Sports in Hell (19 page)

OK, so maybe we table the whole career-change thing for now.

All in all, I don't see Shweeb getting bigger than iPods in the U.S. In fact, I don't see them coming at all to the U.S., a nation with school gym classes that limit kids to “sports” like cup stacking, which is part of the reason that soon one out of every three kids will have obesity-caused diabetes.

Finally, and unforgettably, we Zorbed.

A Zorb is a giant eleven-foot inflatable plastic ball you climb inside and then try to hang on to as you get pushed down a mountain. It's just that stupid.

They throw a bucket of warm water inside so that you're slipping and sliding and flipping and flopping on the bottom
half like a mackerel in the hold of a rollicking trawler. The ball spins
around
you as you tumble down the equivalent of a blue ski slope.

Of course, great zorbers don't put the water in. They try to run in it without falling as the Zorb rolls down the mountain. Only thirty-one people have ever done that. Only three have done that backwards. These kind of people call themselves “zorbonauts.” These people do not have a lot to do.

Even dumber is “harness Zorbing,” which is to strap yourself to the walls inside the Zorb and roll end over end until you chunder up the kraut dog you ate at a carnival in fourth grade. Ordinary people can try “harness Zorbing,” though, unless it's windy, which it was on this day. Because there's no water in the Zorb then, the weight of the Zorb is too light and the wind can blow it a tad off course. One guy caught a gust, hopped the wooden retaining fence, and ended up in the parking lot. Another time a big wind blew a lady so hard down the mountain she hit the back wall, did a 360 inside the Zorb, and broke her ankle.

Did she sue for $100 million? Did she call her congressman? Did she write Gloria Allred? No! She went on with her life!

“We offered her a free ride,” said the Zorb manager, Matt McLaughlin, “but for some reason she declined.”

Could it possibly be that Zorbing was (gasp)
mostly safe?
“A few people lose their toenails once in a great while, but that's about it,” Matt said.

When it was our turn, TLC and I got in a crappy brown van and rode to the top, where the driver got out, took one of the balls off the zorbulator (the conveyor belt that carries the Zorbs up the hill), rolled it onto a platform with a crossbar in front of it, stuck a garden hose in it for a few seconds, then made us literally
dive
through the thirty-inch-wide hole (not a sport for a rotund person—he'd wind up like Pooh in Rabbit's hole).

He looked in through the hole at us and said, “Everything box of fluffies?” (New Zealand for “Everything OK?”)

“Huh?” we said.

Then he zipped the Zorb pod door shut and raised the crossbar. “Now stand up and start walking!” he hollered.

What? Push
ourselves
off the platform? Madness!

“Get up and start pushing!” he yelled again.

So we did. We got up and, like some kind of reverse Sisyphus, began propelling ourselves to our own literal downfall. Imagine!

Suddenly, we were over the precipice, flung backwards onto our butts and bouncing over, under, and through each other like dice in a cup.

Do you know how, in twenty minutes, you can go from not knowing a thing about a thing to that thing becoming one of the things you'll talk about the rest of your life? That's Zorbing.

Telling you, you must Zorb once. If you don't, that life will have been wasted. The feeling of having absolutely no control as you tumble like rag dolls in your own rubbery, watery, spinning, green-then-blue-then-green-again world is hilarious. It's like being on an extreme waterslide at a water park, only you have no idea where it's going, nor where you are, nor which way's up, nor when it will end. It's got to be the greatest invention since
Penthouse Forum
.

What's funny is that the Zorb was invented in the early 1990s for people to be able to walk across hot sand. It worked, but it wasn't exactly laughs. Then they thought it would be perfect as a way to walk on water. Also boring. Then some Kiwi said, “How about you get in it and I roll you down a hill?” Thus, Zorb history was made.

At the bottom, we caromed off a huge bank, through a giant grass curve, and then off another bank until the zorbanistas gained control of us, unzipped the pod hole, tilted the ball, and poured us out of the hole like huge, gloppy, fully grown babies. It was at that moment, as we were laughing hysterically, that I decided I
had
to bring the first Zorb franchise to America. After all, you can do it year round, you don't need much land, and there aren't many moving parts. Even our stupid lawyers would go for it.

“Do they pop much?” I asked Matt.

“Well, the plastic is three feet thick, so not really. All we do is give them a quick blow every morning and they're set.” Well, who isn't?

“Do people ever get claustrophobic?”

“Sometimes. But I just zip them up and throw them down anyway. And they always end up thanking me afterward. They're always like, ‘Man, that was the greatest time of my life!'”

“Much throwing up?”

“Not really,” he said. “If they're gonna honk, they do it just before I close the hatch. I had an Asian kid the other day. I put him in at the top and he stuck his head back out and spewed all over me. So I hosed myself off and I said, ‘You OK, then?' and he didn't say anything, so I zipped him up and threw him down. And he had the greatest time!”

I was really starting to like the way this guy talked.
Hell, yeah! You're gonna honk? I'm gonna zip you up and throw you down, cowboy! Sweet-as!

I asked about buying a zorb. I'm figuring a sledding hill, a crappy van, a Zorb, a zorbulator, a few zorbanistas, a box of T-shirts, I'm going to make millions!

“They're about $11,000 U.S., but you can't buy one. You can only buy a franchise.”

“But there's none in the U.S. yet, right?”

“Yes, there is one. Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, I think.”

Rats! Figures. Pigeon Forge is the home of Dolly Parton. Hasn't she got enough giant, round, inflatable balls?

