Raleigh, North Carolina. 2003 – The Rebel Yell.

Its February 2003, and we (myself, greg, and sully) are traveling to the Raleigh, North Carolina for a warm up match for the spring season. Deciding against an overnight stay the night before we begin the 5 hour drive shortly before 6am on Saturday morning. After an uneventful ride down we arrive at the pitch, we’re playing for the B side and the A side are up first. However before kick off the heavens opened with a huge thunderstorm and turned the pitch into 4 inches of mud. Lovely. It should be pointed out however that sheltering under a metal ridge tent is not the best idea during a thunderstorm…. So we eventually we kicked off and duly won the match, it was a horrible game to play in though, as every time someone hit the mud we had to stop play so they could rinse their eyes out with water. The game felt like it took 3 hours. I also managed to score my only try in the USA, this precipitated the events that where to unfold later that evening in the bar.

Sully’s hometown is quite near to Raleigh, so after the match we went to his brother’s house, showered and clogged up his washing machine with the 7 gallons of mud our kits were covered in. Another benefit of going to Sully’s hometown was the fact that his brother is an assistant manager of a local bar. Bonus. So we head to the bar and proceed to get slightly pissed, actually not slightly pissed VERY pissed. The special for the night was $5 pitchers of Yeungling, usually its $5 for a GLASS in Washington, so we proceeded to buy a lot of beer. Greg and I each ran up $80 tabs for the night, though this wasn’t established until afterwards. It’s an amazing ability the drunk person has to hoard crumpled up receipts from bar tabs in long forgotten pockets for viewing at a later, and importantly, soberer date. In fact my drunken persona (I like to call him Walter) has developed the skill of laying the receipts from bar tabs beside my sink for my consultation in the morning. Anyway we digress….. as well as pitchers of Yeungling, Greg and I also destroyed a whole bottle of tasty Jameson Irish whiskey. At one point we stood in opposite ends of the bar and started doing our own interpretations of a rebel yell, this made us a whole bunch of new friends in the bar. Soon a good portion of the bar where joining in. On top of this greg and I started punching each other hard in the face, however it turned out we were doing this in front of the towns mayor, who Sully was chatting to. D’oh. Unconfirmed reports claim that a 400lb fat man tried to take me home. As I said unconfirmed. So we all bail back to sully’s brothers place and pass out in various places, I managed to make it as far as the porch where I started ranting about the troubles of the world before passing out on the floor. Yay me. The next day saw us back in the same bar meeting the rest of sully’s family for lunch. It was almost like returning to the scene of a crime. All in all a good weekend.