War Games

November 12, 2008 at 10:28am by Scott   •  No Comments »

Pros vs. GI Joe is an interesting yet dreadfully named organization that seeks to hook professional athletes up with soldiers and other military personnel stationed around the world through video games. Only in America, eh? Here, I’ll let them explain it.

“Pro vs. GI Joe is a non-profit organization,” said Addie Zinone, the founder and overseas coordinator for the program. “What we do is set up these real-time video game competitions between professional athletes here in the states and troops stationed all over the world. We also hook them up via web cam and invite their family members to the event here stateside. So we’re not only connecting the pro and the GI Joe, we’re also reuniting family members separated by military deployments.”

So, kinda cool, right? Warren Sapp was involved with it at an earlier date, and now for this year’s Veterans Day, the Buccaneers hosted one of these events at One Buc. Alex Smith, Cato June, Phillip Buchanon and Jermaine Phillips participated this year and all took on troops locally and overseas in games of Madden 09 and Call of Duty 2. All the football players play Madden these days and Smith has actually won awards for his playing, so it’s nice to see that they threw a military-themed game in there to put the players at a disadvantage.

Despite their efforts, it was the soldiers who seemed to have the upper hand in the combat simulation game Call of Duty. “They were pretty good,” June said with a laugh. “They had the little side communication thing going on. It was hard to jump in. They had the specific words and code words and everything, but I jumped in and I think my team did pretty good.”

Dexter Jackson was also there for a few minutes, but was asked to leave when he spent one full game lying face-down in a foxhole.