, called the Stone Pony. At the end of the season this year, our captain was drinking there with the captain of the Stone Pony softball team. They got to arguing, as guys will, about who was tougher. Out of this came the "Barlympics", a pentathlon of events between the softball team and the volleyball team. The events were softball, volleyball, horseshoes, ladder golf and darts. The first two events were quite predictable. They beat us at softball 16 to 6, the game ending after just 4 innings with the "ten-run rule". We clobbered them at volleyball 15-4,15-3 and 15-6. We then moved on to here, where we threw horseshoes and played ladder golf........

....the bar owner is an artist and he likes to design the shirts each year...............

......we took first last year and he expected a repeat. We got third............

....the softballers were no less colorful..............

....they took third as well..........

....we won the horseshoe, although I had never throw a horseshoe in my life and did not exactly contribute to the victory..........

....I had never even HEARD of ladder golf before and contributed even less..........

....a pvc goal and golf balls tethered together with cord. You get points for looping the cord around the horizontal bars from a distance of about 30 feet. We lost......

....so we headed back to the bar, which is loaded with bizarre art and décor, for the final and deciding event: darts.....................

....we threw and threw...........

....and threw and threw...........

....and threw and threw.......

....but no winner would emerge. By now we were at barlympics most of the day (a Sunday). Lots of alcohol had been consumed. After a long discussion, it was decided to add a sixth event to settle the question of whether softballers or volleyballers were superior human beings...............