The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (27 page)

At this point, Kevin had begun dating this very annoying, very mean girl whom both Jessie and I had a strong disdain for, so we joined forces and tried to convince Kevin that it was the girl who had made his room smell bad. “Dude, I think she has some issues,” were among the words spoken. Kevin ignored us and, to the best of his ability, the smell. But it was finals week, and the smell in his room got so bad that he could no longer study. He washed his sheets every single day, sometimes twice a day. He vacuumed his floor incessantly. He wiped everything down in his room with disinfecting wipes. And still he couldn’t get rid of the smell. Although it was mid-May, it was freezing cold in Oregon, and he had to sleep with his widows wide open. Unable to remove the smell by cleaning, he began to believe that perhaps we might be right about his girlfriend, and he broke up with her. When that still didn’t get rid of the vile stench, he checked into a hotel.

The minute he left the apartment, Jessie removed the rancorous bowl and disposed of it. When Kevin returned from the hotel, the smell was gone. Needless to say, Jessie and I informed him that having the apartment free of his former girlfriend for five days finally allowed her stench to clear out. Remember, neither one of us wanted him to get back with her.

Although we kept what we had done a secret from Kevin, we didn’t keep it a secret from our other friends. At the time, Ben Crane, the now-famous golfer, was one of our study partners, and he shared a good laugh at Jessie’s shenanigans. We told him every last detail of the prank. We shot our mouths off far and wide, and we realized that it would eventually get back to Kevin. So on graduation day, Jessie handed Kevin a card inside which was a detailed description of the origin of the mystery smell that had permeated his room months earlier. As you would imagine, a very pissed off Kevin began chasing a giggling Jessie around the campus, confusing everyone in their Sunday best. That was the end of the matter. Jessie had a great story to tell his grandkids.

Fast-forward four years. Jessie and his wife were in town, and Jessie invited his old buddy Ben Crane and his wife out to dinner. At one point the conversation died down, and Ben’s wife said to him, “Hey, tell them the story about what you did to your roommate in college. You know, about that prank that you pulled with the salad container.”

“Aw, I don’t want to tell that story,” Ben said.

“No, you
have
to tell it. It is soooo funny!”

Ben looked across the table, right into Jessie’s eyes, and said, “For April Fools’ Day one year, I filled a salad container with a whole bunch of nasty stuff and stuck it under my roommate’s bed.”

“Really?” Jessie said.

“Yeah.” He went on to describe Jessie’s prank in minute detail. He talked about how he broke up pieces of turkey, and how his roommate dumped his annoying girlfriend and even moved into a hotel so he could study for finals.

Jessie didn’t need a bullshit detector to know Ben Crane was lying, was retelling Jessie’s story as if it were his. Apparently Ben had told the lie so often, he had completely forgotten that it was Jessie who had told him the story in the first place. Jessie, being a good guy, was going to let it ride. But Jessie had told his wife that story on many occasions, and she wasn’t going to let it fly. Immediately she said, “Ben, you do realize that you are telling Jessie’s story. You realize that he is the one who did that prank, not you.”

I will spare you all the details about the havoc this caused at the dinner table, but let’s just say that it was pretty freakin’ hilarious: Ben’s wife began screaming at him for lying to her for so many years, and Ben looked as if he wanted to run out of the restaurant. When you break it down, I guess there are several morals to this story. The first one is, Don’t lie. And the second one is, Don’t believe a word that comes out of the mouth of a professional athlete. Unless, of course, that athlete is Chael P.

That reminds me, did I ever tell you about the time I stopped a mugging the day I was to fight for the title. Yeah, it was Greg Jackson and me. …

ot much can be said about wrestling—other than it is the best sport in the history of the universe. It also happens to be a very old sport. Now, if you read my blurb on ancient knowledge, you know I’m not a huge fan of people who worship something simply because it is old and mysterious. People have done a lot of stupid things throughout history, and there are groups of people today who like to identify themselves with those stupid things, not realizing that they are even stupider now than when they were first practiced. If you look back through history, wrestling was one of the few things that people got right. How do you know? Just look at the class of people who wrestled.

