also I missed the HGATR so will tell this story here:
I played football with Rivers Cuomo in LA once, a noted football fan hence why he wrote the US National Team’s anthem a couple World Cups back and apparently while on tour often goes and finds games he can join if he has time.
Anyway it was through my parter at the time’s uncle we were visiting, he works for Dreamworks and had a weekly sunday game of 11s with LA-based, mostly ex-pat, lower level industry types. I played two games during the month I spent in Cali (went to San Diego and San Francisco too) and the first game my “uncle in law” (for lack of a better term) and I stayed up most of the night drinking whisky so played the next day on a couple hours sleep and still pretty drunk and ironically had a pretty decent game.
The second time I was sober and had slept properly but hilariously had a much worse performance than the previous game, my only real contribution was putting away a nice goal that had been set up from a player on the wing called Rivers. At the time I didn’t connect the two partly because I was more focussed on the game but also 1) it’s an industry game, it would be rude to start fanboying or talking shop but more importantly 2) I didn’t recognise him without his glasses. I was actually using the urinals next to him at one point, and all I’d really noted was his Chicago Cubs cap (over his slightly balding head) and thinking “huh, Rivers is an interesting name.”
Anyway, later on that day me, my girlfriend and her uncle go to his local for some beers and food (this is also the moment I got into “craft beer” all the way back in 2011, dear reader) and were shooting some pool and played a few songs on the jukebox. I saw they had Blue Album in there so put a couple tracks on, and my partner’s uncle pipes up and goes “oh you like them do ya? You know you were playing fitba with him earlier right?!” and jaw hit the fucking floor. I was like “what?! no he’s one of my heroes and yet I had no idea” to which he replied “that’s all well and good, but it’s a casual game so not really the place for that kind of interaction”. Fair enough, I thought, it was probably for the best I didn’t explode in fanboyism in that setting.
Anyway, a day or two later I remembered that he uses twitter a lot often to talk about football and so my first proper use of my own account was to tweet him to say “we weren’t introduced but it was really awesome to meet and play with you the other day” and he replied with “nice goal!”
Probably should have just left Twitter after that really
