Smells like bad spirit

Honestly, all this talk about the ultimate "Spirit of the game" sounded kind of loopy to me before. Up until two weeks ago, when my team first played at an honest-to-goodness Philippine Ultimate Association tournament, I kind of thought the whole idea was a little too New Age-y for me.

That is, until, I witnessed what bad spirit is all about. (Well, OK, I witnessed it two years ago at the office sportsfest, but let's not get into that...)

Yesterday, we competed at Day 2 of the said tournament. We didn't win at all (olats! Haha)--we just so weren't in the mood to play, particularly the MC4 players who had achieved their goal of beating their blood rivals the night before. It was a battle that was two years in the making, so was incredibly happy for them.

So anyway, two of our games were fine, but man, in one game, you could see the other team's claws come out! First of all, they expected the game to be a walk in the park, making no secret of the fact they expected to score 11-0, with us on the nil side. The first sign that this was a team I wouldn't really like was when the girl I was guarding let out a very Nelson-like "Ha-ha" when they scored the first point! WTF?

And then there was their half-naked captain. He kept yelling things to his teammates like, "Bato lang kayo nang bato, wala namang depensa ang mga 'yan!" Or, when we'd score, he'd reprimand his teammates with a, "Akala ko ba gusto niyo mag-11?" Geeeeez. Calm down, dude. It got so annoying that we'd super celebrate every time we'd score because we knew he took each point as a personal insult. Haha. Our response was just to have fun! The funny thing was, this was supposedly the best team we were going to play against that day, but we scored more against them than the two other teams.

At the end of it, the people who were watching but weren't keeping track of the score thought that we had won. "Ang saya niyo kasi eh!" they said. So we lost all three games, but we still had a really good time. Good spirit saved us all!