Flowrs Dominates in 3-1 Romp

Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Coolavin Park
NoC Sports Desk

If you had Brad Flowers in your fantasy bike polo league, you awoke last Thursday morning with a great big grin on your face. Flowers scored three goals in pedaling Team 1 (Flowers, Tiff Morrow, and Kristen Avis) to a 3-1 victory over Team 2 (Tim “Mad Dog” Buckingham, Grant Clouser, and Nick McLean) in the fourth game of bike polo action at Coolavin Park last Wednesday night.

With only one set of lights functioning at the courts, the 8:00 joust time created visibility problems as the two teams battled under fading sunlight in the late summer dusk. The darkening conditions seemed to play most havoc on Tim “Mad Dog” Buckingham, who spilled off his bike and onto the scorching blue surface of the court at several times throughout the course of the match.

His first spill, at the 8:01 mark, left Buckingham splayed on his face at mid court and Brad Flowers, dressed this night in stylish pink shirt and matching blue gloves, all alone to ride it in going the other way for a 1-0 T1 lead.

True to his name, Mad Dog fought back erratically from the embarrassing face-down. On the upside, at the 8:03 mark the bearded giant blasted his way through bike traffic for an 8 foot goal. Moving from right to left at 25 feet out, Buckingham furiously cut an acute angle to the goal and manhandled a shot back across his bike and through the cones for the tying score. After making the shot, Mad Dog immediately circled back left, raised his mallet with one hand, and with the other began blowing kisses to both fans and players, who in the two minutes since his first flop had been heckling him with sordid and rotten names.

As the game wore on, Mad Dog—some say the nickname is a shortened version of “Mad Dog with Rabies”--continued his revenge romp, though admittedly with less than stellar success at the scorecard. At the 8:05 mark, he bear hugged Morrow near mid-court, falling once again off his bike and forcing Morrow to go foot down. Later, Mad Dog's emotions got the best of him when he brutally bent Avis' mallet with a hard karate chop to the middle of the shaft, which caused a one-minute equipment time-out.

Things settled down after these eruptions, though, and at the 8:09 mark Flowers made it 2-1 T1 with a steal at left mid-court that led to a contested shot and goal over some tight transition defense by McLean. Two minutes later, Flowers finished things off with a streaking open goal shot from twenty feet out, which gave T1 a 3-1 victory. Fittingly, the breakaway shot was set up by an Avis block of a Mad Dog shot on goal.

More on Mad Dog's bent shaft
Though she was using it at the time, Kristen Avis was not the owner of the mallet that Mad Dog Buckingham bent at the 8:06 mark. Rather, Avis was playing with a mallet borrowed from the stash of bike polo player Alex Brooks. Still rehabilitating from a broken arm that required surgery last year, Brooks had left the bike polo courts early for scheduled bariatric treatment on the arm. When Brooks learned several hours later at Al's Bar about Mad Dog's antics—and the great chuckles players and fans had with Brooks' pathetically bent shaft—the rehabbing bike polo player expressed disgust. “It's like fifth grade up in here,” Brooks railed. “And I want that [placed] in big bubble quotes.”

Bubble Quote: “It's like fifth grade up in here,” Brooks railed. “And I want that [placed] in big bubble quotes.”