A few years back, I happened across a headline on a forum somewhere suggesting I had bashed the crap out of 6 Rage players at an NPPL event in Miami …. Oh my, how things get exaggerated out of all proportion ……….. it was 5 for fuhk’s sake not 6 … :/
Actually, I didn’t bash anyone .. well, that’s not strictly true but I did have to ‘defend myself' against an attacking hoard of so-called ‘pro’ players seemingly hell-bent on turning my designer- face into a designer-free road accident.
I did tell you awhile back that, trouble seemed to follow me around and this is one such case but this particular incident had its roots firmly embedded in an event prior to the Miami tournament in Florida.
And this incident came supplied with the somewhat predictable ‘sting in the tail’ for me … I should have been used to these stings by now but I doubt anyone could have predicted this one coming …. Well, anyone who wasn’t sucking on a crack-pipe that is.
The Chicago NPPL venue was the event where the problem began … I was with Nexus, and getting into the finals was no easy matter with so many great teams around.
When I first started Nexus, I thought I was gonna be a great coach [humility ain’t my strong suit] - I thought all of my experience could be brought to bear on creating a top pro team from the UK that could compete with the best in the world – unfortunately, life has this unerring knack of making you look a right dooffus when you least expect it.
It’s true to say I suppose - we did manage to compete against the top pro teams in the world by finishing 7th placed pro team overall in our first year together …. but ….. I hate that fuhkin word ‘but’ … I know something bad is coming …
and it was.
If there was an award for being the worst coach of all time, I should have won it hands down; I was to paintball coaching what Mike Tyson was to ballet dancing.
Sure, I had the experience …… sure, I had the necessary grey matter but little did I know just how much the emotional side of coaching was gonna subvert my ability to coach a team.
I’ve always been a pretty bad loser but when you wrap your life around a team like I did with Nexus, it became all-consuming and felt like a monkey on my back; no, not a monkey, a big-ass thousand pound gorilla.
Basically, I morphed into a 230 pound a$shole every time we lost…
Metaphorically speaking, I used to turn green and feel my shirt beginning to rip down its seams whenever I saw all my players in the dead-box – I took every loss, every time we were cheated against, every time someone gobbed off at my players, I took it all personally, waaaaaaay too personally.
I suppose it’s all well and good taking it personally just as long as you can contain yourself and not act like a complete arse … but I’m afraid I never managed to succeed in that and the writing was always on the paintball wall, it would all end in tears but that's a different story for another time.
Any good bits I might have had as a coach were meaningless all the time I allowed my emotions to get involved but I couldn’t seem to stop it happening, no matter how much I tried, or how much I wanted to act professionally – it was beyond me.
As much as I was able to teach my players what to do technically, I was destroying the team bit by bit whenever I allowed emotions to poison my behaviour.
Qualifying in Chicago was always gonna be tight but little did we know just how tight.
We played our final qualifying game against an American pro team called Rage.
I had always been friendly with the Rage players but this was a new Rage team with new individuals and different principles of tournament participation.
After the first round scores had gone up, it had us missing qualification by two points which is kinda frustrating but then something strange happened, and to this day, I got no idea why ….. about ten minutes after the game had finished, some guy who I’ve never seen before comes up to me and advises I check the scoreboard – now, I'm no detective but I smelled a rat and so I went over and went through my team’s scores with a fine tooth-comb.
And sure enough, there was a mistake, our score was one elimination short on our game against Rage.
They had it down that 3 of Rage's players were left alive at the end of the game when they only had 2, and that mistake became the difference between us not qualifying and Rage going through …. back then, you used to get points for how many opponents you shot in the game - My, my, mistakes do happen don’t they … :/
To this day, I still don’t know if the missing point was deliberate or circumstantial, I’d like to think it was an accident but I’m far too much of a cynic to write it off as unintentional.
At this point, the chicanery begun ……I went straight to the head judge and laid out the facts … he listened to my submission and agreed that Rage had two guys left and not three but, he then quoted the rule-book in saying, ‘after both captains had signed the score-sheet, the result stood’ .. no matter what … but there was one exception to that condition and it was if there had been a mathematical error, in that case, the head-judge could amend the scorecard.
