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Phil Rambles, Phil Price blog.
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pnprice@creekcats.com
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Mon, 23 Jun 2003
My last Poultry Days
A couple of weekends ago, I went to (probably) my last "Poultry Days" Festival and Ultimate Tournament. The Poultry Days festival is held every year in Versailles (Vuhr-say-ulls) Ohio, a town with a population of about 3,000 people, about half an hour from Dayton. A carnival sets up at the local high school, there's a flower show and a talent show, a kiddie tractor pull and a continuous bingo game, and just generally it's a Norman Rockwell scene (with maybe a little more heavy drinking by sixteen-year-old farm boys than Rockwell would have painted). And, somehow, along with this small-town entertainment, there's one of the largest Ultimate tournaments in the world, with 80 mid- and low-level teams from around the country.
I went to my first Poultry Days in 1987, and this one was probably my last. Over the sixteen-year span, I played at Poultry Days about eleven times. Back in the late 1980's (when the tournament had about 24 teams, I think), my Black Lung teammates and I would be happy if we won more than one game on Saturday...although one year, when the tournament was split into A and B divisions, we went 5-0 on the first day, in the B division. In more recent years, playing with friends mostly from California and D.C., we've usually been undefeated on Saturday, feeding into the A-division round of 16. Overall finishes since 1996 are: two finals losses, one semis loss, one quarters loss, and two pre-quarters losses (including this year).
Poultry Day is one of the very few tournaments that truly has a unique atmosphere. So many other tournaments are pretty generic: show up at the fields, play a few games, go to dinner at some anonymous restaurant, go to the hotel with your teammates, and then go out the next day and do it again. Poultry Days is different. Everyone camps on at the edges of the main fields in a tent city of thousands of people. Players eat the greasy chicken dinners under the tent at the Poultry Days festival, goad each other into trying to swing the hammer and ring the bell at the Mr. Sluggo booth, and---if they're lucky---get an autograph and a photo with "Miss Chick", the cutest seventeen-year-old in town.
Speaking of Miss Chick, I was pretty impressed by this year's winner. She and both Miss Chick runners-up were coaxed into playing a point at the Saturday Night "All-Star" game. Nobody covered them, and they ran up and down the field while people threw rather hard-to-catch passes in their general direction. Eventually Miss Chick caught one (the crowd roared) and threw a complete pass to a teammate (the crowd roared louder), and one team or the other finally scored. The runners-up then bowed out, but Miss Chick came out and gave it another try. And, let me tell you, she ran hard up and down the field, didn't give up, didn't wimp out...most of us were pretty impressed. It turns out she's on the track team and (someone said) the girls' lacrosse team. Good for her!
Which brings me to the conservative losers who object to Title IX, the government ruling that colleges must fund women's athletics at a level comparable to men's athletics. Some people (mostly men...maybe exclusively men) object, saying that fewer girls are interested in sports, so funding girls' sports at the same level as boys' sports is unfair to the boys.
These people are trying to spoil it for the rest of us. Don't they realize that now, thanks to Title IX, we get to see lots of fit, young women running around in their jogbras? And they want to take this away? Are they frickin' nuts?
Aaaaanyway, I had my usual good time at Poultry Days, and took the opportunity to say goodbye to some players I'm unlikely to see again, as my career winds to a close.
So, farewell to the Mister Sluggo booth, and Miss Chick, and the very lenient lifeguards at the municipal pool...and a special thanks to the organizers and volunteers in Versailles who somehow make it possible for a town of 3,000 people to host 1200 Ultimate players during the town's busiest weekend of the year.