OVER THE LINE

From the archives

This first appeared in Punk Planet 58, August 2003. Salty language warning: this essay describes a strange little adventure into the American Id. Never could have I guessed that this fringe demographic would, just a dozen years later, figure out how to hijack the entire American political apparatus.

My pal Andy and I arrived late for the opening day of the 50^th annual Over the Line tournament on San Diego’s Fiesta Island this last July. Cars, pickups, SUVs and RVs had been piling into the outer lots of the two-square mile island since dawn, and by noon the lanes were clogged. Heat addled rent-a-cops and belligerent, drunkening volunteers with names like “Choo-Choo” stood guard over the various entry points into the fenced-off parking zones. Here is where we scored the first of several Gentleman Points for the day. Instead of drawing attention to the discrete number 5 on the parking tag that dangled from Andy’s rear view mirror, we waved politely at each refusal and continued on. Almost a thousand parking passes had been issued for the event in sequential order, and a single digit number could only mean close personal connections to the event’s founding fathers. On a distant bank of the island, we found a spot on the sandy scrub of the outer road.

Over The Line is held by the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club (OMBAC) on two consecutive weekends every summer. Although the name refers to an OMBAC-invented sports mutation, Over The Line the event has blossomed, in the last half century, into an unruly softball bacchanalia somewhere on a family tree that includes Mardi Gras and the Philadelphia Mummers parade and St. Patrick’s Day as celebrated by certain ruffian New Yorkers. To the faithful, OTL is one of the last pure Southern California traditions left untouched by commercialism. To many average San Diegans, the event is an annual Caucasian nightmare alcohol meltdown.

I’ve never been on an island with thousands of drunk people before, and I hadn’t expected it to be so peaceful. Andy knew the most direct overland shortcut from the road to the games. We crested a small hill and descended into a barren depression of thistle and weeds several football fields long. Fiesta Island is bordered by Seaworld to the south, Mission Bay Park to the east, upscale La Jolla to the north, and the Pacific tranquility of Mission Beach to the west. If I hadn’t known that the entire island had been sculpted from garbage and silt in the 1950s, I could’ve imagined that we’d gone back in time by a few centuries. It says something about the political muscle of OMBAC that such prime real estate has been left undeveloped. Although there is an alleged sewage-sludge drying facility elsewhere on the island, the place remains a largely wild enclave inside a major US city, a rare ‘recreational zone’ that involves no concrete. We scrambled up another dune and found ourselves staring down at a distant mass of human unruliness. 50,000 people were expected this year.

Andy has attended Over The Line since childhood. At the grandstand—“the bracket board”—we met up with Andy’s dad Don, a San Diego attorney who looks like a younger, more handsome Stan Lee. Don has been the announcer and chieftain of Over The Line for three decades. Overhead, the flags of the United States, California, Budweiser Racing, Bacardi Rum, and POW-MIAs fluttered side by side. A steel drum band played on the sand below and, on second glance, I understood that two bears were fucking on the California flag. A trio of wise men dressed as Saddam Hussain, Osama bin Laden, and Fidel Castro loitered nearby. We walked around the bracket board. Don, wearing a white nautical OMBAC blazer with gold epaulettes, looked off into the distance and said, “I’m not sure most people get it”. He would be announcing roughly a thousand matches over the course of the twelve-hour day.