Let the games begin

So, Kenny Dobyns is back online in full force with some rsd commentary on the Ultimate History Book and even creating his own blog. At least for now, I will defer to others in responding to his post in its entirety. I just wanted to comment on the one portion that specifically refers to me (although no names were used to not necessarily protect the innocent).

doing his best al gore imitation, paul greff is quoted as saying that
the best thing dog did was take bad calls out of ultimate. paul must
have misremembered himself. he did, after all, play for a team with
corky "if i didn't catch it i must have been fouled" corcoran, and that
won a world championship (2000) after a call that had every observer
not from boston alternately howling or looking away in embarrassment.

Just for the record, I am the person who made the call that Kenny is referring to. It is unfortunate that he feels a need pass judgement on something that he did not physically witness. The situation was as follows. At one point in the first half, the DoG offense went on a 12 point scoring run without a turnover, and Sweden had maybe 1 turn to let us get back the lead. At game point to 17, we finally turned it over, and then the swillfest began, with a number of turnovers between both teams and DoG doing its best to hand away the championship. Finally, double game point at 19-19 with DoG receiving. After a few passes, Jim Parinella is being trapped on the right sideline maybe 25 yards up. Anders Jerhamre is covering me as the dump. The count gets up, I cut to the backfield for the dump, Jim throws me a leading pass, Anders lunges for the disc, the disc hits the ground, and I call foul. Where the play occurred on the sideline has maybe 2 rows of stands with some spectactors, while the lions share of spectators are in the official stands at least another 20 yards upfield.

Back to the play itself. I have no idea if Anders made contact with the disc, and I don't really care. What I do know is that he slapped the back of my left hand as he was making his play so hard that it stung. I immediately called foul, and then the crowd blew up. But given how stupid and sheeplike crowds are (having played in and heckled numerous finals, y'all know what I'm talking about), Anders would have had to have broken my wrist for the crowd to acknowledge the foul on that important a point, so I don't care what the crowds reaction was. Having to make that call completely ruined the championship for me. I knew that even though I was fouled (and a foul which definitely affected the catch attempt), it was going to be a hotly contested call. What pissed me off even more was when Anders started playing to the crowd, trying to whip them up by raising his arms like they do in football games. That's when I lit into him, using various bad words.

He contested, we called timeout, and I completely removed myself from the play that followed to make sure that Anders did not have a chance to make a play. A few passes later, we scored, game over. Naturally, the postgame circle wasn't very pleasant, as Anders made a few desultory comments in English, then said a few words in Swedish which I'm sure were not nice (stupid fringe languages where we don't have a native speaker...). The best part was when #5, who was probably the biggest asshole on their team, came up to me as we were all leaving the field and gave me his jersey, with some more inappropriate comments.

A final coda to this. Over the years, I have had a few people come up to me, both American and otherwise, who were actually standing in that little portion of the sideline who agreed with me that it was a foul. I have NEVER had anyone say that had any sort of perspective that I made a bad call. And not that I need this kind of reinforcement because I know I made the right call, but it does help a little.

Flame away