‘DO YOU GET POINTS FOR THAT?’

Honestly, I don’t know anything about the AFL.

I don’t think I’d watched the sport at all until Stephen Howard, OSU’s associate director of communications, started posting highlights of Mason’s games for Collingwood on our Twitter account. I have no idea where he sources the videos from but he gets them, posts them and tags Mason so all his old OSU fans can keep up with what he’s doing.

What a crazy game. I’m trying my best to pick it up.

We were talking about it in the coach’s office the other day, doing our best to figure it all out after watching Mason’s highlights from last weekend. We were trying to work out the rules. We’d see Mason jumping up and catching the ball in the air and asking, ‘Do you get points for that?’ And then he would kick the ball through the goals and we were all wondering what it meant.

But you don’t have to understand the rules of AFL to appreciate Mason’s athleticism. To see him flying across the field, jumping up and catching passes was pretty cool – and so was hearing your commentators calling him the ‘Big American!’ We might not fully understand what’s going on but, man, it makes us happy to see him living his dream down in Melbourne.

That’s gotta feel incredible for Mason. The stadium looked massive and there were so many people there watching the game. Just sitting there as a spectator would’ve been really exciting. To be out there in the middle like Mason is? Wow.

We’d see Mason jumping up and catching the ball in the air and asking, ‘Do you get points for that?’

And also … Aussie Rules?! It’s about as foreign a sport as you could imagine for a guy from Texas via Oklahoma. I can’t even imagine the work Mason must have put in to learn this sport from scratch, let alone compete at its elite level.

What a journey. What a story. I can’t think of anything even close to it in my lifetime.

Then again, if there was ever going to be a guy who would overachieve in a new sport, it’s Mason. His worth ethic and energy and intelligence are next level. He’d already had the craziest journey at OSU. It looks like it got wilder after he finished here!

Stephen tells me this weekend is the biggest AFL game of the year, the Aussie version of the Super Bowl. What an achievement for Mason. We’ll all be pulling for him here at OSU.

I’m already looking forward to the next round of Twitter highlights.