My Day with the Vipers

This scene was our first encounter with WFA playoff football. It foreshadowed
things to come.

We were basically on the field when we took this picture. Oddly, the WFL rulebook doesn't prohibit photographers from meandering around the secondary.

The TV camera guy, mistaking Greg
for Brad Lohaus, pleaded for an
interview so that he "could get
something on tape and get the
f--- out of here." Greg obliged him.

You'd think that I'd have taken a picture of the lone sub (on the Birmingham bench, seen
above). In my defense, a person had about
8 seconds of no-glove-time before the cold-induced shooting pains were too much to correctly operate the camera.

To my dismay, Greg asked #95 (on crutches above), "Did you hurt yourself falling down from heaven?" She immediately called security.

I got a little carried away when
the Vipers recovered their 12th fumble of the first quarter.

I've tossed and turned over this article. I've written and re- written it over a dozen times. I can't figure how exactly to put into words my experience at the Indianapolis Vipers game. If I use too much hyperbole, the believability-factor plummets. Should I incorporate too many scathing
criticisms and interjections of personal opinion, we've got (another) entanglement with the NOW on our hands. Should I take the normal Flipsidian approach and merely embelish the obvious, the article turns into some kind of off-the-wall-elementary-school-creative-writing-
assignment. Then I realized the problem: a surreal setting will inevitably lead to surreal descriptions. Trying to describe an event to others is borderline impossible when you yourself are questioning your own perception of reality as a result of witnessing it. In other words, no matter how I describe the Vipers game, you will not believe me. No matter how you look at the pictures we took, you'll remain
in disbelief. Therefore, after much inner-reflection and deliberation, I'm merely going to write what I saw. You are hereby permitted to crank up the levels on your Skept-O-Meter as I recount my one encounter with the Women's Football League (herein, WFL). Believe what you will.

As you, the die-hard Flipside viewer are well-aware, we have been tracking the Vipers for some time now. Updates of the team's ongoings have always been comedic in nature as they usually interjected that rare bit of humor into our homepage. To us, the Vipers were nothing more than a hilarious myth, seemingly sent down to us from Mount Olympius during a period of a severe creative block. Some
journalistic deity, we assumed, blessed us with an almost- too-bizarre-to-believe story-line that was, most importantly, capable of serving as a continuing theme.

The Vipers, we felt, were nothing but a logo and a
punchline.

That is, until Saturday, January 11, 2003...when we came face-to-face with the myth. At Arlington High School, on the near-east side of Indianapolis, the Vipers took the field against the Birmingham Steel Magnolias. My friend Greg and I had decided sometime in November that we would be at this game come hell or high water. And though the
high water never made an appearance, we walked directly into every football purist's hell.

As we pulled into the Arlington "stadium," we
were ecstatic to discover: (A) no parking fee; and,
(B) we could park about 12-feet from the end-zone. We made the seven-second walk to the ticket
taker who—from the warmth of her wooden shack—incesantly screamed encouragement to her beloved Vipers throughout the duration of our stay. We duly paid our $6.

(Of interest was the fact that we were presented with a payment-option from the ticket taker, who from the looks of her, was hiding about 16 Warner Brothers tattoos under her Raiders jacket as she was most assuredly from Martinsville: "It's six dolla's each. Or, ya'll cin juss wait 'til da furst quarter's dun ind ya'll cin git in fo' free." We chose, out of pitty, the former. Twelve dollars, after
all, goes a long way in a franchise whose mascot
is an empty 40-ounce bottle of Cobra Malt Liquor.
A long way.)

As we walked through the chain-linked fence, we each instinctively began to count the number of spectators. I came up with 28...Greg got 26. We settled on 27. (Wouldn't that look odd to see in an NFL box-score? "Attendance: 000,027." Maybe that's just me. Sorry.) Understand, the temperature felt to be roughly -9 degrees. The wind seemed to only dip below 30 mph once, for about 12 seconds during the first quarter. Maybe that played a role in the utter lack of attendance. Or, as we'd
come to find out, maybe it was the fact that the game we'd all come to watch more closely resembled some kind of slow-motion roller derby that only vaguely mirrored the sport of football. We'll never know.