We had signed the score-sheet, that’s true but if you are gonna quote the rule book at me, you had better be interpreting that rule book correctly and fairly, neither was done by the head judge.
For some unknown reason, he did not agree that the problem was a ‘mathematical’ mistake.
… I don’t what else could be described as a mathematical mistake but the head-judge stuck to his decision … all the memories of foreign teams in the US getting fuk’d over sprang to mind but I knew in this case, it was down to one guy, and one guy only … well, him and the Rage players.
Long story short, the Rage players knew damned well the wrong score was put on the score-sheet but they sat back and allowed it to stand …
I didn’t take this too kindly …
I was seething with the injustice of it all …. We had been cheated out of qualification into the finals with the complicity of the head-judge.
All the money that was invested in Nexus, all the hours we trained were shot out the air with one searing injustice .. I felt awful for my guys.
There’s one thing failing to get into the finals because you weren’t good enough but to be prevented like this, it was pretty hard to bear.
The promoters of the event tried to placate the situation by offering me a free entry for the team into the next event … I refused to be bought off, I wanted what was owed to my team and I wanted our rightful place in those finals, not money.
The principle of that burned inside my head, I hated all those bastaards for doing that to my team.
Ged Green, who was the promoter of this event was caught between the devil and the deep-blue sea but he had to remain detached from it all, and I sympathised with that completely.
Ged is an honourable man and he knew damned well that to go against the head-judge would open the door for far too many as$holes to dive in ... Ged had been let down by his head-judge but was powerless to do anything and I respected his decision to stay out of it even though I wanted to get him involved.
Eventually , the head-judge was sacked some events later but not soon enough for my team.
When I got back to my hotel room, I went on-line and blew it wide-open .. two days later, I got back to the UK, and sitting in my inbox was an email from the same head-judge apologising and agreeing he had made a mistake ….. WTF ???????
How comes he didn’t have this epiphany two days prior? … he was doing a damage-limitation exercise because he knew his decision looked bad when splayed out across the forums ... but I weren’t having none of it.
The next event was at Miami and who do we get in the prelims?
Rage !!!
The game was tense, I was tense … no I weren’t, I was fuhkin tense and simmering – the game starts going through its end phase and they were winning, the game ended, we got beat … oh goodie, I‘m so pleased but as I walked onto the field to pick my guys’ pots up, I had to walk past the Rage players’ still in their dead-box adjacent to the field of play.
As I walked past them toward my team at the other end of the field, one of them shouted something to me, I had no idea what the ingrate spluttered, it wasn’t any sort of English I knew.
I walked over, spat on the ground in front of them and gave them the wanker gesture… I thought that was quite restrained for me really but the Rage players didn’t take it too kindly as all five of them then came running toward me. Now I know what Colonel 'fuhkin' Custer felt as time decided to slooooow right down just to make sure I lived through every separate second unfolding before me.
There was a tall guy who was in front of them, he had one of those faces you just wanna redesign, this guy was all mouth and was trying to look all tough by being the lead man as he headed the pack but as he came in range, and before he got a chance to clump me, I lunged forward, grabbed him, and nutted him - I held on tight as the others jumped all over me and began hitting and kicking me.
I had grabbed his playing jersey with both hands before nutting him and as I leaned forward into a 'L' shape, I took him with me and held on tight using him as a shield as much as I could.
It’s a peculiar thing that when you get into things like fights, car accidents and the like, time decides to sloooow right down just so you can savour every separate second … nice :/
Anyway, as I was being punched and kicked by them all, I was thinking, ‘this isn’t too bad, I wasn’t really hurting anywhere, I could feel myself being hit and kicked and whatever, but it wasn’t that bad’.
Now, I’m not saying this to appear tough or big or whatever, this is what I was thinking as all this crap was going on – I think I must have had a lot of adrenaline coursing through my veins which explains why I wasn’t feeling all the kicks and punches as much as I’d imagine.
