Tuesday Top Ten: Moments at The Hydra

Stranded.

The Tuesday Top Ten is back for a quick look at some of my favorite moments over the years at the lake house (aka the Hydra).  While I kinda wish these were more detailed (I'm not sure how interesting these short anecdotes will be to outsiders), I really just wanted to make a short and light-natured post after the drawn out Road House epic.  If you need more info on the Hydra...here's a shameless plug for an older post.

Honorable Mentions
- Cale barrel rolling off the roof to the ground.
- Blake to Heather: "I'm cold...can you give me your socks?"
- Nick: "She's mine tomorrow night." 

10. Ghost Stories
-On special occasions (New Years, boredom) we build bonfires down by the lake.  With a little help from some Color Flames (also talked about in an earlier post), the bonfire quickly turns into an Are You Afraid of the Dark world where we can tell stories while throwing magic dust into the flames, turning them cool shades of blue and green.  There's something about being able to tell ghost stories in the same mold as a classic '90s Nick at Nite show that makes me content with my life.  I guess it's the little things...

9. Sneaking into the Neighbor's Hot Tub
-For as long as I've visited the lake, our next door neighbors have always been a giant condominium.  The mysterious strangers that live over there have been more secretive than JJ Abrams and the only thing I know about the place is that a hot tub is located in the center of the complex.  Ever since I was six, I've wanted to jump in it.  Not until New Years' Eve 2010 did we finally gain the courage and idiocy to trespass and use the vacant tub.  We were 22-24, the weather was cold, and the tub was awesome.

8. The Ghost-Riding Jet Ski
-The summer before our freshman year of college, about seven of us went to the lake house for our first trip together.  My friends Alli, Janisch, and I were riding a jet ski when we all flipped off of it.  Normally, the key is strapped securely to your life jacket in order to kill the engine in situations like this.  Long story short, the key was not securely attached and as soon as we emerged we watched in horror as the jet ski headed straight towards rocks.  However, in a miraculous twist of fate, the jet ski did a 180 and headed straight towards us.  The three of us swam steadfastly towards the jet ski.  While Janisch and I might as well have been bowling balls in the water, Alli pulled an Indiana Jones and grabbed on to the passing craft and saved the day.

7. The Sink Picture
-There is a picture online somewhere with my friend Jessie and I.  While our friendship is completely platonic, the photo says otherwise.  We've recreated it for fun countless times, but it is by far the weirdest photo I've ever seen involving a guy, a girl, a kitchen sink, and a bottle of WD-40.  Sorry, not gonna upload it.  I promise it's classy.

6. Cliff Jumping as Superman
-This is actually a memory from high school, but it's absurd enough that it needs to be noted.  For my 16th birthday my friend Max gave me a Superman costume.  (Those were the days).  Within minutes it was decided that I should put the costume on and jump from our cliff into the lake thirty-five feet below.  Cliff jumping as a regular person has never been the same since.

5. Rickesh and His Wrath
- Several chairs, small life jackets, and rafts have seen better days after my friend Rickesh, a bigger guy, wrecked unintentional havoc on them. Some highlights:
a) "Snorlax."  - T.Whitt's nickname for the sleeping giant.
b) "This is a child's vest! I'm drowning!" (That life jacket was never the same.)
c) "Heather, stop being immature and let's play hide and seek."
d) Literally fell three-forths of the way down a spiral staircase, crashing into a bedroom door like a battering ram.
e) Getting on name-to-name basis with local BBQ cooks...more on that in a bit.

4. The Male-Bonding Trip
- Graduation has made me lament about the end of meaningful pick-up basketball in my life, but it also signifies the end of trips where my friends and I can leave on a Tuesday and go to the Hydra for several days.  My friends Blake, Rickesh, Nick, David, and Janisch joined me on this trip, which happened spontaneously from a Tuesday-Thursday and involved several trips to Lee's Burgers, discovering the mythical Strangely-Attractive Girl, cliff-diving, and card games involving a gentlemen's amount of air humping.  Don't ask, don't tell.

3. Spring Break 2011
- This may have been the last stand.  Not only because of graduation but because there is a chance my parents may rebuild the Hydra in order to live there after retirement in a few years.  This week had it all- a great group of friends, some great stories (the failed shotgun on the dock, throwing live matches at each other, a day full of Community, 3 AM trash disposing, to name a few), not to mention plenty of frustration from real life knocking on the door, but I think what sticks out most is the finality I got out of it.  If that's the way the Hydra went out, I think I can live with it.

