I married a 12 year old…

Jon and I are sports people… I was raised in a sports family and Jon has been a gym rat his entire life.  We have both played countless sports throughout our lives, but we both narrowed it down to basketball.  I guess basketball played a part in allowing our relationship to grow at Southwestern.   And it allows us to get some of our competitive nature out without directing it towards each other… trust me it is not a good thing when jon and I get competitive with each other…  in fact we are no long allowed to play HORSE against one another!

Needless to say March is always an exciting and high energy time in our house.  Jon’s obsession has calmed down through the years though.  When I first met him he would fill out like 8 brackets and each had a different name; the real bracket, the Arizona bracket, the underdog bracket, the if hell freezes over bracket… I never understood/will never understand having more than maybe two brackets….I just don’t see the point.  He would miss classes and stay up late in college and watch every game.  He would have his multiple brackets laid out over his coffee table, sitting on the edge of the couch waiting for the game’s outcome.  After college, without stadium seating in the Fraternity key Club to enjoy the games and brotherhood, Jon and his buddies started to fly to Vegas for the ultimate start to March madness.  Hell, Jon and his best friend Jack even had a joint Bachelor party in Vegas to kick off March Madness… even though both jon and jack were not getting married until June and August… but it was a good excuse in their eyes!  Over the years Jon’s obsession has backed down a smidge.  He has cut back and only has two brackets this year which I am very impressed by, so I guess the 12 steps are working! 

Being from Austin, I bleed orange… maybe I didn’t go to UT but my childhood is wrapped up in Longhorn sports and tradition.  Jon on the other hand spent a significant amount of his early and late childhood in Tucson. .. needless to say he is a wildcat thru and thru.  In fact he had an Arizona Wildcat themed pillow that always had a presence on his couch in college that I finally got him to give away before moving to Dubai… gross I know!  Jon now secretly owns more burnt orange than wildcat red and blue… I am slowly converting him!  Anyways, there was more than normal trash talk going on in our house before the UT/AZ game this past weekend.  All that being said, March Madness has and will be a little different this year.  Obviously our nights and days are backwards from the States.  There is a 9 hour difference between here and there right now thanks to daylight savings.  Well, March madness is making for an interesting schedule in the Cumberworth house.  We decided that since the game came on at 3am here that we would look at the game highlights when we woke up… fair right?  This was a happy compromise because we both got to sleep and see the most important plays of the game in the morning together.  However, I woke up to this at 4am…

Jon had set his IPhone to send him close game alerts if there were games that came down to the wire, and then he turned his volume all the way up.  As we all know… blerp, close game alert… and Jon grabs his phone, reads the screen and starts to fist pump!  Some of you might know that I am not the most alert or happiest camper if I get woken up from sleep (which will have to change soon I know!).  Anyways, I realize something was going on from the glow of a phone coming from beside me so, without rolling over, I say to him, “you can turn on the volume.” And jon replies with a joyous, “THANK YOU!”  He proceeds to give me play by play commentary while in my groggy state I was still trying to figure out what was going on without falling back asleep.  We all know what happened and how UT got robbed with a bogus five second count… if you call a timeout while the hand of the ref is barely heading down on the fifth count it isn’t 5 seconds, it is a freaking timeout!  But I digress.  If you know Jon at all you know he jumped up in bed and started shouting, “Yeah baby… Arizona, woaw woaw woaw!”   Like any 12 year old, it took a while to finally get him to turn off his phone and lay back down from all the excitement. 

As I started to drift back off to sleep he would say, “wow that was a good ending” and “AZ is going to take on Duke… hell yes!” and the occasional “woaw woaw woaw.”  These next few weekends are going to be interesting… better get the coffee timer set @ 4am so I will not be angry this time around since I know he will inevitably wake me up!  I thought we had made progress with the 12 step program but, obviously I need to take away his 1 year chip and get him started with meetings again! 

Until later…

Side note from the desk of Jonathan E. Cumberworth:

As Lute Olsen would say, the game is never decided on just one play.  WOAW WOAW WOAW!  It was actually very funny to see the Facebook posts of joy from my friends from Tucson mixed in with the threats of suicide from the gung ho Longhorn Fans. 

I do feel somewhat inadequate this year when it comes to spitting out the useless knowledge of how many points a game a 19 year old kid from the Bronx typically scores when he gets between 7.4 and 9.1 rebounds against a team seeded 15th -20th. They don’t televise anything here other than golf, cricket or news about Formula 1 racing, so I rely on Slingbox and the beautiful CBS Sports I-phone app for my real sports fix. 

I would give anything to have some mediocre wings and huge beers at B-Triple W’s while watching the Sweet 16. So if you can, please have some for me and watch the Cats knock out the Dukies!  Going to bed early so I can throw back a few hot ones in the morning (coffee) during the game.