Sports in Hell (17 page)

The next day in the giant ballroom of the Flamingo Hotel there arrived 414 teams—most of them hungover twentysomething males, all of whom forgot to pack razors. There were maybe six female teams, and three of those were wearing ultra-hot pants and ultra-low-cut tops, the better to distract the guys with. I mean these shorts were
short
. I've seen doilies with more material.

Anything went. One team dressed as a sex-obsessed octogenarian couple. One guy would whip out his package as the other team shot. Guys would cabbage patch, moon, howl, clap, whistle, even rip off their shirts just as their opponent shot. It was all perfectly legal. It was even in the official rules: “No player may take offense to anything said or done during a game, even if it involves their mother.”

The team names were good, too. There was:

The sentimental team was The Iron Wizard Coalition, mainly because they had been in the finals the year before, thought they'd sunk the winning cup with their opponents still four cups behind, and immediately went triple Grammatica, including falling on the floor in delirium. But the beauty of beer pong is the diabolical “rebuttal” rule, which states that the losing team gets one final chance to tie as long as they never miss again. Four cups in a row, under pressure? Impossible! Except that's exactly what LA's Chauffeuring the Fat Kid did, then won in overtime. It remains the Bobby Thomson home run of beer pong.

Second-place prize for the Wizards? Nothing. Beer pong is winner take all.

Ouch.

“I had that money spent,” says Mike Hulse, twenty-eight, of the Wizards. Worse, less than a month later, his fiancée left him, sticking him with a $6,000 custom-made engagement ring he was able to sell for only $1,000. “Have I thought about last year?” Hulse said between games. “Every time I pay a bill. Every freakin' time.”

There was one team there that was even older than me. Their best player was fifty-four. “I knew I was in trouble when I signed up online,” the guy said. “The ‘birth year' choices didn't go back far enough to my year. It only went back to 1960. I needed 1954.” Cruel.

The rules allowed for teetotaling teams, too. Anybody could put water in their cups—if they could stand the verbal abuse they'd take for it—but we found the only team that did: Mrs. and Mrs. Lara and Kristin Mendez. That's not a misprint. They're a
married lesbian couple from New York. “Our strategy was don't drink at all,” Kristin said. “That way you'll have the advantage because you're sober. But we lost so much the first day, we gave that idea up. It just felt unnatural.”

Just to recap: The lesbian married beer pong team hates anything unnatural.

My favorite team, though, was François the Butt Duster, mostly because they were my sons—Kel, twenty-three, and Jake, twenty-one. The name comes from my days going to the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit shoots. There was a body-makeup man there we called François the Butt Duster. He was allowed into the dressing rooms and the tents with the naked supermodels because he was gay and French. He'd be in there with a stark-naked Heidi Klum or Elle McPherson, dusting their butts with his little French-maid feather duster, applying makeup, and cooing, “Oh-la-la, Tyra! Your bottumm—eet eez parfait!” Afterward, though, you'd always want to have beers with François because in actuality he was neither gay nor French. He was Frankie from Yonkers. “Cindy Crawford is hotter 'n the Fourth of July!” Frankie would say to his rapt audience. “Fuggedabouddit!”

Not since a Jose Canseco BBQ have you seen so many big guys and so many small balls. It was sloshy and loud and smelly everywhere you went. And all of it under fancy crystal chandeliers. It was a parent's hell. You half expected to have some mom come in, turn off the music, step to the mike, and go, “All right. You boys go outside and get some fresh air now. I need to vacuum.”

The Butt Dusters started off white-hot—4–0—including a victory over a team from Rochester, which, no joke, would, just out of nowhere, slap each other in the face
hard
. The slapee, red-cheeked, would just look at his partner—stunned—and finally yell, “Yeahhh!!!” One team of women regularly flashed their chests to distract their opponents. But since that team went 1–11, you began to question their motives. Or the chests.

The Butt Dusters refused to be dragged down to the distracters' levels, though. In fact, when the other team threw, they wouldn't
even watch. Not as a dis. They were just too nervous. They never thought they'd win even one game against the world's best, let alone the first four in a row. Jake kept taking fake texts the whole game. Kel kept turning away and pulling his shirt over his face. They eventually faded to a record of 7–5, just missing the third-day cut by one win, but seemed somewhat relieved. “I'm SO sick of beer,” Kel said at the end.

Again, sentences you never thought you'd hear.

The star-crossed Iron Wizards finished forty-ninth, which left the final down to two teams who play out of Long Island, NY—maybe they should call it Pong Island?—both of which were so good and dispatched their opponents so quickly that they actually had to
sneak
beer just to slake their thirst. One was the aforementioned Smashing Time, two high school jock stars who stood six-six and six-four. “I just throw it like a free throw,” Pops said. The other team was Getcha Popcorn Ready, whose players stood six-three and six foot. Leaning is legal in beer pong. Did you hear that, Yao Ming?

Perhaps worried about his thirst again, Smashing Time's Ron Hamilton, twenty-five, prepared for the final day by chugging a bottle of Jack Daniel's that morning. “The key for us today,” he said, “was me getting really drunk.”

Not the kind of quote that's going to get you on a Wheaties box.

Since Popcorn came up through the loser's bracket, they would need to win both games to be crowned King Pong. Smashing Time only had to win one. But Popcorn won the first game in a shocker. And that's when something happened I've never even
heard
of before.

The two teams made a secret deal. They agreed that whoever won would cut the losers a check for $3,000. Can you imagine Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson stopping before the Masters play-off and going, “OK, whoever loses still gets to wear the green jacket for a week. Deal?”