And just as I had noted I wasn’t feeling too much pain ….BANG !!!!!!!
I got whacked on my nose with what felt like a club-hammer; I’ve been hit on my nose several times before and I know what a punch feels like and this wasn’t a punch.
The pain neurones in my nose exploded into my brain and I thought, ‘fuhk, that hurt a bit’ … prior to that, I wasn’t feeling particularly angry but when I got hit on my nose, I felt anger well up from my toes and flood into my head.
Fuhkin cowards I thought to myself … I despised their weakness.
Someone remarked afterward who saw the fight, I was hit with an air-tank but I think it was more likely someone just got lucky with a well-aimed kick – either way, my nose turned into a tap and I could feel the warm blood run down my face.
As soon as they had finished having their fun, I straightened up, thought to myself, ‘wow, I’m fine’, all five of them couldn’t even put me on my ass, I felt quite good about that but the nose did hurt a bit but apart from that, I felt ok.
I was more angry than anything else ….
Anyways, upshot was, it went round the event like wild-fire and I heard polarised accounts of me, being rushed to hospital to the other extreme where I was supposed to have beaten them all up, both were rubbish.
I never went near a hospital, I stayed on site all day and nor did I manage to clump anyone apart from that first idiot I nutted – he had s shiner, and I had a purple nose.
The promoters were somewhat mortified by it all and to be fair, it stuck them in the **** and they didn’t really know what to do about it all – in the meantime, representatives from Rage had asked to meet me at the back of the Dye tent so they could apologise.
I’m not so sure they were genuine in that gesture, I think they were more worried about being thrown out the league for the assault – as it stood, there were far too many witnesses to a five on one assault and if the police had been called [which I would never have done anyway] they woulda had a problem.
They came to the back of the Dye tent and went through the motions of shaking hands in an attempt to keep their place in the league.
I wasn’t fooled by their duplicity.
I was pissed off yeah, but I’ve had worse, and to be fair, I had come out of that crap smelling of roses .. well, that’s for those who could smell – my nose was out of commission for the time being.
All in all, I would have preferred to have had a straightener with the guy who nose-butted my forehead but he was never gonna have that and there seemed little point in me causing any more problems.
Anyway, like a lot of things in paintball, the next day it was old news and I had moved on …. but as always there was another one of those sting’s in the tail that seemed to haunt me, and boy, was this one weird ……
Also attending this event was a couple of Brits called Mac D and Ronnie from Manchester way who both flew in to this tourney - I had never met them before but I got to hear that Mac had been mugged at gunpoint on his first night in town; the mugger got all Mac’s money and frightened the life out of him because the a$shole made Mac kneel down as he robbed him with a gun to his head - welcome to Miami, Mac :/
As I didn't know Ronnie and Mac, I asked Ledzy to point them out to me and I went over to them.
I asked Mac if he needed any dosh seeing as it had all been stolen, he thanked me for asking but said he was fine, cool – I didn’t think any more of it ….
What I didn’t know, Mac and Ronnie had been watching the game of Nexus and Rage, and Ronnie had videoed some of it.
After the event, some of the Rage guys had gone onto forums and tried to justify their attack on me by stating I had gone into their dead zone and started attacking them which they felt justified their 5 on 1 attacking of me.
You get to wonder sometimes just how stupid some people are, when they believe that a story like that would be taken seriously but I didn’t have to appeal to anyone’s common-sense because apparently, the video showed they had all come out of the dead-box before assaulting me, cool, I thought that would be the end of that … but lurking in the cesspit-sewers of paintball back home lived a particularly foul-smelling rat … even with my nose as it was, I could smell this rat.
I need to set the scene before I continue - a few months prior to this incident in the US, an individual this side of the Atlantic called andy sables had been breaking the rules on p8ntballer.com by continuously advertising his tin-pot little company and was told several times to stop doing it by Steve Duffy, the editor at that time of PGi – sables didn’t listen to Steve’s advice.
