#154. Dennis, Masato, and the Big Mistake (Friday, February 22, 2013)

What was your best day…of witnessing a screw-up of epic proportions?

Despite Masato Takamura being the one was my (recent) best friend (#13, #5), I’m putting Dennis Bei’s (#13) name first in the title, since the idea for the two of them to fly down to North Carolina to visit me for a weekend came entirely from him. And despite one pretty major fuck-up near the end, it went pretty well.

I’d only met Dennis Bei a year ago, through my final-term risk management class and his connection with both Masato and childhood best friend David (#13), but we became fast friends. Namely, he possessed an intense, genuine fandom for sports—baseball, but literally all other North American sports as well—that I had never seen before. And so, when he found out months later that I’d be going to Duke (#5), the first thing he hold me (after congrats) was “You gotta get us some tickets to some Blue Devils basketball games, because we’re coming to visit.”

Well, true to his word, Dennis made the trip happen—with Masato tagging along as well. I had already procured tickets from my classmates Walter (#81) and Jenna¹ for Sunday’s Boston College game. But before that, they wanted to marvel at the beautiful Duke campus and, of course, spend some quality time hanging out with me and my new friends.

They arrive Friday before noon, and we have lunch at Alivia’s (starting point of a famous pub crawl night a month earlier, #51). Then after an afternoon touring campus, we go to the Economics graduate office and meet up with several of my classmates², before several of us drive over to the Cuban Revolution restaurant in Durham’s Tobacco District.

It’s a pretty sizable group there. Besides Masato, Dennis, and I, there is: Walter and Jenna (who we cover, of course), Jenna’s two roommates—and Duke campout partners—Erin Liu and Qiao Tong, my current best friend Jason Simonsen (#97), our basketball teammates³ Colin Garcia and Isinachi Ebute (#86), other good friend David Tao, Jonathan Scriver (classmate) and Florian (German exchange student, director neighbor) from my building, and one one person whose face I can’t make out in the photo.

Yes, I’m counting them all. Because this wasn’t just a mere crossover between universes (which you know I love, #48, #9), but a full active, full-force physical collision I initiated between the closest people in my old life and a large crowd from my new line—a collision between people who had a lot in common (being economics/finance people after all), but would very unlikely have had an occasion to ever meet if it weren’t for me.

But the night is not over. A group of nine (us three, Jason, Jonathan, Walter, Erin, and Qiao) head to my apartment, where we play the only game we could possibly play. Japanese Napoleon (#27). We split up into two groups, where Dennis, Masato, and I separately explain the convoluted rules of this brilliant game, inevitably get the others hooked, and play a full round. It’s Jason’s first time playing, but the former Davidson tight end, current Bayesian stats pro, and future football betting entrepreneur absolute annihilates everyone. (As he concludes his dominant victory, he just shrugs and goes “it’s just logic”.) Then we wrap up the night with a smaller group—including Walter and Jonathan—playing an old-fashioned game of Catan.

Side Note: Near the end of the term, I start having a MAJOR thing for Erin, with coincides with the sudden emergence of several academic and career prospect challenges. Nothing materializes externally, but I have a pretty severe internal crisis (the one I reference in #87). I end up telling all this to Masato, who makes me feel a little bit better by recounting a very awkward toilet-related washroom incident (his fault)—use your imagination on what—between the two of them at my apartment (which I guess got fixed, because I did not know about then).

The rest of the weekend is almost an afterthought. On Saturday, the three of us take the rental car to the Carolina Premium Outlets for a day of North Carolina barbecue and wandering the shops (and catching up on everything from the past eight months), followed by a Carolina Hurricanes game at PNC Arena versus the Lightning. Then Sunday, we sleep in a bit, go to a wood-fired pizza restaurant, and then stop by my room before they get ready to head over to Cameron Indoor Stadium for the highlight of the trip—the Duke basketball game.

Except, just as they’re about to leave my apartment, we find out the game is almost over.

Apparently, Dennis had mistakenly thought the game was at five P.M. instead of two P.M. (none of us knew how that happened). And it’s three-thirty right now. We rush over to the timeless stadium anyway, just in time to see everyone streaming out of the building after a 20-point Duke victory.

So they had completely missed the one thing they had travelled over five hundred miles to do.

Tragic.

Who had done the infamous “Duke campout” in groups (#96) at the start of the year (just two, I didn’t need to go), and had been lucky to have one member of their party win the draw.
Where the natural first topic of conversation is Andrew Wiggins, the Canadian high school basketball phenom who months later commits to Kansas, before going first in the NBA draft the year after.
We play in a graduate student rec league that term, and our most recent game was the night before, where we beat a team political science scholars from “Heads of State” (pretty much all the teams were nicknamed appropriately, except for us, who just called ourselves B.L.U.E.) by 1 point after we fouled a three-point shooter on the last play and the guy made 1 of 3 free throws. (Note the big draw of this rec league was that the finals were played in Cameron Indoor Stadium.)