Turned out to be a dumb move for Smashing Time, which proceeded
to knock out their ten cups in twelve balls. That's some mad ponging. And that was it. The next thing you knew, they were taking a six-foot novelty check back to their room.

As for the future, WSOBP organizers think they'll have over 1,000 teams next year, a monster sponsorship deal, and possibly a TV slot.

And that's all great, I suppose, but I don't think it's truly going to be big without some kind of rule incorporating projectile sicking (29). Can't you see some guy going for the $50,000 win when he's suddenly plastered by a fire hose of haver (30)?

And the victim will only be able to wipe off his face and say, “Dr. Hurtsauce, I presume?”

I
t's a proven fact that American lawyers take 87 percent of the fun out of everything.

This is why all the diving boards are gone from swimming pools and all the cool powder tree runs at ski areas are roped off and why hundreds of school districts have banned tag from school playgrounds because it's “dangerous” and causes “feelings of low self-esteem.”

This is how we came to live in a country where a woman could be awarded $40,000 for hitting a golf ball that ricocheted off railroad tracks and hit her in the nose.

Can we all slap our foreheads in unison?

That's why you can't write a book in search of the dumbest sport in America, because dumb sports are usually risky sports and American insurance lawyers won't let you butter a roll without signing a release.

But New Zealand? Now, that's a whole 'nother story.

In New Zealand, the lawyers are all dead or fired or smoking kiwis, because there is no such thing as suing somebody for personal injury there. You can't do it. It's against the law.

So, if you want to hurl yourself off a 500-foot-high bridge tied only at your ankles while screaming “Ohsssssshiiiiiiiittttttt!” there are plenty of people who will take your money to let you do it.

Drooling, we headed to the Soul of Stupid Sports, the nation where the sports are dumber than Tori Spelling—wonderful, gorgeous, faultless New Zealand.

We started, as anyone would, with cave rafting.

I can hear you silently judging me already.
You didn't bungee? You pussed out on bungee? Isn't bungee like New Zealand's national sport?

No, Mr. Negative. I'd already bungeed. Everybody bungees. Yes, it's stupid, but it's stupid the way those stupid plastic Crocs shoes are stupid. It's already been well documented. Besides, TLC was so worried about me bungee-ing that she kept sending me videos from the disasters page at bungeezone.com. There were dozens of the-cord-came-off-his-feet videos, and even more the-cord-snapped-in-half videos, a few did-her-head-just-hit-the-rock? videos and one he-was-given-the-eighty-meter-cord-for-the-sixty-meter-jump video. It did not make for comfortable pre-bungee viewing.

Besides, how dumb is cave rafting? Actually, the Legendary Blackwater Rafting Company of Waitomo called it “The Black Abyss Tour.” When I showed up at check-in, employees with clipboards
were coming up to me saying, “Are you the black abyss?” And I wanted to reply, “Well, my ex-wife thought so.”

As for TLC, she touched the ice-cold wet suits they wanted us to keep on for five hours, heard how we'd be rappelling down an unlit hundred-foot hole, taking a zip cord down another hundred feet, jumping off a cliff into a fifty-degree underground river populated with blind eels, then float in inner tubes under the light of maggots (glowworms) and crawl through a fifty-foot-long mud tunnel, up two waterfalls, and finally out again, and said, “Uh, I'll be in the car, thanks.”

Good call.

I guess I knew the Black Abyss was a poor choice on the order of anthrax cupcakes when I got to the bottom of the rappelling cave and saw a pile of animal bones in the light of my helmet lamp. I showed them to one of our guides, Parker, a tall twenty-five-year-old blue-eyed spelunking freak. “It happens,” he said. “Dogs get down here and can't find a way out.”

He said that “probably” wouldn't happen to us.

For fun, Parker goes exploring, alone, for days at a time, looking for undiscovered caves. He finally found one last year. He christened it
Who Needs Nipples?
because to get to it, he had to shimmy through a hole so tiny that it ripped both his nipples. Now
that's
a weekend!

There are times he enters some incredibly huge labyrinth of caves and doesn't come up for three or four days. “You can't leave anything down there, absolutely zero,” Parker explained. “You even have to pack out your own poop in a poop bag.” (
Poop Bag
, by the way, would be a good name for a fantasy football team.)

The whole day was misery. I envied TLC her sunshine and her book and her aboveground world. Apart from the times when we were allowed to just float in our tubes and stare up at the mysteriously glowing maggots, it was about as much fun as being massaged with No. 2 sandpaper. To keep my mind off my shivering body, I'd grill Parker on why the hell he did this bizarre thing for a living when it seems so ridiculously dangerous.

“But that's the thing!” he argued. “Anybody you talk to thinks the risk of caving is off the charts, crazy high. But in twenty-two years of running this tour, the most serious injury we've had is one broken pelvis. So the actual risk is really low. Rappelling is the same thing. Perceived danger: high. Actual: low. And yet, driving on New Zealand highways? Perceived: low. Actual: very high!”

This was a subject a guy could warm up to.

The girl in the marabou heels at the end of the bar? Perceived danger: low. Actual: high
.

Toward the end, I started to lose it altogether. My teeth were chattering a symphony as I paddled and waded and crept from one more dank, narrow, lightless cave to an even danker, narrower, even more lightless cave—keeping my hands out of the water as instructed so the eels didn't think my fingers were food. I was tiptoeing around with my fingers in the air, like Liberace in a wet suit. After five hours, I came to sympathize with Gollum from
The Lord of the Rings
.

What does it want from us, precious? It wants us to wade through the freezing slime, does it, precious? And we paid $49.95 for this? Oh, we hates it, precious! We hates it!