We decided to sit on the Steel Magnolias' side of the field, partly because the sun wouldn't be in our eyes, and partly because there was a plethora of open seats...on Birmingham's bench. Their traveling team obviously consisted of 12 players as there was one (1) reserve on the sidelines. One.
(I promised myself I would avoid these digressions, but can you imagine being a second-stringer on
a football team consisting of 12 players? Sadly, now that I think about it...I can. Again, I apologize.) Greg wanted to perform an in-game interview with what had to be the most optomistic person in the entire sporting world. I advised against it. "There's no need to further humiliate this girl," I told him. And trust me, Greg would have asked demoralizing questions: What's it feel like to know that basic mathmatical principles dictate that you had a 93%
chance of starting and yet, here you are? Any feelings on that?

Watching a football game while standing next to the head coach is an experience in and of itself. Watching the said coach decide to go for it on a
4th-and-31 (in the first quarter, on the Vipers' 42 yard-line, no less) is a whole other story. To set the scene, it was Greg, Ron (the Magnolias' coach), and me, in that order. We were anxiously awaiting to see a true-to-life WFL punt after a series of fumbles and botched shotgun-snaps knocked them
out of field-goal range. However, the Magnolias had
different plans. "32...Z...Red," yelled Ron. Apparently, "32 Z Red" is a play Ron drew up that encorporates a screen pass, a hook-and-ladder, two "fake fumbles" and three over-the-shoulder laterals. It was like watching "The Cal-Stanford Kickoff Play" all over again, only it took about 35 seconds longer and covered about a third of the
distance. Complete chaos. I was really pulling for Ron's play to work. And stangely enough, it did. "32 Z Red" brought with it a 38-yard gain, about 16 illegal blocks and a new-found admiration for Ron and his unorthodox coaching style. On to the Vipers' side.

As we neared the Viper fan section, it became obvious that this is where the Indiana Fever groupies hibernate. Lesbians everywhere. And not the good kind, either. These were lesbians of the "Construction Worker" variety. And they were mad. Mad that two men had just entered their Mecca. Mad that their team had just given up a
fourth-and-forever to a bunch of, as they called them, "Dixie Dykes." Greg and I agreed to simply snap a few pictures and get the hell out of their twisted world.

Access to the Vipers' bench, however, was much more difficult than it had been to the Magnolias'. There were a bunch of players on the Indianapolis bench (and by "bunch," I mean "seven"). We opted to simply stay on the 35-yard-line. And that's when we saw it: "The Kick," as it's come to be known around the Flipside office. After Birmingham scored, the teams lined up for a kick-off. The
Magnolia kicker/strong safety lurched at the ball like a dry-heaving labrador. The ball, seeminly defying the laws of physics, traveled 6 yards up, 3 yards deep and about 12 yards sideways. (Unfortunately, this is the God's honest truth.) By all accounts, a scrawny 6th-grader with cerebral palsey could have booted the ball at least twice as far. And it wasn't an "on-side kick" either; had it of been, the
Birmingham gunners wouldn't have loped down the field as they did, totally oblivious to the fact that the ball was about 10 yards behind them. That proved to be the breaking point for Greg and myself. We simply couldn't take it anymore. With the two aforementioned sequences, we had all that we needed to complete this story...and it only took
14 minutes. And yet, we were emotionally drained. We were freezing. We were ready to go home.

We sat in near silence for the duration of the trip back to Greg's house. Silence, we thought, was needed to fully digest all that we had just witnessed. The 295-pound right guard. The 3-yard slant pass that looked more like a 20-mph-Phil-Neikro-knuckleball. The draw plays that took
a full 15 seconds to develop. It was just too much. Too much, too soon. And furthermore, it conjured up images of a week prior when another Indianapolis professional football team suited up and performed in a very similar manner; fresh wounds, after all, should not be re-opened.
Hence the delay in the completion of this article. For that, I am sorry. And I am sorry that you too were not able to experience what Greg and I (and 27 hostile lesbians) did on Saturday.

It was Viper football at its best. Or so I'm told.

Someone needs to check the records:
Was Saturday, January 11, 2003 the slowest news day in the history of television?

Roy Hobbson

My Day with the Vipers