Saturday, January 19, 2013

I'm A Cheater

The last few weeks have been dominated by sports scandals; Lance, Te’o, the Baseball Hall of Fame. It is time for me to come clean. I cheated also.

In the early 1990s, I was part of a powerful dynasty in co-ed softball. The team went by many names like Around the Horny, 2 Strikes Blue Balls, and Scissors and was responsible for three straight University of Northern Iowa intramural championships. I assembled this team with my buddies Woody and Smiley. No, we didn’t use PEDs. But we may have used unethical recruiting methods and if we were college coaches we definitely would be under investigation. By some miracle, no media picked up on the story. We kept it under the watchful eyes of ESPN, Fox Sports, and even The Northern Iowan.

The whole elaborate scheme started in Softball Theory. The connections we made in class and the allure of the wild keg parties featuring underage drinking gave us a huge pool of candidates to pick from. We had several college softball players, even a Division III All-American on the team.

Why am I bringing this public now after all these years? The guilt has weighed heavily on my conscience and caused many tearful, sleepless nights. Would I do it again? Hell yes. I have three UNI Intramural Champion shirts and lots of memories that I can’t fully remember. We slaughtered cocky fraternity teams. Plus, it was awesome.