Sports in Hell

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Rules

  
1
    
World Sauna Championships

  
2
    
Ferret Legging

  
3
    
Bull Poker

  
4
    
The Three-Mile Golf Hole

  
5
    
Rock Paper Scissors

  
6
    
Women's Pro Football

  
7
    
Chess Boxing

  
8
    
Drinking Games

  
9
    
Zorbing

10
    
Baseball

11
    
Nude Bicycling

12
    
Jarts

13
    
Homeless Soccer

Conclusion: The Winner

It takes a lot of smart people to let a dumb guy write a whole book about stupid sports. For instance, how could I have experienced the utter exhaustion of playing a three-mile golf hole straight down a mountain full of explosives without the help of Ryan Klassen and Joel Haley? How would I have entered the world of illegal Jarts throwing without the aid of Jeff Balta? How would I have risked my walnuts in ferret legging without the three women at the Richmond Ferret Rescue League—Rita Jackson, Marlene Blackman, and Meagan J. Rhoten? (Please write me back, Spazz.) Without Kat Byles, I wouldn't have had a clue about how to cover a homeless soccer game. Without Ossi Arvela, I'd have had a stroke trying to figure out how to compete in the World Sauna Championships. Without a hand from Graham Walker, I'd have been stumped at the World Rock Paper Scissors Championships. I shudder to think what would have happened to me at Angola State Penitentiary without Angie Norwood, Gary Young, and Warden Burl Cain. Or Jody Taylor of the (now squashed) SoCal Scorpions women's pro football team. (Yes, Jody, the doctors think some of my vertebrae will grow back.) Thanks, too, to Danitra Alomia at the World Beer Pong Championships. Hope you get that Budweiser smell out of your hair. And cheers to London's Tim Woolgar, who not only explained chess boxing to me (it took hours), but then starred in it. And thanks to the best agent a
man could have, Janet Pawson of Headline Media in New York, her trusty sidekick Michelle (Wood) Hall, Bill (Liam's Dad) Thomas at Doubleday, who went along with the madness, and Melissa Danaczko, who had to make sense of it all. Lastly, warehouses full of thanks go to the gorgeous and patient and ingenious researcher/organizer/travel agent TLC (The Lovely Cynthia), who made the idea of traipsing all around the world looking for stupidity seem like a brilliant idea.

S
portswriting can be about as tough as fur boxers. I've spooned the strawberries and cream at Wimbledon, slurped the mint juleps at the Kentucky Derby, sneezed into the azaleas at the Masters. I've sat on leather pressroom couches in front of glorious big screens from Dubai to Del Mar while pages of athletes' quotes were hand-delivered to me. I've been courtside at the Final Four and on the field for the Super Bowl and nearly had Mary Lou Retton land her famous 10s at the 1984 Olympics on my foot. I've covered all the sports everybody aches to attend.

Do you know how BORING that gets?

After thirty-one years of covering crap like that, I wanted to try covering some sports that were completely new, totally obscure, and mind-warpingly … dumb. The dumber, the better. I wanted to see if I could search the planet and find the single stupidest idea for sporting competition the world had ever devised. The thrill of victory, the forehead slap of “Why do you people DO this?” My motto was: If your sport is really moronic and witless, I'm the guy to write about it.

So, accompanied by my curvy girlfriend, Cynthia Puchniarz—aka TLC (The Lovely Cynthia)—a former Glendale, California, high school teacher, former Miss Teen California, and current
research wizard, I set out in January of 2006 to do it. But first, over many, many tequilas, we decided on some ground rules:

1. It had to be an actual sport
   . Meaning: It had to be something people actually tried to win, something people cared about it, something open to anybody. There are dozens of Try to Fly Off the End of the Pier contests, bagsful of Who Can Come Up with the Dumbest Craft to Sail the Dry River regattas. Pah! It had to be dumb to everybody but those who played it. In fact, our rule of thumb was: If you would get punched if you told a guy his sport was stupid, it qualified.
   

2. It couldn't be stupid for the sake of being stupid
   . For instance, the World Shin Kicking Championships, which involves two combatants, their hands on each other's shoulders, kicking each other very hard in the shins. Seemed to have real stupidity potential. But then we saw this quote, from a shin-kicking official, who was trying to get shin kicking into the 2012 Olympics: “There's no need for dope tests—if anything, stupidity is encouraged.” That nixed it. You can't KNOW your sport is stupid.
   

