What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger...

After being in the dark (with El Capitano far-far away, somewhere on a secluded island where paintball is non-existent), the captain came back home... once again hungry for results... He saw his teammates running around shooting with other teams, not doing what they were suppose to do which was sticking together, shooting as a team and holding their heads up high, proud to call themselves a Hoodlum...

El Capitano put his foot down and held a team meeting to straighten things out. It was a long and heated discussion where everyone had their own opinion and politics came into play.. in the end though, everyone was on the same page and most of the differences within the team were solved. Despite all that, every player was still an individual player, playing for himself and getting kills not for the team but for himself, which was sad, but it was what we had and what we had to play with..

The team decided to join a very prestigious event that would be held in Penang called the TYT Governors Cup which was part of the Malaysian Paintball Official Circuit (MPOC) , which meant that the team had to come up with funds to pay for their very serious addiction to paintball. The air fare didn't come cheap. The team had to come up with money to pay for their own tickets and paint (pallets don't come cheap either!!) Thank God a local paintball pro-shop (Borneoxs) saw the dedication and commitment of the team and funded the registration fee, batteries, team t-shirts and head bandannas. (for more info on Borneoxs please visit www.borneoxs.com). Thanks to them, the dream to play paintball in Penang was coming true..



Everything was working out beautifully. The tickets, registration, accommodation and transportation were all sorted even before we touched down in Penang, thanks to excellent management skills from the Team Manager (some people are just born to be managers).. When we touched down, we were greeted by KCHL (www.kchlpaintball.com) personnel wearing paintball branded t-shirts that sort of woke us up and made us realize that we were really there. That was the start of a lovely time in Penang.

Day one in Penang was exhilarating... we started off by checking into Vistana apartments. We were housed on the 16th floor..imagine that!!!! 6 crazy paintballers cramped into one apartment on the 16th floor..sounds like the recipe for disaster to me...=) After settling in, we then raided a local Penang paintball Pro-shop (KCHL), and got a couple of things there (Dennis you're the bomb!!) and even met Team Johor Rirates... Knackered, hungry and grumpy, we decided to sample some of the local food, we stumbled upon a "nasi kandar" shop and decided to quench our thirst and pig out there...The food was delicious but a bit pricey. Our makan on that day ranged from RM 8.80 to RM 28.80/head!!!! yupp we were that hungry =)!!!


After relaxing for a bit, we went through the ever so important "walk the field" session. We were the first team to walk the field. Though the field wasn't fully up yet, we worked ourselves around it anyway.. We had some fun walking the field, snap shooting each other with imaginary markers and stuff like that =). Our snakeman came just in time (straight from the airport), to walk the field with us, which made it valuable for the team... On the way back, we met the coolest taxi driver ever who goes by the name of Ah Kit. We wanted to get a normal taxi but like i said before, it wouldn't be a Hoodlums story if wasn't a bit crazy...Ah Kit took us back to Vistana in his old school Datsun 120Y which smelled like parmesan cheese and to make matters worst, he could only speak Cantonese and the only person who could speak cantonese from our side was Team Manager. He U-turned in the middle of the road, drove ON the white line of the road and was travelling way below the speed limit... "40km/hr"... Oh yeah, did i mention that all of this was done with one back player, two mids and two fronts in the car (5 people in the car)...


Conclusion...
The taxi fare from Stadium to Vistana = RM20/-
BUT!
Riding with Ah Kit = PRICELESS..

We got back to the apartment safe and sound (Thank God!!) and started to get ready for the next day. When El Capitano got back from the captains meeting, we had a short team meeting regarding strategies, roles and responsibilities. El capitano then wanted everyone to get a good nights rest but then we are Hoodlums and we never go to bed early... We ended up talking about paintball and hit the sack at around 2am....


Game day. We woke up early in the morning, had breakfast of champions which was Nescafe and Maggi Mee, then headed down to meet up with our limo that would then bring us to the stadium..


Game time!! The feeling we had before each game was a mixture of nervousness and excitement.. To be honest, we really felt like we were about to piss in our pants cos we were playing against some of the best teams in Div. 3 and rosed to the occasion...At the end of the day, we were exhausted and proud of our achievement. We managed to qualify 3rd to the second round out of 21 teams. As usual, we went back to the apartment, talked about the days work and paintball as a whole.. El Capitano then once again tried to make sure everyone went to sleep early but got sucked into the fooling around, jokes and paintball stories..We ended up sleeping at 2am... again =) ... Day 1 over and done with...

We walked out of the apartment in the morning as individual players...
We walked back in as a paintball team..



2nd round. Can't believe we're here!! We made it to Sunday!!! That was the target of the trip and we did it!! Anything that comes after this, is a bonus. Our approach to the game in the 2nd round was a bit different. We took it too cautiously and ended up losing 2 games.

We had 1 more game to play and we knew we couldn't make the semi-finals even by winning the next match. But... it's not our style not to try, knowing there was nothing else to lose. We trudged the field once again, denying the final team a spot in the semi-finals. We won that game 4 man up..securing the path for Team Nightmare (ally-team) into the semi-finals. We took the limo back to the apartment, proud of how far we have come in this tournament, taking into account that Hoodlums is a new team that have just joined 2 major tournaments. Placing 9th out of 21 teams is a dream come true for us and that achievement will just burn the desire we have as a team to train harder and be the best in this sport.

We left the apartment in the morning as a team..
and came back as a family.



We decided to take a chill pill and relax in our apartment, smoking cigarettes and sharing with each other, things that we had learned from the tournament. Then suddenly, a phone call came in. It was the Team Manager's phone. He signalled for the rest of us to shut up and said "that really made our day la bro." With a cool smile on his face, he hung up and smiled at the rest of the teammates and said "We just won the Best Performing Rookie Team award.." It took the news of this recognition awhile to settle in (it took about 5 seconds to the initial WOOHOOO!!!). That piece of info really made everyone's day...




untill the next post...
Hoodlums...Believe and you shall achieve...

-lut-