- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
In 2003, I was 14 years old, and had just begun attending a governor's s school in a different county, away from all of my friends. The commute would have me away for almost the whole day not leaving much time for a social life. I was a pretty depressed kid, since I had been with the same group of friends for my whole life, and wasn't very good at making new ones. The first semester sucked: my grades were terrible, I was miserable, etc. In any case, during the second semester, I joined a rowing team. On our rowing trips, we ALWAYS brought Xbox and Halo. At the hotels, you could tell which rooms were ours because of the LAN cables running room to room. My first memories of Halo were of standing around in the open snow fields of Sidewinder trying to get a feel for the controls, catching sniper rounds with my face, much to my boat-mate's delight. Every trip, our time was divided by food, rowing, sleeping, and Halo. It was Awesome. Before I knew some of their names, I knew their tags. I may be sitting next to Will, but I knew him as Terminator, and he was the sniper. I was hooked.
That fall, I got my own Xbox, and Halo 2 arrived. Within days, we were all on Live. Now, we didn't have to wait for crew trips to play. I would get up, go to school, go to rowing practice, and come home and play Halo with my boat-mates, and crash around midnight. We played as the TJ Crew Clan, and after that, the DCEPTICONS. Even our coach played on Live with us. Hell, my gamertag is "The Three Seat", which was my position in the boat. When we were sophomores, we initiated the freshman in a 16 person LAN game of Multi-flag on Sidewinder, just the way I had learned. To this day I play Halo with those guys, and every so often that game will come up in conversation. Halo bound our team together. When we argued, when we played pranks on one another, when the rowing was ugly, we would get on an Xbox, and spend a couple hours fragging the crap out of each other, and then all was well. I made the best friends I could ever have over boats and bullets.
About 5 years later, we are all off at our colleges. As a crew, we were exceptional. Our senior year we won states, the Stotesbury Cup, and the Scholastic Rowing Association Nationals. We went to England to race in the Henley Royal Regatta (which is as close as you get to worlds in scholastic rowing), and finally lost on the third day of racing, putting us in the top 8 crews in the world . Henley was the first regatta we lost, and coincidentally, the first one we didn't bring Halo on (due to electrical complications, not enough converters, etc.) I'm not saying there's a connection, but one could get that idea. That was 6 months ago. Now, my boat and I are scattered. I've only seen them a couple times since college started, so while I'm always in touch with some of them on Xbox, I don't get to talk to them all the time. They all went off to row at D1 schools. I ended up quitting, because the team at my college couldn't replace the bond I had with my boys. I went to college close to our high school, and now I drive there a couple times a week after classes to coach the freshmen rowers. On the first day of winter training, I asked them: "So, any of you guys play Halo?". One or two of them raised their hands, but most of them just looked at me, kind of confused, and shook their heads. "Well, you will."
Thanks Bungie
Sincerely, Big Tom