Check out the new CBS Sportsline homepage for Official Pinzur Friend
Dave Richard, a senior fantasy football columnist for CBS. He was also Official Fantasy Consultant for my team this year (the Crapshots, indicating my relative chances of winning without his aid).
The backstory of the Pinzur-Richard friendship is a happy little tale, at least to the seven people bored enough to read this blog:
Dave's wife is Karen, and her parents have been very close friends with Momma and Poppa Pinz since before time began. Karen and Little Pinz and I were among about a dozen kids who were practically raised together by this close circle of our parents' friends, five couples affectionately (and, I guess, a little sinsterly) known as The Group. We all had big get-togethers at least every few months - mostly your traditional non-family holidays like Labor Day, Memorial Day, etc.
While all the kids were friendly, we mostly lived just far enough apart to attend different schools. I don't ever remember us being an especially tight-knit group, with a few exceptions, so it was easy for us to drift apart as we went to college and out into The World.
Karen, who is just about a year older than me, moved to South Florida after high school (I think she graduated in '93) and went to Lynn University in Boca. I didn't move down to Miami until '02, and didn't see Karen (or meet Dave, by then already her husband) until early '03 at a now-infamous dinner.
It was just a few months after Lady Pinz and I had started dating... my parents happened to be in town at the same time as two other couples from The Group, including Karen's parents. A fourth couple from The Group had already met Rachel when they were in town a few weeks prior, but this was a crucial night - the approval of The Group may be of marginal importance to us kids, but is ultra-important to our parents.
Luckily, it all went incredibly well. Everyone naturally loved Lady Pinz, who is far more personable than I am. Karen's youngest brother, who was (I think) around 13 at the time, amused everyone by walking on his hands along Lincoln Road, the strip of cafes and shops on South Beach where we were eating. I think he eventually passed himself off as one of the street performers who hit up tourists for dollar bills. Lady Pinz and I bonded with Dave and Karen, who live about 45 minutes away, and we've been friends ever since. Funny how things like that work out...
Also funny is the postscript to the dinner, which we didn't learn until after we were engaged: the wives of The Group are also known (at least among themselves) as the Bet Din, a Hebrew word for a court presided over by a panel of judges. Evidently, an informal vote of the Bet Din was taken as they walked back to their cars that night, and Lady Pinz received a crucial, vocal, enthusiastic endorsement. We had consumed a lot of wine that night, of course, but I'm pretty sure it was a fair ballot.
