This week’s column is a hard one to write.

Even now, as I attempt it, I’m sitting at a Wendy’s kiosk at Sky Harbor International Airport staring at my laptop and wondering, among other things, what happened to my strict Atkins diet as I scarf down hash brown nuggets smothered in ketchup.

But my real struggle is with how to capture the true essence of where I’ve just been.

The facts of it are simple.

I’ve been here in Phoenix since Monday for the Gay Softball World Series. It is an invitation-only championship tournament where gay softball teams from around North America come to compete until only one team is left standing in each division earning the title of World Champion.

Those are the facts, but they don’t tell the whole story.

You see, in 13 years of playing and coaching softball, my team has never earned the right to play in the Series. This year was no different.

Though we made a valiant effort, we faltered just a bit and ended up, once again, on the short-end of the stick.

But at the end of the season, I had a crazy idea. I asked the D Division Champion Masterbatters if they needed an extra player.

Surprisingly, they said yes!

This was a remarkable turn of events, for a number of reasons. You see, I play in the B division, which is, for San Diego, the highest division of competitive gay softball we offer. I, however, have a D-level rating. The D division is the lowest. It’s unusual to see a player with a D-rating, like myself, choose to play up in the B division. But it is even less likely that a D team would be willing to take that player with it to a tournament – no one wants to be accused of having a ringer on the team.

After all, I had, at one point in the year voted to take the D division World Series berth away, and give it as an extra berth to the B Division. That vote failed, thankfully.

Stunningly, the Masterbatters came to embrace me as one of their own and when the Series came around, I was able to don the sleeveless blue jersey with the suggestive name across the back and take the field in the only kind of World Series I’ll ever make it to.

Now, if this were any other sports column, this would be the part where I talked about the games, the hits, the double-plays, and the somewhat disappointing results for San Diego’s teams.

But to write about the win-loss records in this space would be a disservice to the most important element of this story, and that is the people who were the face of San Diego at this tournament.

Again, the facts are simple.

San Diego sent B Division Champions Urban Mo’s Lack of Focus, and the C Division champs the Viejas Chiefs and runners-up Shameless. Teams from the Women’s Division included Fit 2BTyed in the A Division, the Fusion and Bourbon Street Ballers from the C Division and Jiai Aikido in the D Division.

And of course, there was my adoptive team, the Masterbatters.

For me, the tournament was familiar fodder; there were fielding errors, and base-running mistakes, but there were also stellar plays and spirited comebacks.

But the true story of the tournament was the passion displayed by the Masterbatters, more specifically from its spirited fan base, the Wife Beaters.

I’m not sure from where the politically incorrect moniker came, but I can tell you the group is comprised mainly of the spouses of the team’s players. They wear tank-tops with the jersey number of their particular player screen-printed on them. I am told the “beaters” come to almost every game, just as they all came out for the week-long tournament. What struck me the most about the group was that there were two sets of parents who decided to come along too: one belonging to a player, and one belonging to the partner of one of the players.

The wife-beaters were loud and raucous in their cheering, providing an almost “home-field” advantage for their loved ones on the diamond. Tireless and devoted, these fans showed up in force, even for 8 a.m. games. Many drove from San Diego to be there and one group of parents even came from as far away as New Mexico. For my money, their devotion would easily rival any state in the mighty Red Sox nation.

At one point, during a particularly intense come-from-behind win for the Masterbatters, one of the moms present, congenially referred to as “the Mouth of the South,” politely suggested to the umpire that he had perhaps erred in making a call.

OK, in truth, “Mama Turney” was really busting his balls.

And though we live in a time where such support is supposed to be the norm, where it isn’t supposed to be a surprise, still, seeing a mother stand up and read an umpire the riot act at her gay son-in-law’s softball game gave me a sense of warmth that, quite frankly, still moves me.

Perhaps, if there were more parents embracing their sons and daughters (and children-in-laws), the need for gay sports would be significantly lessened.

Face it, we all grew up indoctrinated into the idea that “gay” and “sports” don’t belong together. They were mutually exclusive, and the only time the two clubs played together was in PE class.

While we scoff at that notion now, many of the people in my Generation X grew up with that as reality. Many of the athletes playing in the Series were that quiet kid in the back, or the nerd, or the one who threw like a girl, or the one who was always picked last for dodgeball. Many of the Series athletes came to embrace sports late in life, because doing it any sooner was tinder for the flames of ridicule that burned so intensely as a teenager.

But now they have softball. Now they have a championship tournament that you already have to be a champion to get to. Now that last kid picked for dodgeball was playing in a world series.

Maybe that’s what this tournament was really all about: proving to ourselves that the bullies may have won the battle on the playground, but that, with a little help from organized gay sports and moms like the Mouth of the South giving an umpire the what-for, we might just be winning the war.