The History of the Fat Guys
As seen by Lord Gorlan of the Redlands
10 Dec, 1997
Like most good things it just happened. At the Double Wars
in Sweden in 1994, myself and several other Americans working in Germany
attended. Now if you have ever had a run in with the authenticity police,
imagine an event with over 200 APs running around for a whole week. The
Swedes play with gusto. Their encampments are the most period that I have
seen anywhere. If you don't have a period tent, you have to set up in
another area. Most of the Swedes had never seen or encountered the SCA
American style. Many thought that they had invented it. But the main
element that we noticed was that they were taking the game and themselves
MUCH TOO SERIOUSLY.
Interject into this environment five middle-aged Americans, getting wide around the middle who had been playing the game forever. (I started playing
back in 1974). We interjected some comic relief into the event. They didn't
quite know what to think about us when we set up our plastic tents and
Coleman stove. They did notice that we were having too much fun and as the
week went by more and more of the folks were coming to our encampment.
About halfway through the event, they had a four man melee tournament.
Each team had to come up with a name. As you can imagine, most of the
Swedes took these serious, macho sounding, manly names, like the Red Death,
or the Sharks. Well when asked what our name would be we chose "Four Fat
Guys". On the bridge battles we devastated them. We came in second in the
tourney. During the wars, if they needed a shield wall broken the cry was
"Send in the Fat Guys!" The name stuck. For the rest of the event we were
known as the "Fat Guys." By the end of the event we had come up the
definition of living large. That's how it started. The only official status
we have is the right to impose a beer tax at all feasts in the kingdom as
long as we insure that the King will never go dry. We also host a "Beer Pit
Tourney" at the Double Wars. Each entrant has to bring a beer to enter,
Squires must bring two, and Knights, a six-pack. The winner of the tourney gets all the
beer. We are known to ask the King quite publicly "Is this going to be a
one, two, ... or six beer court?"
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