Steve eventually banned sables for repeated advertising and ignoring the rules but the thing was, I didn’t know anything about this crap - Steve used to deal with all these type idiots back then thankfully.
And so, sables the rat was inexplicably pis$ed off, hell knows why ….. he broke the fuhkin rules, he got banned, that’s the way it goes when you’re an a$shole, they should get used to it.
Well, after the Miami trip, myself and Nexus all come back to sunny ole England and I get a phone call from Ronnie / Mac, I can’t remember which one it was but they informed me some kid had offered a thousand pounds for the video of the fight…. I kid you not !!!
WTF ??????
A grand?????
This was insane …..
That was serious money, especially to poor old Mac after he got relieved of all his dosh in Miami ….. but anyways, Ronnie /Mac asked me what I thought about it because let’s face it, a thousand quid was a lot of dosh and I think both of them could have done with that cash at the time.
They realised quite quickly that someone wanted that vid for nefarious purposes but a thousand pounds was a very real tempter.
Ronnie and Mac were in a spot because they could have done with the money but at the same time, it meant handing over a video that didn’t really put me in a good light, or so some people believed at that time.
And so, Ronnie and Mac came to me first because Mac appreciated how I’d tried to help him in Miami when he was robbed.
Now that was a nice gesture because I know how much a grand would have meant to them but I asked them to refuse the offer, and to their credit, that’s exactly what they did … they told the kid who approached them with the money, they weren’t gonna let the video go …
But …. Who the fuhk was the person pulling the strings behind the kid’s attempt to purchase the video ??????
It didn’t add up as to why some kid would offer that sort of money for a video of a fight.
It seems the kid was obviously acting as a go-between for someone else and when Ronnie pressured the kid as to who he was acting for, he eventually named sables … and then the bits started to fall into place but still, it made no real sense to me.
Why would he pay silly money for a video like that?
The answer to that is bewildering … to me it is anyway.
It seemed sables wanted to disgrace me and the magazine by putting the video on line because he felt I was somehow instrumental in getting him banned .. how the hell he came to that conclusion is really beyond me but if paintball has taught me one thing then it’s not to spend too much time trying to work out what makes people do things the way they do but what a silly insignificant individual this was …. The irony was, the video didn’t disgrace me at all, in fact, it disgraced Rage but I suppose sable’s thinking went along the lines that because I was involved, it would reflect badly on me and the magazine, and this is exactly what he wanted.
Why on earth he just didn’t call me and ask me to meet him somewhere and sort the problem out but when I pondered it for a minute, this guy was a spineless ingrate who had the testicular profile of a worm hence the long-distance ploy using the kid as a prospective buyer for the vid.
It sounded like a John Le Carre spy novel ….. this is paintball for fuhk's sake not the cold war.
As you may imagine, I wasn’t happy with this slime-sack of a man and so I went public with it, and he tried all sorts to shut me up – his futile attempts at gagging me only served to confirm his insignificance and pis$ me off even more.
Of course, it is the nature of such pond-life to deny everything, and that’s exactly what he did, it was of course his only option, the alternative was to be a man and put his hands up but that was never gonna happen.
Funnily enough, sables lives at the other end of the country to me but I have some friends who live in his area and in passing, I just happened to mention all this crap to them.
And then curiously, a few days later, I got a phone call from sables repeatedly assuring me he had no problem with myself, and wanted to put it all behind us, my, my, how nice of him, so very, very nice.
What a co-incidence, I genuinely hadn’t asked anyone to do anything for me but sable’s change of heart was quite surprising, leastwise to me it was. I often wondered if someone had got in contact with him, I might never know
…. As I told you at the beginning of this history saga, 'fact is sometimes stranger than fiction' and so it proved to be with yet another example of paintball’s pantheon of idiot wannabees.
When I think back at this whole sables thingy, it could have so easily been avoided if he had acted responsibly and hadn’t acted like a bitch just because he couldn’t abide by our site’s rules but some people it seems, have a sense of entitlement that is skewed and they end up being treated accordingly – whaaattttt a fuhkin dick-head !!
