Father Throws Best

One of the fun things about having Ultimate Glory come out has been the unearthing of pictures of events from the book. Yesterday I learned that there was this documentation of the incident from the book (described below):

During my last year “off” I played with a team of older players, many of whom had children, on a team called Father Throws Best. Father had several ex-Rude Boys on the team, and at the end of one tournament in Amherst they indulged in an old Rude Boy tradition of diving after discs into a big mud puddle. One player would flip a disc into the air and another would come running up and lay out for it, “getting horizontal” as it was known in the sport, then splashing down and sliding in the puddle. I refused to play along; it was a Rude Boy thing after all, and I, in my heart, was still a Hostage. But then a bunch of them grabbed me by the arms and tried to drag me over to the puddle. I told them to let me go, that I’d do it, only I’d do it my way.

 

I whispered instructions to one of my teammates, an ex-Rude Boy named Toby Lou, and then began my running approach to the puddle. Toby did what I’d asked him to do, tossing not a Frisbee but a half-empty case of beer into the air. I took off and flew toward the case, getting horizontal, ready to make a spectacular catch. But our timing was a little off. Toby’s underhanded beer case toss was a little ahead of my dive. The beers were out of reach and they landed and shattered upward just a second before I landed on them. For a second the puddle was a mess of water, blood, mud and flesh. Then in became clear that a good chunk of my left forearm, a scrag of flesh, was hanging down where it wasn’t supposed to hang. Fortunately, we were on the whole a more mature team, and we had our very own doctor playing for us. Dr. Gil immediately set to cleaning out my wound and picking glass out of my arm before accompanying me to a nearby emergency room.