THE ODDCAST VAULT

Bread Pool Rookie Kristen Ball isn't a writer by profession, but when a trip to the remotest part of Kenya profoundly changed her outlook, she knew she had to capture her experience for posterity. What emerged was a middle-grade novel that caught the attention of acclaimed economist Jeffrey Sachs and renowned novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard, the author of Deep End of the Ocean. With allies like that, Kristen  found a publisher that offered her a contact within 24 hours of reading A Calf Named Brian Higgins. 

The Rat Pack sang. The Brat Pack acted. The Petroleum Pack plays an ungodly amount of ping-pong.  Meet Kevin Harrington, Matt Cressman and 2019 Instead Pool champion Ryan Peckham, a rough-and-tumble trio of coyote-hunting, hockey-playing, university-teaching buddies who hold down the Bread Pool's last remaining outpost in Texas. Tethered to the oil industry in the Permian Basin,  the epicenter of the Friday Night Lights franchise, the Pack has raised table tennis -- and wasting time -- to a high art. 

When a dozen dudes threw $20 apiece into a winner-take-all pot at a golf course bar in the Bay Area in 1996, nobody had an inkling that we were sewing the seeds of a warped legacy. Bread Pool founder Brian "Bag O'Donuts" Higgins and Sammy "The Fish" Bozzo were among the original dozen, Dennis "Paternity Suit" Tuhn joined up in 1997 and Dennis Miller won the 2002 championship. Hear the perspective gleaned from a combined 95 tours (and just one damn title)  in the Meadow of Shame.

Bread Pool Founder Brian Higgins didn't invent the vertigo-inducing, bowel-vacating, Napalm-in-the-morning feeling of horror that comes when your brackets drop out from under you  . . . but he did construct the Meadow of Shame to serve as an S&M chamber specializing in that unique brand of pain. Until the 1981 NCAA Tournament, Brian was a happy-go-lucky, fledgling alcoholic attending college in Chicago. But on March 14, everything changed . . .  and he was forever diverted onto a dark, twisted path to Madness.