Warrior wizard

Gandalf bustin’ heads

I rocked with several crews in high school, including the jock crew, the stoner crew, and the artsy crew, to name a few. They overlapped and folded into all kinds of fun Venn diagrams, including ones involving my egghead crew. I graduated during the Clinton Administration, and my core egghead crewmates and I still do an annual guys’ trip, usually centered around a sports or music event somewhere in North America. We’ve watched the Red Sox at Fenway, hit Vegas to see Stevie, Usher, and Lionel Richie, and a couple of us merged sports and music a couple of summers ago when we saw the Boss rock Wrigley Field.

We centered this year’s guys’ trip around a B1G Money Conference college football game in Los Angeles. One of the guys is a woman, and her fiance, Rob, joined us for the game. He’s older than us, but he’s a silver fox with a heart of gold and a lean body like iron. Like me, he has a warrior spirit with bad boy tendencies and is a former lawyer. We shared an instant affinity and connected on a soul level. He’s my brother, I love him, and that’s how it is with us.

Rob didn’t hang with us the whole trip, as my friend wanted space to reconnect with her homies, and everyone was cool with it. It felt like Rob was with us much of the time anyway, as his presence resonates, and we had loads of questions about how it was with them. Everything our friend had to say about the man was magical. Several times her eyes even lit up like a child’s when they’re mega into a story and get taken away. One of the stories she told us about Rob hit as hard for me as any fairy tale, except for the Three Little Pigs, as I have some canine conduct I’m still working on managing—got that dirt dawg in me—and a soft spot for the Big Bad Wolf.

Once, my friend took Rob to an Angels baseball game, which she said is a way mellower experience compared to Dodgers baseball games, especially since Sho-Time took his talents across town to Chavez Ravine. It was a lovely day, they had great seats, families with kids were out, and everyone was enjoying the vibe and having a good time at the ballgame. At least until the part where a pack of twentysomething men carrying tall boy cold ones and hot heads crashed their section around the third inning.

The youngbloods came in hot, peppering their taunts at the players on the field and increasingly loud conversations with each other with enough f-bombs to make a sailor blush. The whole vibe of the section shifted hard negative, and Rob could sense that a couple of the young parents in their section were on the verge of piping up on the pack of post-pubescent pirates.

Rob saw a hothead young dad getting ready to give the punks a piece of his mind and knew it was time to spring into action. With a smile that could melt an iceberg, he turned around, used his magic words like a mystic, and, with love in his heart, asked those boys to be mindful of the families around and dial the temperature down a few degrees. It wasn’t hard for Rob to show love because back in the day, before the internet, he was out with friends at Pirates games talking the same sort of junk as the pirates he was dealing with now. The pack leader felt the love, dapped Rob up, and attempted to execute a drunken master version of the guy half-shake, half-hug, that Rob deftly maneuvered out of without taking a suds shower, and everything was all good.

Until it wasn’t two minutes later when the drunken marauders started up again, this time dialing it up to 11 with the f-bombs. Some folks are so far gone that we can’t reach them, no matter how strong our spell game is.

Rob and my friend stared straight ahead as profanity-laced heckles rained down on them and their seatmates, along with several sprinkles of the suds that Rob had sidestepped earlier. When my friend saw Rob’s teeth grit and knuckles turn white from clenching his stadium seat, she thought for a brief moment that her fella might knock Captain Sparrow’s behind onto the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland across the street. But Rob didn’t do that. That would’ve made a bad situation way worse. Instead, he got up, left his seat, and narc’d on the hooligans to the usher on the concourse, who resembled Yoda, only if Yoga was an 81-year old man rockin Angels usher drip.

One look at Yoda slowly tottering down the steps towards the pirate pack was all it took for Captain Sparrow to know the jig was up. He hopped out of his seat, ditched his crewmates and booked it, probably to re-up on a cold one. The usher asked the other ones for their tickets, and when they said Captain Jack took off with theirs, he asked them to shove their ship out of port, and they did.

The crowd went wild for Rob and Yoda. It was the best play of the game. Rob kept his head, used his wits, and did exactly what the situation required.

Some situations require even the mightiest Warrior to be the wisest Wizard. My man Rob put on a Wizards and Warriors clinic at the ballgame, and I know those families will remember it way more vividly than any home run hit that day.

Lead with your heart, and always keep your head.