Weekend Highlight: heckeled…at a kid’s game.

This weekend, Blair and I had company (Georgia & Matt) in town for the Austin 10K marathon. Saturday afternoon, Blair and Georgia decided to go shopping and Matt and I decided we would be better entertained heading over to Dave ‘N Buster’s (I had a lot of credits left from a few company parties).

Of course he and I end up at a game of hoops (Super Shot). You know the type, you drop in $17 worth of credits, the game dispenses 5 mini-basketballs and you shoot for an undetermined time period while the basket moves back and forth. It’s really very complicated. This particular machine had a Jackpot if you were able to hit 80 points in the time alotted. My average score was about 25. Matt’s was around 60. We opted for him to try for the Jackpot.

After around 20 Power Card swipes, Matt finally hits the Jackpot score and the tickets spill out like Niagra. Now, there’s a very minor complication to this story that should be included — this game was supposed to include 5 balls, and Matt’s machine only had 3 (a severe handicap), so towards the end of the game I passed over 2 balls from my machine to even him out.

As we’re celebrating the win, Matt thanks me for the help at the end, and from behind us we hear the strangest thing. Someone yells to us, “At least I can do it without any help!”

We turn around, and there’s a 40-something man wearing his best Billy Bob Thornton disguise, puffing his chest out, standing in front of a different Super Shot machine. I offer a futile explanation and quickly turn around to continue talking with Matt.

To our complete amazement the man says it again, louder this time to make sure that we’ve heard him — “At least I can do it on my own, without anyone else’s help”. We decide the only thing dumber than being heckled at a kid’s game is arguing over being heckled at a kid’s game, so we ignore our new fan and walk away.

I feel it’s necessary to mention that as we’re leaving, Mr. Thornton starts his game and banks in every single shot. He definitely put in some good time with the Super Shot machine. I can already imagine him pushing some poor little kid out of his way so he can train for a moment just like ours.

Here is a professional artists’ rendering of that: