The Paintball Tournament

So Internet access has been fairly limited. According the the staff at our hotel, the copper wires were stolen which makes it tough to use the Internet, much less make a phone call.

Friday
We all slept late and woke up thinking everyone else left them. After we sorted that out we headed out to grab some food on the way to the Rand show. We ate at some German style restaurant, and enjoyed some delish Ostrich meats, Kudu ( a kind of antelope) and some spareribs. All the food here is very inexpensive especially the meats. A 350gram (10oz) filet runs around $10. Headed to the Rand show after lunch to walk the field. It is a single field setup with the Malaga Millenium setup. Driving home Tom Cole got us lost despite the fact that he has a GPS. Africa is a little crazy there are definitly people all over the highways, on the way back to the hotel there were people walking the wrong way down the middle lane of the highway. We showered up and headed into Jo'burg for some awesome authentic Pakistani food with Ridwaan ( of Blades and Triggers) and Dawid from Unleashed. Had a superb lamb dish, with plenty of hot naan bread.


Saturday
Woke up early which was a little miserable with the jet lag as it felt like the middle of the night. Had some breakfast at the hotel some peach yogurt, omelets and hotdogs. Our first paintball game was a little rough as Unleashed really put it on us and we ended up losing to them and they had 4 left alive. The level of ball here is definitley comparable to people in the states. We ended up going 3-3 on the day losing to Reapers and Black. Got lost again headed home, nothing like a 30 minute drive turning into a hour after a full day of paintball. We went straight to a steakhouse without showering. On the way there Tom signaled into the right lane and missed a head on collision by literally about 1 foot. He shrugged it right off but he was close. Vinnie, JP and me would have had a tough time playing 3 on 7 on Sunday but luckily Tom swerved out of the way. Driving on the other side of the road has been a little bit of a challenge. The odd part was the guy that was heading towards him never slowed down once. Slept like a baby because there was a huge T-storm, the rain on the thatch roof was super cool.

Sunday
Our first game was at 8 am we shook the sleep out of our eyes and posted a win. Unfortunatley the next 2 werent that good and we lost to Awsim and Impact. Knowing we were on the bubble we finally put together a good game plan and smashed Dynamix, but it was too little too late. We ended up missing the cut going 5-5, and finishing 5th. The top 4 teams were Unleashed, Reapers, Dynamix and Awsim. In a final very intense game of the semi final round robin, where Dynamix was beating reapers 5 on 2, the Reapers held strong and brought it down to a 1 on 1. Despite putting himself in a bad spot the Dynamix player made it all good with a spectacular over the top single snap shot to get them in to play for the grand prize. So it was Unleashed vs Reapers for 3rd and 4th and Dynamix vs Awsim for 1st and 2nd. In a controversial 3 game series the Reapers ended up beating Unleashed to take 3rd, while Awsim beat Dynamix in 2 games to take 1st. Overall it was a great tournament and all the players were super nice and very friendly. It was disappointing to not do better but things like that happen sometimes. We are leaving now to head up to some National Park, but I will post asap with the rest of Sunday and Monday as well as some more pictures.

South Africa

A decent flight over. South African Air is pretty nice. Had plenty of on demand movies and games to pass the time. Slept quite a bit, I could stretch out because there was an empty seat next to me. I had to wait in the airport for a couple of hours after I landed because somehow I missed meeting up with our South African connection. I just caught up on my reading and waited for Adam, Kevin and JP to land. Finally met up with Dawid from Unleashed, and went our our hotel to check in.

Our hotel is super nice. Kind of a hunting lodge feel with thatch roofs and little individual huts. It is super luxurious, probably one of the nicest places I have ever stayed at during a paintball event. We went out last night after checking in to grab some dinner at a steakhouse. Had a couple of beers and talked paintball and many other topics with all new South African friends. We all were feeling pretty awake so we went to another cafe/bar, and had some more beers and a couple of shots to try and make us sleepy. After retiring to the hotel, Adam told us he had brought a bottle of wine so in another effort to get sleepy we split that as well. Despite all this JP still only slept like 3 hours and was up at like 8am local time. Jet lag is tough on a body hopefully we will all get acllimated by tournament time on Saturday. We are at the paintball store in their mall, getting ready to go to a lion park later on. I will post pictures as soon as we can transfer them.

Welcome!!

Welcome to the Chronicles of Muzz. This blog will be about the adventures of me, Chris Remuzzi, professional paintball player, with team Bad Company. It will touch on all kinds of things, from paintball, to travels (beginning in South Africa in about 15 hours), to living in our nations capitol Washington DC in the Shaw neighborhood. I have traveled extensively in my paintball career from Australia to Sweden and many places in between, but this year is shaping up to be a great one. Thanks to the generous support of our sponsor Kingman we have a paintball itinerary for the year that starts in Johannesburg and goes to Aruba, Brazil, Australia, and Prague. I will post commentary, food reviews, paintball results and anything else cool from these places as well as pictures and videos. Tom Cole, captain of BC, will be shooting a lot of the pictures for this blog so we will have plenty of authentic pictures for everyone to enjoy. Please use the comments section to ask questions or if you would like more details about something.

A little bit about the tournament. We are playing 7 man in the South African Paintball League and the venue is at some festival/tradeshow that looks really awesome. It even has a monorail! The next post will be from Johannesburg, South Africa. Hopefully South African Air will be an empty flight, or at least no screaming babies..