2. The Impromptu USA Weekend
-On 4th of July weekend 2010, my friends and I decided to head up to the Hydra for some fun and fireworks.  What we got was Rickesh making friends with the local BBQ people ("What should we make for you tomorrow, Rick?"), Janisch shooting Roman candles at me, friends yelling at the moon, and one of the greatest shows of American patriotism I've ever witnessed.  I was on the hammock with someone while a few friends played a game inside.  Normally, after one team wins with my friends there is incessant but unintelligent trash talking.  Not this time though.  On cue, a raucous chant of "USA! USA!" emerged from inside the Hydra, which lasted for what seemed like an eternity and could be heard over the fireworks blasting from across the lake for all our mysterious condo neighbors to hear.  I jumped from the hammock and left her behind, because anytime you can win a game and demean your opponent by yelling your shared nationality at them, you've gotta do it.

1. The Stranded-on-the-Lake Fiasco
-MLK weekend 2008 may have been the game-changer with my friends.  It was that weekend that we realized that the Hydra was a place where we could always go to to reconnect, no matter how far away we lived.  This is the same weekend where I came down with what I am pretty sure was walking pneumonia.  I felt deathly sick.  Rickesh, always looking to complicate things, demanded that he go out in the freezing January water on jet skis.  Since I was the only one who knew how to get them off the dock and into the water, I went out to help.  As the jet ski started to drift away I jumped on it, thinking I could drive the it back to the dock with the keys.  Little did I know that the machine's battery was dead.  In a matter of moments, I found myself a hundred yards away on the other side of Lake Travis as the rest of my friends pointed and laughed from either the dock or the cliff above.  I felt the icy water with apprehension, knowing I had to make a decision.  I took off my sweatshirt, shoes, and jeans, yelling at my friends "Don't look at me!"  (Except for the girl I was interested in... she could look.  Kidding.)  I jumped into the water, positive that I was going to die embarrassingly in my underwear, and pushed the jet ski back towards the dock.  Here's the best part though: Rickesh and Janisch jumped in foolishly to help.  While Janisch actually swam like a normal human being, Rick, who threw a life jacket over his clothes, thought that he could magically float towards me.  He looked like a human buoy.  Together, we acted like human seals and moved the jet ski like a beach ball while the rest of our friends mocked us from above.  And THAT is what friends are for.

(I'm sure I'm missing on some better stories, so if you guys remember one, post it below!)

-PB (this song has been stuck in my head for days)

Glory Road House

Last Friday I received my Aggie Ring.  For those of you not familiar with Texas A&M tradition, it is a milestone and it signifies the looming end to the college undergrad experience.  (I'm sure it means more than that, but I am a 2%er.)  After three schools in four years, I truly cannot be more blessed that I am able to wear it and that I am on track to graduate on time in May 2011.  However, graduation has taken a seat on the back burner a bit to one last hurrah with the sport I've always loved.  To top it off, I've found myself trying to live up to my dad's 1960's intramural basketball fame with a team named after a classic '80s movie starring my mom's old boyfriend.  What does it all mean?  I'm not sure, but I feel like there's a story here.

Road House
 (Crouching From Left: Cam Glass, Chris Selle

Semi-Crouching Like a Fool: Ryan Smith

Back From Left: Ken Baer, Joe Bailey, David Hall, Sam Brenner, Tyler Whittington)

Basketball has been in my blood ever since I saw Hakeem and the Rockets take out Ewing and the Knicks for the '94 championship when I was less than six years old.  Granted, I was too young to really know what was going on (I am pretty sure I spent most of the game playing Sonic the Hedgehog 2), but that didn't stop me from going out to Dillard's with my family the morning after to pick up a hilariously over-sized championship shirt.  After my parents got me a basketball hoop the following Christmas and Houston repeated the following season as NBA champions,  my life and basketball were destined to intertwine.  As I briefly mentioned in an earlier post, I used to cry every single time the Houston Rockets lost from about age seven to nine.  What can I say, I've always been a pretty passionate guy.  (I still hate you, Utah Jazz and Derek Fisher.) Basketball was the common factor with all of my friends growing up as well as over half of my game when it came to impressing girls (which still probably put me at a disadvantage). 