O
f all the bizarre, senseless, and anvil-brained sports I dove into, the dumbest one was right in front of me—baseball. It's OK, I guess. It's just that not enough baseball players are swallowed up in tragic sinkhole accidents.

I suppose there was a time for it once, when people whittled and waited for the movie to change at the Bijou. But, like leeching, those days are happily gone and the truth has been revealed: Baseball is so crushingly boring you would sooner stick forks in your eyes than see another zoom shot of Andy Pettitte's nostrils.

I've heard all the arguments from seamheads: “It's a sophisticated taste. It's subtle. It's a game of patience and grace and strategy. We wouldn't expect one-celled organisms such as yourself to
understand.” If baseball is so subtle and graceful, how come the guys in the bullpen never watch it? They're either trying to spit tobacco juice onto each other's socks (very subtle) or figuring out how they can get Chinese food delivered.

No, there are at least 5,003 reasons to hate baseball, but I was able to reduce them to these seven:

Name another sport that needs a seventh-inning stretch. Nobody gets drowsy watching football. It's my pet peeve: In baseball, an at-bat takes just slightly longer than the Crimean War. For some reason, after a pitch, baseball hitters take thirty-seven minutes to get back in the batter's box. They adjust their helmet, their jersey, their wristbands. They must re-Velcro their already-perfectly-Velcroed batting gloves. They adjust their belt, smooth their pantslegs, kick imaginary dirt off their cleats. And this is after they've let the ball go past. If they have swung and missed, they must actually unbutton their pants, take out their cups, blow-dry them, and put them back in.

And that's just the hitters. Pitchers fuss with their rosin bags, the rubber under their feet, and the brim of their caps, where the Vaseline is hidden. Then they stare in forever at the catcher's sign as though—if they wait long enough—the catcher might suddenly become Salma Hayek. Then they take a big, deep breath, stare over at third for a bit, go into a windup that would make a glockenspiel jealous, and then … throw over to first. Eleven times. By the time the pitch finally gets delivered, the 490-pound umpire has expired. I once timed the actual action of a three-and-a-half-hour baseball game: less than seventeen minutes. This is why—no lie—many people bring a good book to the game. See it all the time.

Seamheads argue that baseball is the only game that does not use a clock. Exactly. This is why any American under the age of twenty-five cares as much about baseball as a goiter seminar. If baseball did use, say, a fifteen-second clock between pitches, the
game would be over in less than two hours and then World Series games wouldn't end as milk is being delivered to your home. As it stands now, baseball is as dead to your average nine-year-old as pogs. Baseball long ago lost the next generation.

Another thing: Why do relief pitchers need two minutes to warm up? They've been warming up! For ten minutes in the bullpen! Do substitute QBs get to warm up once they go in? Backup goalies? Can a 3-point shooter in a basketball game take eight or ten shots before we restart the game? No! While we're young, if you don't mind!

Attendance, amazingly, is still strong for baseball, and I know why. People don't go to baseball games to watch the games. Do you honestly think anybody cares how the Kansas City Royals do against the Cleveland Indians in July? No, people go to sit in the sun, eat foot-long hot dogs, visit, drink kiddie pools of beer, and stand behind home plate, waving their cell phone at the camera, screaming, “D'you see me? Do you? It's pointed right at me!” These last kind of people need to be tied to the 4:55 out of Buffalo.

For a time, there was a surge in attendance at San Francisco Giants games, but it turned out people were coming purely for the excellent and free wireless service at the games. This is true. You'd look up in left field and see women in spectacles downloading albums, hoping a foul ball might hit them so they might sue.

Baseball players are so dense light bends around them. They are the thickest of all professional athletes by a par 5, mostly because they usually leave for the minors before graduating high school and then spend nine months a year for the next twenty years with other baseball players, most of whom have read nothing longer than the Betty and Veronica Super Double Bubble issue. In 2004, Chicago Cubs pitcher Mark Prior gave the commencement address at the USC School of Business. The dean introduced him as one of only seventeen major leaguers with a college degree. Seventeen out of 7,500
players. Baseball must be very proud. That's almost what they have in the Jiffy Lube organization.

Baseball's tradition is to mock the intelligent player—“What are you, some kinda commie?”—and exult the bonehead. The dumbest players are the most fondly remembered. Recall Yogi Berra's classic: “You gotta go to your friend's funerals or they're not gonna come to yours!” Remember Dizzy Dean, after getting hit in the head? “Doctors examined Dean's head. They found nothing.” Remember the Atlanta Braves pitcher who had to miss a start after suffering a burned stomach from ironing his shirt—while it was still on him?

I just usually pick out one player as an example of the kind of typical brainpower we're talking about: Gary Sheffield. Besides wearing out the patience of seven teams, this is a man who once:

• admitted he purposely threw balls over the first baseman's head and into the stands to punish his own Milwaukee Brewers fans for booing him. And why were they booing him? Because he seemed to purposely throw balls over the first baseman's head.
  

• said his uncle, Dwight Gooden, was justified in hitting his girlfriend.
  

• allegedly left two 9mm Luger bullets and threatening notes on the doorstep of the mother of one of his seven children.
  

• asked to be traded from the Dodgers because they were spending their money stupidly. Why were people accusing the Dodgers of spending their money stupidly? Because they signed Sheffield.
  

• refused to play in the World Baseball Classic because he wasn't being paid.
  

• borrowed steroid cream from Barry Bonds.
  

• contended that there are more Latin players than blacks in baseball because Latins are “easier to control … They have more to lose than we do. You can send
  them back … You can't send us back. We're already here.”