I’m back. Don’t ask me where I’ve been or how it went, and I won’t ask you about those Facebook pictures you took with those two dudes and that horse in that barn on New Year’s Eve – pictures I’m sure your boss would love to see. Fair? Deal.
Just like last year, I have made no new year resolutions. I can’t keep them, and I’m not going to lie to myself year after year. It seems to me that the only thing new year resolutions do is make the gym impossibly crowded for the first few weeks of January, no thanks to all the folks who say to themselves, “I SWEAR I’m going to lose these 50 pounds this time” or “Why did mom have to put so much damn butter in the stuffing?”
We all caught up now with the mushy stuff? Good. On with the show.
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I’ve done a smattering of publicly embarrassing (a redundancy, I suppose) things through my adult life up to this point. Ask any of the Cal Band alumni in my time, and probably the first story they will tell you is the Middle School Boys’ Basketball Incident at a Cal basketball game during my first year in college. (If you really want to know, I’ll write it later. Just take my word for it that it’s a strong enough story with enough cheap thrills and shocking laughs to have tainted my good reputation for the past five years and likely for the rest of my unfortunate life.) There was, of course, the Tucker Max At Work Incident from last year. This incident is the first one of the new year, and if destiny has ever meant anything, this event will set the tone for the rest of the year.
This is a story about my first eviction notice, blame placed entirely upon my filter-lacking brain-to-mouth neural connections. My co-worker, AsianShaq, has described me as him, but drunk, meaning that when he loses all inhibition and says whatever he wants to without consideration of consequence, that’s just me ALL THE TIME. You know how Robin Williams can’t ever seem to “turn it off” because apparently he broke his “Funny” dial years ago? My “Inappropriate” switch is similarly broken. I’m guessing both he and I were brought to our mommas by storks from Acer Computers, because our warranties sure didn’t last very long.
As college rivalries go, Cal-Stanford is relatively tame. Yet every time any sports event poster branded with “CAL VS. STANFORD IN THE BIG [insert creative synecdoche],” you see the inner blue-and-gold flames flare up as Cal fans young and old show up to support their teams, no matter how obscure the sport or how bad the teams. I mean, how good can West Coast college hockey teams be?
Being a big money sport, the twice-yearly Cal-Stanford men’s basketball game always draws a full house. Being a Cal Band alumnus, we like to use our former powers and get into basketball games for free wielding nothing more than our trusty instruments, oddly decorated straw hats, and our annoyingly loud vests. And here…we…go:
Vegas had us favored at something like 13.5 points, and thank the Great Oski in the Sky that it turned out that way. In the final two minutes of the game, we were up by around 15 points when the referees started calling really bizarre phantom foul calls. Immediately I thought that they were pulling a Tim Donaghy, trying to throw the game in favor of the spread. (I guess since being a college sports referee is a part-time gig, they need all the extra pocket change they can get their grubby, incompetent little hands on. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Pac-10.)
Those of you who know me well know that I sometimes have difficulty controlling my emotions in the heat of the moment; consequently, the phrases that fly out of my mouth could be rated anything from a gentle PG to a blasphemous R. Let me tell you, those inexplicable foul calls elevated me from a nice “awesome, we’re going to win this game easily” Disney movie mood to a “2.23 uses per minute of the word ‘fuck’” mood a la the 1995 classic Casino. My brain had no filter of any sort, not even a sieve or a collander. It was a just a straight cannon.
I can also tell you that there is a difference between the entire arena booing loudly and a single loud, poignant opinion in the silence of dead air. Instead of choosing to yell profanities under the cover of ubiquitous noise, I accidentally called the ref a “stupid bald motherfucker” as soon as the arena noise died down. It wasn’t my fault, mind you. Who knew dissenting noise could die down so quickly?
No sooner had the words left my lips did a Haas Pavilion official take a quick skip and hop up to where I was standing and told me to go with him. We strode to the lobby of the pavilion. It was actually a really calm, amicable conversation:
“Am I being kicked out of the game?”
“Yes, you are. I need you to leave the premises. Come on, man, there are kids here. You have to come up with insults more creative than that.”
“Fair enough.”
He kindly showed me the door.
I think he only got pissed at me because he was bald too.
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