In high school I was lucky enough to be named on the All-District and All-County team my junior year, despite being a key part to a terrible team.  A team so terrible, in fact, that the coaches began to hype up kids the next season that weren't even old enough to take high school algebra yet.  Nearly overnight, I went from team MVP to team scrub, and if TLC taught me anything, I was a "guy that couldn't get no love" from anyone.  So what did I do?  If you read my last post, you can probably guess that I played the tragic hero card and stubbornly quit the team rather than be a drone on the bench.  I lost a lot of love for basketball after that.  I barely played my first two years in college.

Arriving in College Station changed all of that.  It was here that I reconnected with an old friend from high school named Ken Baer.  Ken played with me growing up, but it wasn't until he started doing Aggie yells that he had a ridiculous growth spurt that transformed him from a 5'10'' undersized post to a 6'5'' behemoth down low.  He introduced me to Tyler Whittington and Cam Glass, two guys from his organization One Army, and together we formed a very formidable quartet our junior year.  After spending most of the summer playing basketball with Ty and Cam (not to mention watching the 2010 NBA Finals together with the aid of some Beach Bums), we had more team chemistry than the characters from Weird Science.  For the first time in years, it was actually fun to play basketball. 


"The Rule of Three": I learned early at Texas A&M  that you should never attempt to play pickup basketball unless you have at group of at least three players with you.  There are too many selfish ballers out there and anything less than three will leave you feeling bitter and angry.  With three, you can monopolize the team to your liking.  (And that, my friends, does not make me a selfish baller.)

Ronnie "Red" Smith and the "Junior Farcity"

(This picture, amazing on so many levels, still hangs in Gregory Gym at the University of Texas.  My dad is second from right in the back.)

My dad may be the greatest storyteller that I know.  Ever since I was a kid, he has told me the story of his intramural basketball team at the University of Texas, creatively named the Junior Farcity (The team was named after his friend claimed "it would be a farce if we won the whole thing!" Hearing that only confirms my suspicions that I am living in the wrong era).  The team went on to have some miraculous feats, including being the first team in UT intramural history to score 100 pts in a game against the likes of Elgin Taylor and Little Kenny Ferguson.  They made it to the championship game as a motley crew of freshmen.  These stories have stayed with me my entire life and subconsciously I always knew I wanted to try and match him.  However, it wasn't until my senior year before I finally was able to assemble the team to take on the new generation of Little Kenny Fergusons.

The Team: Road House

As I mentioned before, my mom dated Patrick Swayze when she was young.  They even went to prom together, not to mention the University of Houston.  It's always fun watching people's reactions when I reveal this information, but truthfully I really have no interest in the situation; my dad is much cooler (not to mention much more alive) and he doesn't have to rip out a guy's throat or become a ghost to prove it.  My mom could not have picked a better husband.  That being said, Road House is an incredible movie and a well-deserved moniker for the greatest team I have ever played on.

The roster:

-Cam "The Little General" Glass - Road House's Kyle Lowry. Also known as The Post Up King.
-Tyler "The False Prophet" Whittington - The heart and soul of the team. A complete glue guy, does everything it takes to win.
-Ken "Papa" Baer - The man in the middle.  May have the coolest post passes I have ever seen. 
-Sam "Slytherin" Brenner - The wildcard.  Mysteriously drains dagger 3s. 
-Chris "Swat Team" Selle  - the lockdown defender.  In the words of T.Whitt-"A high school coach's wet dream." 
-Joe "Houdini" Bailey - My roommate at The Orchid.  Has a sick running jumper.
-David "Detention" Hall - an unsung hero (partially bc he missed a few games), can do a little bit of everything.
-Ryan Smith - I'd like to consider myself a much more selfish, much more turnover-prone intramural version of Steve Nash. I don't know...just don't call me Matt Maloney.

What else is needed? Sometimes a little extra help from the worst pair of basketball shoes in history doesn't hurt.


