wondered whatever became of me, i’m livin on the air in cincinnati, cincinnati, wkrp.

i was thinking earlier this week about pivotal points in life. like you’re faced with a decision and you make a choice and you wonder what would have happened had you gone the other way.. i remember one choice like that.. if you’re not a geek or gamer, very little of this will make sense to you. in college & for a few years after i was a big gamer. my main obsession was magic, the gathering. a bit of background: mtg is owned by wizards of the coast, the people who now own d&d and just about every game under the sun. they have a yearly professional tour circuit, which is invitation only. in order to win an invitation to a pro-tour, you compete in qualifier tournaments. a friend of mine, steve spisak was going to ann arbour, michigan for one of these qualifier tournaments, and although i had never played in one before, i thought, what the heck, i got nothing better to do. so we picked up a couple others, eric tam and paul mccabe, and made the drive down to michigan (from hamilton, ontario). eric berates the chaff deck i’ve made and builds me one he got from somewhere, and i manage to fight my way through 8 rounds into the top-8 (as does steve, and our host, fish ). my first round i play someone who i played in the swiss rounds and i know his deck, and know how to beat it, which i do handily in the first game. the second game we get into a battle for one of his cards, and although i can win the battle, i choose to let it go and save some of my firepower for later, which proves to be a mistake, since he uses the card in a way that i didn’t expect, and kills me. same thing third game, although i didn’t have the power to stop him then. i’ve looked back at that often and wondered what would have happened, had i chose to win that battle. would i have won the tournament and started making the rounds on the tour? world travel? fame & fortune (well, you know.. geek fame…). i don’t know, but it’s one of those moments that i think about.

at the time it didn’t seem like one of those pivotal moments, but since then i’ve come to think of it as such. i look at people that i used to hang out with at the time. some of the most noted are gary wise (still a pro-tour competitor) and jeff donais, who went on to work for wizards. they’re doing well for themselves, but i can easily see how my life could have paralleled theirs instead of diverging to where it is now.. married, working a 9-5, 1.5 kids & the house in suburbia. that’s not to say that i’m unhappy with my life, quite the opposite. i just wonder.. what if.

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