Life without fence isn’t life at all

All right, I am still getting over the fact that I won’t be playing fence every day anymore.  Fence-a-thon ‘08 was enough to get anyone completely addicted to this game, though I was before that… and not being able to play just sucks.  So me and Doty did what any fence player would do… we brought the fence to Endicott.

Since I have never really written anything about this game, let me explain fence as well as I can.  I am writing this because I have just graduated from college and I really don’t have anything better to do with my time.  If you want a short explanation, or just to see the rules, check the picture of the rules below.

There are 32 cups placed in a 6-5-6-5-4-3-2-1 pattern on a lattice fence, as shown below.  The drink of choice of fence is beer (3 or 4 should do it per side), although one can use whatever they want.  The liquid is necessary to keep the ping pong ball from bouncing in and out of the cup.  The premise of the game is like beer pong, to shoot a ping pong ball into the cups and eliminate them if the shot is made.  Although, it’s much better than beer pong, and honestly, I haven’t played a game of beer pong since we invented the game of fence.  The teams shoot for ball, and each team gets 3 shots per “possession.”  Two people make up a team, and that person shoots 3 times, and then gives possession to the other team.  Now if someone hits 3 shots in a row, they continue to shoot until they miss.  The middle cup, which was sometimes filled with Jager, sometimes with beer, and sometimes with water (for those days where fence was played from 4 PM – 1 AM), is considered to be the “8-ball cup.”  This means that you hit the shot when all 32 cups are eliminated, but if you hit it in there before the rest are eliminated, that team automatically loses.

If a player bounces the ball off the ceiling (that is, if you are playing inside), the shot counts for 2 cups.  If one hits 3 bounces in a row (which has never been done yet), they get 3 more shots.  If the ball bounces into the same cup (if one didn’t remove it yet), then that shot counts as 2 cups, so people need to get the cup out as soon as it’s hit, otherwise they face the consequence of having a shot count that normally would have fallen through the table.  The suicide cup, or the one that the person is drinking from, is 5 cups, if a player throws the ball into this cup.  This makes people want to drink faster if they can, or at least be protective about what they are doing.

Defense, which is one of the most important parts of the game, is almost necessary for a team to win.  One can hit the ball after contact has been made to prevent any bouncing, and if they hit the ball into the other teams cup, it counts as that cup being eliminated.  If a team tries to bounce the ball of the ceiling to try and get 2 cups, the other team can hit the ball out of the way before contact is made.  Defense is my favorite part of the game.

Now, because some people take too long sometimes, there is a shot clock implemented, which is normally 5 songs playing during the game.  When these songs are over, the team with the most eliminated cups wins.  The 8-ball cup does not have to be hit if both teams have cups left, and the game is over as soon as the last second is off the clock.  When you play the game a little more though, the game usually ends before 5 songs, which is approximately 20 minutes.

That’s my explanation of fence.  Check out our Facebook group if you want to see records and creators and all of that: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=23877379872

Now, to get our fence, me and Doty went over to the Depot and saw a bunch of fences, spruce lattice to be exact.  We wanted an exact replica of the Cuse prototype, and that’s what we got, as you can see from this photo.

So, we picked out our fence… it’s like $10, so you should go out and buy one if you don’t have one already. But the problem was, we didn’t have T-Mo’s Lex Luger to help us bring the fence home.  So we really had to figure something out, and I would say it was somewhat of a fiasco.  Here’s the picture of the endeavor.

The first time we started to drive away, and the fence was all over the place, so we decided that it wasn’t going to work.  We finally got it secured using the method you see above, even though we couldn’t really see out the back.  But it was fine, it was for fence.

The Endicott fence prototype is under construction at this point, since we really have nothing better to do with our time as college graduates.  The evolution of fence continues…

It’s all over

Wow, college is over for me… at least undergraduate school (if I pass that extremely hard Biology class, that is).  I really can’t believe that the 4 years came to an end, it seemed way too fast and I really do wish I had more time left.  I won’t miss the homework, going to classes, taking tests, and all that, but nobody misses that.  I will miss living so close to all of my friends, and it’s going to be very strange not seeing them every day, since I have seen some of them almost every single day for the past 4 years.  Like everyone else, I guess I have to move on, get a job, and realize that college is only a small part of one’s life.  I don’t even know why I am writing this, I’m not really that motivated to write a blog post, but I figured, what the hell else am I going to do with my free time?  I’ll probably import this on facebook, cause I know that nobody really checks this, and I can’t blame them cause I probably wouldn’t either.

Of all my years at college, senior year has definitely been the best.  I met a ton of new friends, which is great, considering you usually have the bulk of your friends by this time.  But I met very good friends this year, in and out of my classes, and I hope I will stay friends with these people for a long time.  I really wish I met some of these people so much earlier than during my senior year, but I am happy that I was able to meet them at all.  Although my classes this last semester weren’t the best, the people that were in them were great, and that made it so much easier for me actually get up and go to class every day.

I think I have definitely changed a lot since when I first came to Syracuse, and I think MVP and Doty can vouch for that, two of my best friends who have seen me through the good times and the bad times for the most of these 4 years.  Hopefully I changed for the better.  What I do know, that maybe I didn’t know back then, is that I can make it.  Maybe right now, at the end of school, I won’t be doing exactly what I set out to do when I was a freshman, but things change and we can get things to still work out our way if we work hard enough.

It might sound corny, but this entire post might be kind of corny, so I don’t even care.  Stuff like this always sounds so corny and cliche, but it’s the truth.  It’s not like I will never be back to Syracuse, and it’s not like I will never see my friends.  It just won’t really be the same, when I come back to visit my friends at school, I’ll be that old guy… although come to think of it, I already am old… and the ones who have graduated will have a lot on their plates, as will I, and we won’t be able to just do whatever we want all day and then come back and start playing fence every other night from 5 pm – 1 am.  Going to games will be a little bit weird too, I’ll feel like those old guys who come to every game and actually stay optimistic about some of our teams (although for some of them, that’s basically like torturing yourself).  College is like your own little world for 4 years, and even though you have some responsibility, you can really do whatever the hell you want.

And to sum it all up, I’ll miss that.

So thank you to everyone who helped me make this college experience so enjoyable.  I won’t name names, this isn’t the Mitchell report… and some people don’t like having their names out there for the 3 (if not less) people that might read this to see.  But, you know who you are.