The Kicks: The Gentleman's Starbury

 I am a fairly superstitious guy.  Mainly on stupid things.  For instance, I recently tricked a pretty legit girl into being interested in me.  When I first met her I was wearing glasses and had a decent amount of facial hair.  For some ridiculous reason, I refused to be clean shaven or cut my hair while we were hanging out.  I even went out of the way to wear my ridiculously dorky glasses for a while until she said something nice about my eyes.  What the hell is wrong with me?  (Things did start to unravel almost immediately after I cut my hair and went clean shaven, so maybe I'm not crazy.  But I wouldn't put money on that.  Then again, I was the only that was really cared about anything, so that may have played a small part.)
   Anyways, back to the Starburys.  If you don't know anything about the maker of the shoes, Stephon Marbury, this next sentence will sum him up:  He tattooed his logo onto the side of his head, was paid over $20 million to stay away from his team, and ate Vasoline on a 24/7 webcam show he put online.  Hilariously psychotic.  So of course my Oklahoma roommate and friend Cale bought a pair on Amazon for $12 and somehow ended up with two extra pairs a few years back.  It was like he drew a Monopoly community chest and had a bank error in his favor, except this was "Ridiculous-Amazon-User-Selling-Mass-Amounts-of-Starburys-Error in your favor."  He handed me a free pair and I never looked back.
   Okay, maybe that is a slight lie: I did buy a pair that were better (the inside souls to the Starburys eroded over a year ago), but I ended up wearing the Starburys for the first game this season as a joke.  After a miraculous comeback win where I drained a few clutch long-range 3s, the superstitious side in me decided to ride the Starburys till the end, no shoe souls included.  In the least, they are a great conversation piece on the court.
"Hey, look at Captain America over there." (I've heard this on more than one occasion, said to me both jokingly and hatefully.)

The Last Stand
The next part of the story should be the part where we heroically run the tables on the rest of the students at Texas A&M, the part where you are given fulfillment on reading this far into an overall ridiculous post.  It's the part where I finally can hang my hat on advancing past the Junior Farcity and live the rest of my life in the glory of knowing we were the best.  However, it didn't happen.  Like many other things in my life, Road House ended in complicated heartbreak.  However, we did not go quietly into the night.

After rolling through the first four months of the season rather painlessly, beating teams like "Trees & Threes", "White & Slow", "The Nerdlocks" and "Erf, Wind, and Fire", we found ourselves in the Final Four.  We were set to play "Beer 30", and it was clear from the start that the two superior teams in the league were playing a game too early.  Led by two talented guards, Beer 30 led the game by 7 with 2:30 left in the game.  Never knowing a shot I didn't like (something that had hurt us for much of the game), I drained two 3s back to back to put us down 1.  On the second shot, the painfully inexperienced referee crew called a foul on the other team underneath the basket as the ball went through the hoop.  Now, most of the players were aware that the rule is an "And 1" for our player who was fouled.  However, the painfully inexperienced crew decided that with 2 minutes left in the game and with momentum on our side that they should hold the game up for literally ten minutes while they looked to the rulebook for the correct answer.

Ten minutes pass and one referee awards our team the free throw, which we make to tie the game.  However, he is overruled by the other painfully inexperienced referees who are not ready to call it official.  A few more minutes pass and the ruling is confirmed.  By then our team has as much momentum as Vanilla Ice had with the rest of his career after Ice, Ice, Baby died out.  After our first made free throw is called off, we miss our second chance, keeping us down 1.  With one minute left we are forced to foul, putting us down 3.  After Selle comes up with a huge "And 1" with 30 seconds left, we are tied.  We lock down their two best players, leaving the ball in the hands of a player who hadn't scored all game.  He pulls up inside the three-point line and drains a jumper at the buzzer.  Road House dies.  Beer 30 goes on to win the championship in a much easier game, and I experience another tragic ending to something I care a little too much about.

The End

It dawned on me that this may be the last time I would be playing for something that meant anything, albeit something small.  No more community league games where I can end the season by taking home cheap trophies, no more games where my roommates and I can half-jokingly draw out the tournament on a blackboard, no more games where I can legitimately get away with writing such an unnecessarily drawn out post.  This was it.  I can always play in adult league games, but that's not the same.  Graduation is in less than a month and after that there won't be time for me to call up my friends and ask them to meet me at the Rec Center on a Tuesday afternoon.  I think I am more disappointed in the idea that my basketball career may finally be over than I am that I won't be able to live the life of a college student anymore.

Picking up my Aggie Ring

(Ken, T.Whitt's thumb, my brother-in-law George, Joe, me, my dad, my mom, as well as my nieces in nephew in the front)
(Me, my sister, and Hudson)

However, what's important to me is the relationships I've been blessed with from the game of basketball.  Several players on Road House will be my lifelong friends and although we may not have the chance to meet up and play any time we want like we used to, the knowledge that I've made friends with upstanding people is the most important thing to me; much more important than that elusive championship.  As for Road House vs. Junior Farcity, we'll never know who was truly better.  I feel pretty comfortable taking it to my grave that we would have taken them out, just as my dad would probably say the same.  At the end of the day, though, I am truly grateful for my family and friends.  It makes things like receiving my Aggie Ring that much more special.

So thanks, guys.  Road House.

-PB (thanks to my brother Denver for the song)