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Big Game 2001 Story

What a weekend!

MVP for the tank crew goes to Butch!  George's favorite saying all day Sunday was "Thank God for Butch!".  Butch fixed nearly every problem we had during the day with my Leatherman Wave, some tape and a lot of ingenuity!  Starting with a quick re-wiring of the ignition and installing the radio/cd player from his own car due to something in the stereo system screwing up the ignition.  We're pretty sure it was JIMMAY!'s fault.  Sadly Butch said he wasn't feeling well and left around 1:00 or 1:30 and missed out on our best runs of the day.  He did get his own gun though :).  He now has his very own Tippman 98 with a reactive trigger so next year we'll make him stay if we have to duct tape him into the tank!  At least he was in on the run with the film crew and was filmed again this year.

JIMMAY! surprise surprise (lots of sarcasm) was damn near completely useless.  He spent all day Saturday moaning about his girlfriend breaking up with him (She grew a brain!) and all day Sunday jumping up and down that she took him back (She lost the brain thanks to the Power of George!).  Well at least now that she took him back we don't have to deal with him anymore.  He also didn't camp out at the field Saturday night and showed up pretty late Sunday morning, missing the first run.  We were actually surprised that he showed up at all.  He spent most of his time hanging out with some friends of his that were camping out near the tank.  They had the camper in the BG-01-sunday-009s.jpg in the parking lot pics, behind the van/bus.  they had one of the best setups with their camper and some very nice folding chairs.  They left us a present in the form of two half lobsters stuffed in the cannon Sunday morning.  Unfortunately they only left the front half, no claws and no tail.  I'm pretty sure that they were the only guys there who brought live lobsters for dinner to the field Saturday.  One of them was an insurance agent and was telling us about some wacko guy who had called a few weeks ago to insure his tank for the game.  George goes "That was you!?" and the insurance guy goes "That was you!?".  "Does this sound familiar?  What are you F***ing nuts?" he asked and George goes "Yeah!" Not surprisingly though we became friends with them over the weekend and once when Rob was over there one of them said "Can't you guys keep him over there?" about JIMMAY!  JIMMAY! also seemed to be fond of comments like 'I was going to re-do that so it would be better' or 'I'm going to fix that' type of stuff but if that was true I wonder why he never bothered to show up and help us out when we were working on the tank for the past month.

Rob finally got a chance to do some combat riding in the tank and is now probably trying to figure out how he's going to get his own gun for next year lol!  Rob and I both felt that we liked JIMMAY! better when he was depressed than when he was bouncing around happy that he had a girlfriend again.  At least he was quieter when he was depressed and wasn't trying to make it seem that he was going to fix all of the tanks problems.

I'm not sure when he did it but George told me that Rob has indeed bought his own gun.  Apparently he went up to the Tippmann booth at the end of the day and picked up a Tippmann 98.

During the first combat ride of the day we managed to run over our own battery.  We were going uphill around a turn on a rough road when the stereo and PA system died.  George said "Looks like we're running on the battery" we got to the top of the hill and the tank stalled.  It was completely dead so we got out and looked under the hood to see a gaping hole where the battery used to be!  We had changed the front tires to 15" from 14" and had tossed in an oversized marine battery.  The tire caught either the battery tray or the battery itself and ripped out both.  I ran back down the hill to retrieve it and Rob helped me carry it back to the tank (those marine batteries are HEAVY!).  Went back for the tray and surrendered my leatherman to Butch who re-wired it in the field.  Thankfully we were in the blue teams territory who we were assigned to in the morning so it wasn't a real problem.  After we were back in action we encountered the Scorpions tank which had also gotten disabled.  They ran out of gas unfortunately for them they were assigned to the red army and broke down in what soon became blue territory.  They got shot up a bit and were shoved off to the side of the road by a bunch of blue's so that we could get by.  Just before lunch we had a cooling hose pop off.  There was a loud hissing sound as a huge cloud of smoke enveloped the tank.  We promptly popped the hatches and evacuated.  Someone came up to me a little later and asked if I had seen that.  I said "I was one of the guys jumping out of it!".  Once again Butch came to the rescue with the leatherman again.  Unfortunately that blown hose poured hot anti-freeze over the amp and once again we lost an amp (that's the third one for the tank 2 because of JIMMAY and 1 to anti-freeze).  JIMMAY thought we could have gotten it to work.  Butch said yes we might have but it wasn't worth the risk of damaging the hap-hazard ignition that had given us trouble that morning because of the weird wiring job JIMMAY had done on the stereo system earlier.  So the next big project for the tank is a new wiring harness.  

The Scorpions call their tank the 'love bug' and George thinks that it looks like one of the termites from the movie 'ANTZ'.  Check out BG-01-sunday-003s.jpg above and see what you think.  I think George is on to something there hahaha.

The rest of the day was pretty much major problem free.  We had to re-rig the positive cable to the battery, jump start the marine battery a number of times and finally replaced the marine battery with a Die-Hard.

We also stress tested the new rear suspension system.  George ran over and gathered up all of the lobster guys (either 8 or 9 of them) along with 5 of our crew (Butch had left by then and I followed the tank on foot) and did a troop insertion.  The tank barely lowered even with 13 or 14 guys in it!  They didn't do to well that first time, we left too soon and they were attacking one of the command post (the sand bag fort on the south end of the field).  George grabbed them again a little later on and did a second insertion at the 'oil refinery'.  This time we hung out for a bit which scared off some of the opposing forces and the fortifications at the oil refinery weren't as good as the command post so that time they took the position as we were driving off.

We did one more major attack after that where we had a bit of confusion and shot a few of our own team but quickly turned it around and stopped a blue advance dead in it's tracks and let the red team capture and hold the capital until the end of the game.  Ironically enough George's cousin was part of the mass of red players in that attack.  This was his first big game and he claimed that we wiped out nearly half of the attacking force he was with.  I'm pretty sure that the mass of red guys did more of that than we did.  People seem to get so caught up in avoiding the tank that they forget that they're exposing themselves to fire from the other players!

Towards the end of the day Alan from the Scorpions tank split up a whole mess of grenades (water balloons filled with paint) with us that Doc didn't use from the helicopter.  We thought that was really cool since he didn't have too.  As we were coming off the field after the end of the day we still had a number of grenades left.  We saw the Scorpions tank near the field entrance and proceeded to pop open the hatches and 'return' our remaining grenades.  We scored several hits on their tank and started to drive off.  Alan in an attempt to return the favor ran up, jumped up on our hood and was about to throw a grenade into our tank.  Kristian begged him not to, which caused Alan to hesitate just long enough for Kristian to reach out and grab Alan's hand.  Kristian then squeezed causing the grenade to go off in Alan's hand.  We do feel bad about the whole incident (only because they blew the main drive sprocket on their tanks chain drive as they were leaving the field).

At the end of the day JIMMAY! disappeared (thankfully), Kristian and Rick also pulled a vanishing act leaving George, Rob and Myself to pack up and take the tank back to George's.  Afterwards George and I were sitting at his kitchen table when Rob's wife Lisa called looking for Rob (they live two houses away from George).  Rob was out cleaning up some more in the dark!  George yelled at him to knock it off and get inside, grab a beer and relax.