3. It couldn't exist mainly as tourist bait
   . It couldn't scream out, “Yes, this is a dumb sport and that's why the boys in marketing invented it, so YOU would come and spend all your euros!” The British are just awful about this. Take bog snorkeling, in which one dives into a disgusting muck-filled trench and swims 120 yards, with the proviso that one can't pull one's head out of the water. Besides, when one does come out, one finds one still in Mid Wales, so one just keeps swimming. Or cheese rolling, which involves letting a giant Double Gloucester cheese wheel roll down a hill, triggering a hundred or so drunk twenty-two-year-olds—falling ass-over-Guinness—in an attempt to be the first one across the line after it. In 2008, eighteen of the fifty contestants were injured.
   

   You know what I say?
   

   Good.
   

4. We had to actually watch people do it
   . There have been some wonderfully spackle-brained sports that no longer exist. Take the World Housekeeping Championships, for instance. Held at the Opryland Hotel, it was started in the 1970s by seventeen hotels in the Nashville area to promote pride in maid service. The maids fought to the last mint to see who could win titles in: Blindfolded Bed Making, Pillow Stuffing, and Slalom, which featured two-person teams pushing brooms to steer soaps and other amenities through an obstacle course of “wet floor” signs. How great is that? All that was missing was the Knocking Loudest at 6:07
   A.M
   . While Ignoring the Do Not Disturb Sign competition.
   

5. It couldn't even be slightly famous
   . For instance, one sport I was dying to cover at first was noodling, which is the art of catching fish with your bare hands—the perfect solution for those fed up with the high cost of poles and worms. This was right up Dumb Drive. Noodlers have even been known to die doing it. We made plans to shadow a noodler—any noodler—in the big yearly noodling tournament in Oklahoma. The first guy we asked, a plumber, told TLC: “Nah, I'm hooked up with Discovery Channel this year.” Then we tried a randomly toothed boat mechanic. “Sure,” he said. “Hope you don't mind a crew from
   National Geographic
   along.” The last guy—I think he was a professional drifter—spat out, “Sorry, I got a guy from
   Time
   .” We decided to wait for the musical.
   

6. I didn't want to die covering it
   . This eliminated buzkashi, which is exactly like polo except instead of a small wooden ball you use the bloody corpse of a recently beheaded calf. Fun at parties! It's the national sport of Afghanistan. Teams of men on horseback using ropes try to drag a calf carcass—into which sand has been pounded—back to the winning circle while hundreds of other horsemen try to keep him from doing it, often with whips, for days at a time. Magnificently dumb. But I just couldn't see my kids having to tell people, “Dad died in Kabul when three buzkashists mistook him for a headless goat.”
   

7. I couldn't have already covered it
   . For instance: lawn mower racing, which remains the only motor sport in the world where you can watch the pack go by, go get a bratwurst and a Pabst, and be back in time for the next pass. I liked it, though, if only for the names they give their rigs: “Sodzilla,” “The Lawn Ranger,” and “The Yankee Clipper.” And I'd already investigated blimp racing, although there was only one blimp in the sky at the time, and that was the one I was driving: the Goodyear Blimp. If you ever want to do it, don't. They redline at fifteen miles per hour and there is no bathroom. Which is why if you happened to be at the Indianapolis Colts–Baltimore Ravens exhibition game a few years back, I'd like to apologize. Those were not summer showers.
   

8. It had to at least resemble a sport
   . This left out Extreme Ironing (which I did on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange anyway, just for the photo), the Air Guitar Championships, and Shotgun Golf, in which one advances a golf ball by means of a shotgun blast. That turned out to be entirely made up and passed off as real by the late Hunter S. Thompson. Hate to be a caddy for it.
   

Anyway, off we went. It would take us three and a half years, eight countries, and about 373 Red Roof Inns before our quest was complete. We found thirteen sports that we believe can outstupid anything a committee of Dennis Rodman, John Daly, and Courtney Love could come up with. The things I did, the interviews I conducted, and the sentences I found myself writing actually reduced my IQ. So much so that after I finally turned the manuscript in, all I could think to say was: “How 'bout them Cowboys!”

O
K, kids, today's activity is to go down to your local Pizza Hut, have them set the oven for 261 degrees, and insert your entire body into it. The tips of your ears start to ignite. The backs of your arms scream. Your throat feels like somebody stuck a tiki torch down it. Your lips are bitten by large, unseen raccoons. You vow to move to Alaska. And you haven't even hit thirty seconds.

Now do it for ten minutes or more and you have an idea of what it's like to compete in quite possibly the world's dumbest sport—the World Sauna Championships.