As for what's coming next?
The Rise and Fool of Nexus .... a blueprint of 'How not to own/run/coach a pro team ....
Actually, I didn’t bash anyone .. well, that’s not strictly true but I did have to ‘defend myself' against an attacking hoard of so-called ‘pro’ players seemingly hell-bent on turning my designer- face into a designer-free road accident.
I did tell you awhile back that, trouble seemed to follow me around and this is one such case but this particular incident had its roots firmly embedded in an event prior to the Miami tournament in Florida.
And this incident came supplied with the somewhat predictable ‘sting in the tail’ for me … I should have been used to these stings by now but I doubt anyone could have predicted this one coming …. Well, anyone who wasn’t sucking on a crack-pipe that is.
The Chicago NPPL venue was the event where the problem began … I was with Nexus, and getting into the finals was no easy matter with so many great teams around.
When I first started Nexus, I thought I was gonna be a great coach [humility ain’t my strong suit] - I thought all of my experience could be brought to bear on creating a top pro team from the UK that could compete with the best in the world – unfortunately, life has this unerring knack of making you look a right dooffus when you least expect it.
It’s true to say I suppose - we did manage to compete against the top pro teams in the world by finishing 7th placed pro team overall in our first year together …. but ….. I hate that fuhkin word ‘but’ … I know something bad is coming …
and it was.
If there was an award for being the worst coach of all time, I should have won it hands down; I was to paintball coaching what Mike Tyson was to ballet dancing.
Sure, I had the experience …… sure, I had the necessary grey matter but little did I know just how much the emotional side of coaching was gonna subvert my ability to coach a team.
I’ve always been a pretty bad loser but when you wrap your life around a team like I did with Nexus, it became all-consuming and felt like a monkey on my back; no, not a monkey, a big-ass thousand pound gorilla.
Basically, I morphed into a 230 pound a$shole every time we lost…
Metaphorically speaking, I used to turn green and feel my shirt beginning to rip down its seams whenever I saw all my players in the dead-box – I took every loss, every time we were cheated against, every time someone gobbed off at my players, I took it all personally, waaaaaaay too personally.
I suppose it’s all well and good taking it personally just as long as you can contain yourself and not act like a complete arse … but I’m afraid I never managed to succeed in that and the writing was always on the paintball wall, it would all end in tears but that's a different story for another time.
Any good bits I might have had as a coach were meaningless all the time I allowed my emotions to get involved but I couldn’t seem to stop it happening, no matter how much I tried, or how much I wanted to act professionally – it was beyond me.
As much as I was able to teach my players what to do technically, I was destroying the team bit by bit whenever I allowed emotions to poison my behaviour.
Qualifying in Chicago was always gonna be tight but little did we know just how tight.
We played our final qualifying game against an American pro team called Rage.
I had always been friendly with the Rage players but this was a new Rage team with new individuals and different principles of tournament participation.
After the first round scores had gone up, it had us missing qualification by two points which is kinda frustrating but then something strange happened, and to this day, I got no idea why ….. about ten minutes after the game had finished, some guy who I’ve never seen before comes up to me and advises I check the scoreboard – now, I'm no detective but I smelled a rat and so I went over and went through my team’s scores with a fine tooth-comb.
And sure enough, there was a mistake, our score was one elimination short on our game against Rage.
They had it down that 3 of Rage's players were left alive at the end of the game when they only had 2, and that mistake became the difference between us not qualifying and Rage going through …. back then, you used to get points for how many opponents you shot in the game - My, my, mistakes do happen don’t they … :/
To this day, I still don’t know if the missing point was deliberate or circumstantial, I’d like to think it was an accident but I’m far too much of a cynic to write it off as unintentional.
At this point, the chicanery begun ……I went straight to the head judge and laid out the facts … he listened to my submission and agreed that Rage had two guys left and not three but, he then quoted the rule-book in saying, ‘after both captains had signed the score-sheet, the result stood’ .. no matter what … but there was one exception to that condition and it was if there had been a mathematical error, in that case, the head-judge could amend the scorecard.
