Champions

HARGOTT!
One Year Ringer Comes In to Give Career Loser Title
-Morgantown, WV Rec Center
John Elway, Jerome Bettis and Tommy Bane are now immortally linked together. Mere days before graduation and after four failed attempts, Tommy Bane gave one last run at the Showdown in Motown, a trivia challenge for sports scholars in Morgantown.

Dealing with mounting pressure and not having a bye, Tommy Bane and his off-season free agent acquisition npoc, the Jonathan Hargett Booster Club, blazed through the field. In a move that paralleled Big Ben delivering a title to Jerome Bettis or Carmelo Anthony coming in to send Jim Boeheim out a champion npoc did what four other teammates could not do and that is make a winner out of TBane.

In a post-contest press conference with Micky Furfari npoc revealed his guarantee to his almost retired partner. "I told TBane if you fail a few classes, you'll be able to come back one more year and I promise I won't let you leave here without the belt," npoc said. "He told failed a few classes wouldn't be a problem, we conjured up the name, downed a few, ok maybe a lot of brews and then shcoked the world."

With 25 teams in the mix, the odds of a team without a bye advancing all the way to the finals was tatamount to the Stillers winning the big one without a bye. The Jonathan Hargett Booster Club got the day started off at 10:30 a.m. with TBane purchasing a 30-pack of Miller Lite in his suit fresh from a formal the previous evening.

1:00 6 beers deep a piece and into the first round, a low scoring first half gave way to a dominating 13-0 win including one of the only touchdown attempts in showdown history.
The match barely took 15 minutes, the victors paraded down Grant Street early on spreading the good news.

"The momentum really picked up right there as did my drinking," TBane said to Mitch Vingle later that night. "Everyone on Grant was really buying into the hype and jumping on the bandwagon."

3:00 11 beers deep. It began to look more and more like the Hargett Booster Club was on a collision course with Mulva, a team of Lutz and the defending champion Bupp. The Booster Club held up their end of the deal with a shaky 6-3 win against two natives. With only minutes before their next game, the Booster Club made one more trip down Grant.

"Yeah I was listening to U92 and they interupted my Urban lunch to tell me about those guys. Its really crazy what they're pulling off, I guess they're trying to win the big one,ha ha ha ha" said Andy Daly over a bag of chips and a Pirates cooler.

4:00 30 packs about gone. The format now changed to a list style, in which Tommy Bane guaranteed victory. The Human Sports Almanac fell 3 games to one and at 4:30 in the stiffest challenge yet, The Booster Club derailed the consensus favorite from the field in a series that came down to game 5. They started off down one early on but came storming back to take the toughest series of the day 3-2. Mulva had already been dethroned so this set up a championship against two natives from Scummit.

5:00 Rob the American Dream Summers and Darris Nichols take the stage for the final best of seven series to determine the champion. The Booster Club falls 1-0 early on but takes a 2-1 lead in a series that featured each team winning twice and two ties. Thats pretty damn evenly matched. The natives tripped up on the final list question and TBane and npoc lifted the championship belt.

"It was ballsy for those kids to bring that belt to a first round game, I mean that loser Bane hadnt won it in 4 years and he is claiming to be a champ? Ballsy very Ballsy," a disgruntled Jon Bentz said after the game while crushing a bottle of Absolut.

The post-conference media onslaught was there with flash bulbs bursting from far reaches of the rec center.
TBane retires with a 1-4 record in the showdown but in the last six years there have been only three different champions. npoc joins the flying junkies as the only showdown competitor to win their first ever challenge.

The parade down grant was held at 6pm with plenty of fanfare and the banner was raised to the rafters of 300 Second Street shorltly after dark.
"They brought the belt back to Grant," Daly exclaimed. "And its a good thing because I paid alot of money for that, ha ha ha."
"They made the whole blunt circle really proud, thats how you represent, especially with the American Dream present," Texas said in between a game of beer pong.
"Aww hell thats sumtin aint it," Summers County could be heard yelling. "They're mad good," Colby Piper said.

-n