A ReSURGEnce of [Insert Grammatically Incorrect Word Choice Here]

Brief note: I fucking hate the Surge's...overall visual presence, I guess. Needless to say, my picky, judgmental self isn't wild about the combo of bright, primary red with bright, primary yellow without the soothing intervention of a neutral (that is not bright white), but beyond that, their team image seems designed to do violence to epileptics the world over. Everything is lightning based and extremely busy, with a ton of movement...gah. Moreover, their marketing strategy seems designed not only to encourage the viewer to buy sponsors' products, but to encourage said viewers to go out and develop issues that necessitate the purchase of those products. We're two games into the season and I'm already fighting back a Pavlovian impulse to ram my car into a tree just so I can go to Accurate Collision. I have to have heard those ad reads eleventy billion times so far...and again, two games in.


Okay, so I hate their marketing. I like pretty much everything else, so fine.

I'm a hockey girl at heart, which means a variety of things, but mostly that the actual gametime contact between players and me is limited. Hockey's loud, first off, and secondly, you have the obvious obstacle of the glass - if you're high enough up to be heard over the glass, you're probably not loud enough to get anyone to actually tune in. I'm plenty loud - I specialize in top-volume, extended-remix WOOs - but actually getting a player to hear every word you're saying and react to it is not that common. (Speed does not have this issue. Misogyny at work? KIDDING, KIDDING) At the Surge however, we sit front row, and there's no glass, so we have plenty of opportunity to talk with any number of participants...coaches, officials, players.

The Surge guys are fascinating to me, most of all because they are pretty much doing this for fun. The Surge is part of the CIFL, one of the minor leagues of arena football. The guys on the team have day jobs and usually only get $100-$200 per game. Good deal, right? Yeah, except this is full contact, really fast football, not toss around with your buddies. If these guys get hurt, they risk all kinds of crap with their actual, bill-paying jobs, not to mention the fact that their respective health insurers may or may not cover "injuries sustained while participating in violent sports." The parts of me that finds weird injuries cool really thinks it's neat that these guys do this. Logically, I can see it's probably a moronic risk, but at heart, I just think it's fucking great, to be honest with you.

I credit this kind of extreme amateurism for the general good feeling of the games...the guys are invariably cheerful before games, and the exact right kind of fighty during, and for some reason about half of them like dancing? In the middle of the game? Love it.