We had signed the score-sheet, that’s true but if you are gonna quote the rule book at me, you had better be interpreting that rule book correctly and fairly, neither was done by the head judge.
For some unknown reason, he did not agree that the problem was a ‘mathematical’ mistake.
… I don’t what else could be described as a mathematical mistake but the head-judge stuck to his decision … all the memories of foreign teams in the US getting fuk’d over sprang to mind but I knew in this case, it was down to one guy, and one guy only … well, him and the Rage players.
Long story short, the Rage players knew damned well the wrong score was put on the score-sheet but they sat back and allowed it to stand …
I didn’t take this too kindly …
I was seething with the injustice of it all …. We had been cheated out of qualification into the finals with the complicity of the head-judge.
All the money that was invested in Nexus, all the hours we trained were shot out the air with one searing injustice .. I felt awful for my guys.
There’s one thing failing to get into the finals because you weren’t good enough but to be prevented like this, it was pretty hard to bear.
The promoters of the event tried to placate the situation by offering me a free entry for the team into the next event … I refused to be bought off, I wanted what was owed to my team and I wanted our rightful place in those finals, not money.
The principle of that burned inside my head, I hated all those bastaards for doing that to my team.
Ged Green, who was the promoter of this event was caught between the devil and the deep-blue sea but he had to remain detached from it all, and I sympathised with that completely.
Ged is an honourable man and he knew damned well that to go against the head-judge would open the door for far too many as$holes to dive in ... Ged had been let down by his head-judge but was powerless to do anything and I respected his decision to stay out of it even though I wanted to get him involved.
Eventually , the head-judge was sacked some events later but not soon enough for my team.
When I got back to my hotel room, I went on-line and blew it wide-open .. two days later, I got back to the UK, and sitting in my inbox was an email from the same head-judge apologising and agreeing he had made a mistake ….. WTF ???????
How comes he didn’t have this epiphany two days prior? … he was doing a damage-limitation exercise because he knew his decision looked bad when splayed out across the forums ... but I weren’t having none of it.
The next event was at Miami and who do we get in the prelims?
Rage !!!
The game was tense, I was tense … no I weren’t, I was fuhkin tense and simmering – the game starts going through its end phase and they were winning, the game ended, we got beat … oh goodie, I‘m so pleased but as I walked onto the field to pick my guys’ pots up, I had to walk past the Rage players’ still in their dead-box adjacent to the field of play.
As I walked past them toward my team at the other end of the field, one of them shouted something to me, I had no idea what the ingrate spluttered, it wasn’t any sort of English I knew.
I walked over, spat on the ground in front of them and gave them the wanker gesture… I thought that was quite restrained for me really but the Rage players didn’t take it too kindly as all five of them then came running toward me. Now I know what Colonel 'fuhkin' Custer felt as time decided to slooooow right down just to make sure I lived through every separate second unfolding before me.
There was a tall guy who was in front of them, he had one of those faces you just wanna redesign, this guy was all mouth and was trying to look all tough by being the lead man as he headed the pack but as he came in range, and before he got a chance to clump me, I lunged forward, grabbed him, and nutted him - I held on tight as the others jumped all over me and began hitting and kicking me.
I had grabbed his playing jersey with both hands before nutting him and as I leaned forward into a 'L' shape, I took him with me and held on tight using him as a shield as much as I could.
It’s a peculiar thing that when you get into things like fights, car accidents and the like, time decides to sloooow right down just so you can savour every separate second … nice :/
Anyway, as I was being punched and kicked by them all, I was thinking, ‘this isn’t too bad, I wasn’t really hurting anywhere, I could feel myself being hit and kicked and whatever, but it wasn’t that bad’.
Now, I’m not saying this to appear tough or big or whatever, this is what I was thinking as all this crap was going on – I think I must have had a lot of adrenaline coursing through my veins which explains why I wasn’t feeling all the kicks and punches as much as I’d imagine.
And just as I had noted I wasn’t feeling too much pain ….BANG !!!!!!!
