Snarkastic

There Will Be Butt.

In order to understand the story unfolding here, please note the following:

• Aside from football, the only sport I follow with any sustained interest is tennis. I've watched it since I was a wee shorty and played it with great enjoyment and an utter lack of aptitude almost as long.
• I'm not a fan of clay. The Fransh Open is my least favorite event, but it's important and it's summer and tennis is a fine baby-sitter, so we watch. And to keep things interesting, some buddies and I have been running side bets throughout the tournament.
• These guys are not fans of Roger Federer, my favorite active player, whom I adore to distraction because he is like an arrogant killer robot in tennis whites.
• The television networks have been running the matches on the same back-asswards, nonsensical time delay that plagued last summer's Olympic coverage. The real winner here is ESPN2, which breaks up its tourney coverage with SportsCenter highlights....that regularly show the end results of matches we are WATCHING RIGHT THIS SECOND THAT HAVE NOT BEEN COMPLETED YET.

This is all by way of saying that I while love these three boys, and while we go a ways back, and while we've had a lot of fun and won and lost a lot of money together this week, they have all betrayed me, and they will pay dearly.

So. This morning. The finals are upon us, Federer has made it through, and NBC, glory be, is running the match live on the West Coast, starting at 6 AM.We set the terms of our final bet, which runs vaguely along these lines, because one of the guys is a Bama fan and has always been disappointed he didn't think of that first. And then I realize the live telecast doesn't matter, because I've already committed to a family outing to Disneyland all day.

But I had a plan, see. The boys and I agreed to settle all accounts later tonight after I got back and sat through the match. Away from the internet, away from SportsCenter highlights, I would be free from any tennis conversations. I sent all phone calls straight to voicemail and turned off Twitter. I was ready.

Then this happened. I won. The boys lost. 'Twas ever thus.

And the boys...those diabolical boys, who knew I had radio-silenced myself for the express purpose of getting to watch the finals pure and unaware Sunday night, they held up their end of the bet. Early. Which is how I learned of Fed-Fed's victory, about an hour after the match, via three Twitpics masquerading as innocent text messages, pictures of three bare asses of my childhood chums with the score of each set scrawled across them in bright blue ink.

I almost threw my phone off Splash Mountain. (The upside was, I got to turn mobile web back on and entertain myself while the small ones rode the teacups, because the teacups are bullshit.)

So. This wasn't part of the deal, but neither was ruining the viewing experience of one of my only sporting pleasures of the offseason, so let's take a poll: Shall I post these fine works of art? Who wants to see some butts?

Posted by Nastinchka at June 7, 2009 10:39 PM