The Eighth Page

Blaine-O-Dome

If there is one thing that I have learned this spring, it is that Mother Nature does not like Phillips Academy. In all my years as an athlete, I can’t remember having a baseball game canceled because of snow on the field. And just thirty-five minutes away in Marblehead, there is no snow on the ground. Lately, I’ve been doing some thinking between my crying spells. I have decided that what we really need is a dome. We need an indoor athletic facility that could act as a football and soccer stadium in the fall and lacrosse and baseball stadium in the spring. It would be called the Blaine-O-Dome, after Blaine Austin, the greatest Athletic Equipment Manager of all time. The Blaine-O-Dome would seat 68,756, the same number as Gillette Stadium in Foxboro. Parents, students and alumni would enter the Blaine-O-Dome free of charge. Everyone else would have to pay a small admission fee. Exeter fans would not be admitted. They would be, however, allowed to sit in the parking lot, and watch the big game on a small television in the guard shack, provided they bribe Paulino. The Blaine-O-Dome would have plush locker rooms for all of its sports teams, a state-of-the-art weight room, cafeteria for athletes only, couches, a big screen TV, and best of all, an enormous, hairy, former male body-builder will serve as the in-house massage therapist. As I have stated before, the Blaine-O-Dome will be in constant use during the fall and spring seasons, but what will happen during the winter months when all sports are indoors, and don’t require state of the art turf facilities? Laser Tag. Every Saturday, starting at 8 p.m., the lights inside the Blaine-O-Dome will be turned off and spooky techno music will come blasting out of the speakers. The same fog machine that is used when the football team comes running out of the tunnel would then be used to set the mood for Laser Tag. Students with asthma would be among the first eliminated. With the dome, Andover could also consider getting its own Arena Football League franchise. Arena football is one of the fastest growing sports in the United States. It battles sports like bass fishing on ESPN 2 in the fierce television ratings wars. I have even thought up a cool name for our team: The Andover Assassins. The Assassins would be owned by Stephen Tyler. Tyler would buy the team in order to rival fellow-AFL owner, Jon Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi’s AFL team has done a lot of work with Habitat for Humanity, resulting in a lot of good for the community and good publicity for Bon Jovi himself. In order to top him, Stephen Tyler would found his own earth-saving group, called the Andover Assassins Arbor Aid Association sponsored by Aerosmith, also known as the A.A.A.A.A.A. This charitable organization would use all money made by the Assassins to plant trees in Qatar, where there is an ongoing scarcity of trees and the letter U. We all know from taking Biology 100 that trees are an integral part of the oxygen intake of human beings. Therefore, the poor people of Qatar will suffer if the A.A.A.A.A.A. does not help out; top that Mr. You Give Love A Bad Name. The Blaine-O-Dome would be the greatest addition to Phillips Academy since the Ryley Room was built in 1791. And with our AFL team’s charity work in Qatar, we’d be saving the world too.