I got whacked on my nose with what felt like a club-hammer; I’ve been hit on my nose several times before and I know what a punch feels like and this wasn’t a punch.
The pain neurones in my nose exploded into my brain and I thought, ‘fuhk, that hurt a bit’ … prior to that, I wasn’t feeling particularly angry but when I got hit on my nose, I felt anger well up from my toes and flood into my head.
Fuhkin cowards I thought to myself … I despised their weakness.
Someone remarked afterward who saw the fight, I was hit with an air-tank but I think it was more likely someone just got lucky with a well-aimed kick – either way, my nose turned into a tap and I could feel the warm blood run down my face.
As soon as they had finished having their fun, I straightened up, thought to myself, ‘wow, I’m fine’, all five of them couldn’t even put me on my ass, I felt quite good about that but the nose did hurt a bit but apart from that, I felt ok.
I was more angry than anything else ….
Anyways, upshot was, it went round the event like wild-fire and I heard polarised accounts of me, being rushed to hospital to the other extreme where I was supposed to have beaten them all up, both were rubbish.
I never went near a hospital, I stayed on site all day and nor did I manage to clump anyone apart from that first idiot I nutted – he had s shiner, and I had a purple nose.
The promoters were somewhat mortified by it all and to be fair, it stuck them in the **** and they didn’t really know what to do about it all – in the meantime, representatives from Rage had asked to meet me at the back of the Dye tent so they could apologise.
I’m not so sure they were genuine in that gesture, I think they were more worried about being thrown out the league for the assault – as it stood, there were far too many witnesses to a five on one assault and if the police had been called [which I would never have done anyway] they woulda had a problem.
They came to the back of the Dye tent and went through the motions of shaking hands in an attempt to keep their place in the league.
I wasn’t fooled by their duplicity.
I was pissed off yeah, but I’ve had worse, and to be fair, I had come out of that crap smelling of roses .. well, that’s for those who could smell – my nose was out of commission for the time being.
All in all, I would have preferred to have had a straightener with the guy who nose-butted my forehead but he was never gonna have that and there seemed little point in me causing any more problems.
Anyway, like a lot of things in paintball, the next day it was old news and I had moved on …. but as always there was another one of those sting’s in the tail that seemed to haunt me, and boy, was this one weird ……
Also attending this event was a couple of Brits called Mac D and Ronnie from Manchester way who both flew in to this tourney - I had never met them before but I got to hear that Mac had been mugged at gunpoint on his first night in town; the mugger got all Mac’s money and frightened the life out of him because the a$shole made Mac kneel down as he robbed him with a gun to his head - welcome to Miami, Mac :/
As I didn't know Ronnie and Mac, I asked Ledzy to point them out to me and I went over to them.
I asked Mac if he needed any dosh seeing as it had all been stolen, he thanked me for asking but said he was fine, cool – I didn’t think any more of it ….
What I didn’t know, Mac and Ronnie had been watching the game of Nexus and Rage, and Ronnie had videoed some of it.
After the event, some of the Rage guys had gone onto forums and tried to justify their attack on me by stating I had gone into their dead zone and started attacking them which they felt justified their 5 on 1 attacking of me.
You get to wonder sometimes just how stupid some people are, when they believe that a story like that would be taken seriously but I didn’t have to appeal to anyone’s common-sense because apparently, the video showed they had all come out of the dead-box before assaulting me, cool, I thought that would be the end of that … but lurking in the cesspit-sewers of paintball back home lived a particularly foul-smelling rat … even with my nose as it was, I could smell this rat.
I need to set the scene before I continue - a few months prior to this incident in the US, an individual this side of the Atlantic called andy sables had been breaking the rules on p8ntballer.com by continuously advertising his tin-pot little company and was told several times to stop doing it by Steve Duffy, the editor at that time of PGi – sables didn’t listen to Steve’s advice.
Steve eventually banned sables for repeated advertising and ignoring the rules but the thing was, I didn’t know anything about this crap - Steve used to deal with all these type idiots back then thankfully.
