A senseless act of comedy in its purest form, The Great Peanut Conspiracy started with a single peanut, furtively left on a pillow. There, there little beige legume waited patiently to be discovered by USA Women's Rugby prop, Catie Benson.
What did it mean, this common, salty nugget of fat and protein? How had it gotten on the pillow? Who could've put it there? These questions swam through Benson's tiny peanut brain, but in the end, she decided she needn't answer them. It was only a peanut on a pillow, after all.
The next day, in the USA Women's Rugby team room, as a team meeting was about to begin, two peanuts were discovered under Benson's chair. It was deja vu for Benson. She recalled the peanut on her pillow from the night before. Why were there peanuts now under her chair? She quickly dismissed any suspicion, as she had only hours before. The players were all in the team room, which was the home of the team snacks, peanuts included. It was only a coincidence that there were peanuts under Benson's chair.
Later that same night, while playing Bananagrams with other teammates, Benson found yet another peanut. This time, the legume had found a resting place closer to home--in Benson's sandal. This wasn't merely a little peanut on a pillow, or a couple of nuts strewn about the floor. This peanut in the sandal was deliberately placed there.
Who had done it? Benson quickly confronted teammates known to play silly pranks. She asked Naya, Hope, Kate Z, and she even barged into my room attacking me with the peanut that had been left in her sandal. However, she got no answers. All suspects had alibis. And to her dismay, while she was in my room, when I, one of her suspects, was in plain sight, she found a rogue nut nestled in the bun of her hair.
Benson had to reevaluate her suspect list. Everyone was now under her suspicious eye. Her investigation into the matter was made more difficult by the quantity of peanuts that began appearing all around her. If one person were doing all of this, then it would stand to reason that the person would be in her vicinity often. She could find no person, and it didn't help that the very nature of tour requires you be in the vicinity of your teammates most of the time.
Benson racked her brain trying to unravel the mystery. Everywhere she was seeing peanuts. Even her water began to taste like peanuts, but then she discovered that there was a gaggle of the wee things in her Gatorade bottle. She found peanuts in her rugby kit bag, one had somehow gotten in the sealed plastic bag that contained her game shorts.
On Thanksgiving Day, The Great Peanut Conspiracy reached its climax. The day started like any other. Throughout the day, Benson found the occasional peanut hanging around, which had become the norm. However, that night, at the jersey ceremony for our last match against the French, a rebel nut flew from the number 17 jersey (Benson's jersey) when our captain for the last match, Jenny Lui, picked it up. There was an initial hush--had the joke gone too far--then the room erupted in laughter. The peanut had given us all something for which to be thankful--humor and laughter.That wasn't the only peanut Benson would find that evening. In honor of the holiday, someone decided to make a peanut pie for her and leave it on her doorknob. Despite acting like she didn't care for the pie, Benson couldn't help but smile at the thoughtfulness of the act. It dawned on her that someone cared enough to go to the trouble to make her a personalized pie. And we all learned on that Thanksgiving that enjoying the company of our teammates was something for which to be thankful.
Benson never nailed down the peanut culprit. She still has her suspects, even to this day, and some are still calling her Peanut Benson, but she never quite untangled the web of a mystery that was The Great Peanut Conspiracy. Perhaps we'll never know how all of those peanuts wound up haunting her during the France Tour. One thing is for sure, the great act of senseless comedy brought us all together in fun and laughter and made the stresses of tour a little more bearable.
