Anyone who has ever played Beirut with me knows that I talk a lot of shit. The basic concept is that I’m awesome and you’re crap. It’s pretty simple and evidently, quite irritating.

We used to have Beirut tournaments among our friends. We would put together a huge bracket and get two or three tables going at the same time. People would make up team names. Some people would even dress up. My team was The Deathly Hallows. The concept is simple: we’re unbeatable.

And we did win. Two tournaments, in fact! But we have never had a tournament since…

Evidently my shit talking pissed everyone off so much in the first tournament, there were actually incentives just to beat me in the second tournament. No one wanted to see me win. And I talked so much shit in the second tournament (and probably gloated extra hard because no one wanted me to win) that my friends have refused to have another tournament since.

I also tend to heckle a lot at sporting events. One time, I attended a friend’s college basketball game. Our team was the away team and me and my two friends were probably the only non-parent supporters.

It was a nail biter of a game; came down to the last minute with a ton of fouls on both sides. Any time the other team would shoot a free throw, we’d make as much noise as three people could possibly make to psych the other team out. We were banging plastic soda bottles on the benches and hooting and hollering. Anything to give us the slight edge.

This man comes barreling down the stands, right at us, all in a huff. He surveys the situation: lesbian, bearded man, gay boy. I think he then decided that the gay boy was the safest bet and gets in his face and says, “If you don’t stop banging that bottle, I’ll shove it up your ass.”

We were obviously shocked. My bearded friend was the first to come out of the shock and just say something like, “Have you ever been to a sports game before?” I quickly followed and started yelling at the man to get away from us. Clearly we had struck a nerve.

Something similar happened when I went to a college soccer game. Me and two friends were watching and cheering along for the team but were definitely in the minority since it was another away game. We had just gone to a Sounders game the night before and were full of soccer chants to belt out.

One of them is really long but has a verse in it that goes:
“Take them all. Take them all.
Put them up against the wall and shoot ’em
Short or tall.
Watch them fall.
Come on boys take them all.”

We replaced “boys” with “girls” and sang the chant proudly. At one of the rare moments where we were completely quiet, a woman turned to me and goes “How old are you guys? Like 5?”

I had absolutely no idea why this woman seemed to have a stick up her ass so I just responded, “Yeah around there,” and then turned away from her.

She taps me on the shoulder, I turn back, and she goes, “Didn’t you ever stop to think that that’s someone’s daughter out there?”

Whoa lady. Somebody needs to calm down.

The chant is long and clearly about soccer. I don’t think that anyone made up some drinking soccer chant about mass murder. And we weren’t even drinking! Besides that was just one verse in one of the many Sounders chants we sang that day. We weren’t being disrespectful at all to the other team.

Which is not to say I haven’t done that as well. At Whitman, there was a group that would sit in the front row for every women’s basketball game. They would then learn the names of the girls on the opposing team and heckle them loudly. I participated once or twice and I’ve been told by members of the other teams that it was infuriating.

I think the moral of the story is that you should never play or attend a game with me if you’re sensitive to competitive assholes. I really don’t want to have to put a dollar in the douchebag jar every time I play a game. The competitiveness in me is something we’re all just going to have to learn to deal with, okay?