And so, sables the rat was inexplicably pis$ed off, hell knows why ….. he broke the fuhkin rules, he got banned, that’s the way it goes when you’re an a$shole, they should get used to it.
Well, after the Miami trip, myself and Nexus all come back to sunny ole England and I get a phone call from Ronnie / Mac, I can’t remember which one it was but they informed me some kid had offered a thousand pounds for the video of the fight…. I kid you not !!!
WTF ??????
A grand?????
This was insane …..
That was serious money, especially to poor old Mac after he got relieved of all his dosh in Miami ….. but anyways, Ronnie /Mac asked me what I thought about it because let’s face it, a thousand quid was a lot of dosh and I think both of them could have done with that cash at the time.
They realised quite quickly that someone wanted that vid for nefarious purposes but a thousand pounds was a very real tempter.
Ronnie and Mac were in a spot because they could have done with the money but at the same time, it meant handing over a video that didn’t really put me in a good light, or so some people believed at that time.
And so, Ronnie and Mac came to me first because Mac appreciated how I’d tried to help him in Miami when he was robbed.
Now that was a nice gesture because I know how much a grand would have meant to them but I asked them to refuse the offer, and to their credit, that’s exactly what they did … they told the kid who approached them with the money, they weren’t gonna let the video go …
But …. Who the fuhk was the person pulling the strings behind the kid’s attempt to purchase the video ??????
It didn’t add up as to why some kid would offer that sort of money for a video of a fight.
It seems the kid was obviously acting as a go-between for someone else and when Ronnie pressured the kid as to who he was acting for, he eventually named sables … and then the bits started to fall into place but still, it made no real sense to me.
Why would he pay silly money for a video like that?
The answer to that is bewildering … to me it is anyway.
It seemed sables wanted to disgrace me and the magazine by putting the video on line because he felt I was somehow instrumental in getting him banned .. how the hell he came to that conclusion is really beyond me but if paintball has taught me one thing then it’s not to spend too much time trying to work out what makes people do things the way they do but what a silly insignificant individual this was …. The irony was, the video didn’t disgrace me at all, in fact, it disgraced Rage but I suppose sable’s thinking went along the lines that because I was involved, it would reflect badly on me and the magazine, and this is exactly what he wanted.
Why on earth he just didn’t call me and ask me to meet him somewhere and sort the problem out but when I pondered it for a minute, this guy was a spineless ingrate who had the testicular profile of a worm hence the long-distance ploy using the kid as a prospective buyer for the vid.
It sounded like a John Le Carre spy novel ….. this is paintball for fuhk's sake not the cold war.
As you may imagine, I wasn’t happy with this slime-sack of a man and so I went public with it, and he tried all sorts to shut me up – his futile attempts at gagging me only served to confirm his insignificance and pis$ me off even more.
Of course, it is the nature of such pond-life to deny everything, and that’s exactly what he did, it was of course his only option, the alternative was to be a man and put his hands up but that was never gonna happen.
Funnily enough, sables lives at the other end of the country to me but I have some friends who live in his area and in passing, I just happened to mention all this crap to them.
And then curiously, a few days later, I got a phone call from sables repeatedly assuring me he had no problem with myself, and wanted to put it all behind us, my, my, how nice of him, so very, very nice.
What a co-incidence, I genuinely hadn’t asked anyone to do anything for me but sable’s change of heart was quite surprising, leastwise to me it was. I often wondered if someone had got in contact with him, I might never know
…. As I told you at the beginning of this history saga, 'fact is sometimes stranger than fiction' and so it proved to be with yet another example of paintball’s pantheon of idiot wannabees.When I think back at this whole sables thingy, it could have so easily been avoided if he had acted responsibly and hadn’t acted like a bitch just because he couldn’t abide by our site’s rules but some people it seems, have a sense of entitlement that is skewed and they end up being treated accordingly – whaaattttt a fuhkin dick-head !!
As for what's coming next?
The Rise and Fool of Nexus .... a blueprint of 'How not to own/run/coach a pro team ....
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