Monday, January 18, 2010

But, Um...

Monday nights are big night in this household. It is practically the only night on TV where you can watch three legitimately funny sitcoms nearly back-to-back (minus the incredibly lousy "Accidentally On Purpose" in which I absolutely refuse to participate...thus time to write a blog!

So tonight on "How I Met Your Mother", the episode focused on the "but um" which turned out to be a college drinking game that everybody takes a shot whenever Robin says "but um" in an interview. Ultimately everybody gets completely tanked and hilarity ensues.

The episode brought me back to my college days when my buddy Ryan and I had a "but um" evening thanks to this man...



It was September 8th, 1998. It was the summer of Sammy Sooser and Mike McGwire. For about the last week and half Ryan and I watched as ESPN relentlessly broadcast all St. Louis Cardinal games waiting for the moment that Big Mac smacked HR number 62. On this particular evening, McGwire just got enough of the ball to get in over the fence in left and chaos ensued.

Being the young college fools that we were, we decided to head to the local bar and celebrate this historic achievement with the one caveat that whenever the bar television showed the McGwire HR, that we would take shot, or a swig, or a cherry bomb, or whatever was in front of us at the time.

Needless to say, things got interesting in a hurry as the bar had two televisions...one tuned to ESPN and the other tuned to ESPN2. I would suspect though that you could have been on the cartoon network or animal planet and STILL have seen the HR highlight.

As the evening wore on, more of our friends showed up and partook in the game. This was good because the more the merrier, but also very very bad for those least intoxicated that were always Johnny on the spot to point out when the highlight was running again.

Where the evening unraveled and ultimately became lost from the memory banks and into fuzzy lore was when some hot rod at ESPN decided to close out the 11PM SportsCenter with a 62 HR montage of Big Macs blasts. A look of horror shot across our faces as bomb after bomb went over the fence. The rest is history.....very foggy history.

2 comments:

  1. dammit! Guess my editor fell asleep again. You can't hire good help these days! Lets go with 1998!

    ReplyDelete