It’s been about week now since this insane bocce roll went viral on the internet, and I just can’t seem to get it out of my head. Given how many times I’ve revisited the video, I figured I had to a blog about it.

If you haven’t seen it, here it is

Just an absolutely insane roll there. Perhaps the only thing more insane was that guy’s reaction. He acted like it was no big deal, when in reality he just (To my knowledge) pulled off the most impressive Bocce roll in the history of Bocce rolls. The lack of celebration and shit talk afterwards is a foreign concept to me, because I would have been dancing, yelling, and flipping off the other team for at least 10 minutes after doing something like that. I guess that’s what separates gloating assholes like myself from humble professional athletes like this guy.

Some of you might be a little lost here and don’t really understand why this roll was so great, so let me catch you up to speed on the rules of Bocce.

Despite the fact I hail from an Irish Catholic family, I’m no stranger to the game of Bocce. My uncle, who is Italian, introduced us Irish folks to this fantastic lawn game years ago, and it quickly became my family’s go-to activity at family parties. This was way before CornHole and Kan Jam’s popularity skyrocketed and took over the lawn game/tailgate scene, so getting drunk and throwing heavy balls around was just what we did for fun way back then.

The rules are simple: Get your bocce balls as close as you can to the smaller bocce ball (Which is thrown at the beginning of the round and acts as a target), and whatever team has more balls closer to the target ball gets points for that round. I don’t know if that is the actual terminology for any of those objects, or if those are even the correct rules for Bocce, but that’s how we played it so I’m sticking with it. Looking up rules is for nerds. Just shut up and start throwing stuff, that’s my motto.

Now that I’ve (shittily) explained the rules of Bocce, let’s go back and break down the video a little bit.

First, let’s take a look at the field he has to work with.

The mini yellow ball in the middle there is his target, but the other team (Red) has it perfectly blocked off. Have you ever heard the expression, “The best offense is a good defense”? Well apparently that phrase still holds true in Bocce.

Now if I were in this guys shoes, I would pretend I was at the bowling alley and drunkenly roll my ball as hard as I could toward the red balls, hoping to somehow knock them away from the target ball and leave mine close to it. It very rarely works, especially if you’re as bad as I am, but it’s a risky move with a potentially huge payoff and it gets the fans going. But this guy marches to his own beat. Rather than take my advice and go for a strike, he decides he’s gonna sneak it around the side like an absolute madman.

Somehow this

Turned into this

“That was outrageous” is right.

I know I said earlier that he didn’t celebrate at all, but turns out I was wrong. This guy knew his roll was perfect right after he let it go, and he showed it with a well executed, yet still modest, fist pump. Here’s the face/stance you make when you just rolled the perfect ball and you know that you and the boys are gonna be drowning in pussy once the Bocce groupies get their hands on you.

Any game that can easily be played with a beer in your hand is always okay in my book, and its needless to say that my extended family felt the same way. We’d play Bocce for hours on end back in the day, mostly because we were all terrible and the games took wicked long. Either way, it certainly made family parties more fun and this video brought back a lot of great memories of a game I haven’t thought about in years.

I think this spring I’m going to come out of Bocce retirement. Sure, Corn Hole and Kan Jam are fun games, but Bocce is different. It’s a sophisticated man’s game, and it always sort of made me feel like a retired mobster that was playing around with my old mafia buddies at a retirement home or something. Is saying that stereotyping Italian people? Probably, but Oh well. I’ll extend an olive branch and stereotype myself by admitting that my Irish ass will be too drunk to see my phone by the time anybody reads this blog, so I won’t be able to see the angry replies anyway. Have a good weekend everybody