Monday, July 30, 2007

can those internationals play soccer!

After a staff soccer match, August 1982. Standing left to right: Todd Payton, Gorm Fosdal (Sweden), Dimitris Emmanoyil (Greece), George Lordi, Tom Franzkowiak (Germany), Kazuhiko Toshita (Japan), Jon Coates (York, England), Rudi Miremont (France?), Dave Gold, Mark Greenhall, Tom Woodard, Scott Livolsi, Dave Lovice, Graeme Sephton (Australia), Per Hansen (Norway); kneeling, left to right: Walid Sakr (Lebanon), Paul King, Rick Cobb, Paul Webster, Mike McNamee, Scott Nichol.

Rick Cobb had been an FV mainstay for years earlier and had been gone a few years by '82. But I faced a need for some extra counselors for the second half of the summer and got on the phone. "Cobbman, what are you doing now? You're between jobs? Oh, good, well, come on up here and be a counselor." So Rick was a super-counselor in Lenape that August, rooming with Walid Sakr in cabin 18. Cobb was "over the hill" and no one thought he could actually be a regular counselor for a whole month, but he really carried that village. Not that it lacked leadership, since, I believe, the great Paul Webster (Obi Wan Web-bo) was the VC--one of the finest in my long experience with VCs.

Cobb singlehandedly brought back a hilarious after-lunch dining hall skit, "The Ugliest Man in the World." The gist of the action is that a series of people look under the hood of the "ugliest man" and run away screaming, out of their minds. Well, Cobb taught his cabin-mate and fellow counselor Walid from Lebanon how to scream insanely for this skit. Walid's bizarre piercing scream still echoes in the mind down the years. I'd never heard anything like it. For days after the skit was performed, campers would come up to Walid and imitate his scream to his face, and then he'd do the maniacal scream back at them and they'd in turn run away screaming.

Well, I remember this soccer game as rather intense. Not sure if the expressions of the players reveal this. (The "old man" Rick Cobb is at right just above.)