The 12th annual WPH Red Death Invitational handball tournament drew the usual suspects, from the tourney namesake to Jake the Snake.
The namesake, Randy Jolliffe, was first "Red Death" while Monte Hegel was "White Death" and handball was getting squeezed a bit more by racquetball.
Jake Plummer became Jake the Snake early in a storied football career that saw him star for Arizona State and the Denver Broncos.
It would be tempting to say he is a latecomer to handball if his wasn't a handball family: Steve, Jake's dad, won the Idaho state singles title many times; his brother Eric is a player of some renown who competed for the University of Montana and is also an Idaho singles champion.
"He played handball for the Griz and made the elite eight," said Jake, who played the Red Death for the second straight year. "He's good. He's the top dog in the family."
Last weekend both the 55-year-old Jolliffe and 37-year-old Plummer were bouncing off the walls at the Peak Racquet Club on the outskirts of Missoula.
If "Red Death" needed somebody to breathe life into his tournament - he doesn't - there was Plummer, playing the open doubles final with Eric.
The match drew a big crowd even without two former ASU assistants who happened to be in town: Robin Pflugrad and Dick Arbuckle, the head coach and special teams coach for the football Grizzlies.
"I actually talked to him prior to the semifinal game (against Sam Houston State)," Plummer said of Pflugrad, who was quarterbacks coach at ASU from 1995-2000. "I touch base with him a little bit. He's a good coach, man. I hope he continues to do well."
Plummer came to a Griz game in 2010 and still watches the NFL and college from afar.
"After playing the game it's still fun to see what they're doing now, the way the game has kind of morphed a little," he said. "Letting those athletes play back there at Q, I kind of salivate sometimes at what they're letting them get away with now."
Plummer said this after he and Eric lost to Pete Svennungsen and Jay Balkenbush 21-20 Sunday, and before he grabbed his wife and young son and headed back to Sandpoint, Idaho.
"We made it to the finals and couldn't quite get 'em closed down," he said. "We had game point and couldn't finish it. That's how it goes sometimes, playing good opponents - you can't miss your opportunities."
Handball feeds a competitive Jones for Plummer even if he doesn't play more than a half dozen tournaments a year. He famously walked away from the NFL, and a reported $5.3 million, when the Broncos traded him to Tampa Bay before the 2007 season.
A feature in Sports Illustrated last year noted Plummer's immersion in handball before his NFL career ended. That bit of cross-training helped him through offseason conditioning.
"It wasn't that I was kicking their butt," he said of his Denver teammates. "It's that it wasn't beating me up that bad. I was running, sprinting and recovering real fast. My cardio was real good going into workouts, whereas most guys coming to workouts a little la-" - he stops himself - "a little less in-shape."
Handball is like any sport - you usually get out what you put in. There were some decent-sized front porches at the Peak and the 40 doubles teams were split into five divisions ranging from "Open Doubles" to "Never Will Be Open Doubles."
Jolliffe, whose damaged hand serves as the tournament logo - as a youngster he lost the tip of one index finger when it was smashed under a trailer - was somewhere in between. Probably the "Probably Not So Open Doubles."
Wherever he competed, he shepherded players through 169 matches on just six courts at the Peak. With his dog, Murph, walking around with handball gloves hanging from his collar, Jolliffe sipped a Bud and reflected on a job well-done: The Red Death lived to see another year.
"It's come a long ways since 20 guys and a keg of beer on a Saturday," he said.