In Egypt hieroglyphs engraved in stone circa 2500 BC depict athletes wrestling it out for supremacy. I’m not a big fan of Egypt, simply because of the buildings shaped like triangles there, and after my fight with Anderson, I have come to hate all things that have anything to do with that horrible geometrical form. But you have to admit that the Egyptians were pretty badass. Baquet III, Egyptian governor and wrestling fanatic, had 405 images of wrestlers chiseled onto his tomb when he kicked the bucket. In these scenes you can find double-leg takedowns and knee blasts. The Egyptians even wrote a list of rules and instructions on papyrus around AD 100, laying out all the aspects of wrestling training and competition.

The Egyptians weren’t the only ones to wrestle for sport. Ancient Indian civilizations made mention of wrestling in their epic Sanskrit texts as early as the fifth century BC, and the Chinese used wrestling to keep their soldiers on their toes during peacetime. Even Genghis Khan, the super awesome Mongolian warlord and leader, was reported to have instructed his soldiers to learn the perfect trifecta of “the three manly skills”—wrestling, archery, and horseback riding.

Who knows how long wrestling has been around. In prehistoric times, all the real men were out wrestling sabertooth tigers, and all the liberal-arts majors failed to survive childbirth. It wasn’t until we began coddling and subsidizing the liberal-arts wieners that articles were written about the sport. The bottom line is that for as long as men have had arms, they’ve been wrestling. To solve disputes. To stay in shape. To sharpen body, mind, and soul against any and all challenges they might face in their brutal existence. In short, every little society on earth that had two brain cells to rub together independently realized the great heights that can be attained by having the young men of their culture grab each other and toss each other to the ground.

Unfortunately, some societies did not have two brain cells to rub together. Unfortunately, some societies didn’t even have one brain cell to rub against the empty space filling up the rest of their brain cavity. Against all odds, these societies were too stupid to invent wrestling or at least a reasonable facsimile. Instead, they developed a “martial art.” In hindsight, voluntarily forfeiting their lives to slavery would have been a better choice for these cultures, as they have added very little to the betterment of the human race. Below I offer a brief description of these martial arts, allowing you to make up your own mind as far as their relevance.

When discussing pointless, time-wasting endeavors, karate has to be the second activity you consider (the first being trying to convince the California State Athletic Commission of your innocence). Karate was developed on the small Japanese island now known as Okinawa by out-of-work fishermen. Because of their humble position in the economic structure of feudal Japan, these malnourished fishermen began consuming their own urine to recycle vital nutrients missing from their meager diets. Of course Japanese society frowned upon this, and eventually the fishermen-turned-urophagists were exiled to the outskirts of society. To exact their revenge on Japanese society at large, these pariahs developed a unique style of martial art to perfect their minds and sharpen their bodies. Unfortunately, they were still extremely malnourished and quite easily broke their hand bones. They remedied this situation by swatting weak kicks at their opponent and then simply refusing to engage for hours at a time. This method would annoy most opponents into defeat. This style of pseudo-attacking and running for your life, called karate, was born, and Japan adopted it, and the fishermen, into society with open arms. In an effort to make the story more family-friendly, Japanese society buried the true story about the piss-drinking originators of the “art.” However, once in a blue moon, before important fights, you can still find Japanese karatea drinking their own urine in an effort to connect with their forgotten ancestors.

Surprisingly, despite its humble origins as a coping mechanism for insecure Japanese salarymen, karate did have its imitators. Korea, aka, Japan Jr., also wanted a piece of the running-in-circles-while-randomly-throwing-kicks pie. Koreans will take any opportunity to rip off the Japanese and steal a part of their culture while vehemently arguing not only that they are its originators but also that they in fact do it better. This was the case when Korea imported karate, changed nothing, and called it tae kwon do. I’m fairly certain that “tae kwon do” literally means “avoiding copyright infringement.” Because of the weak legal system in the Far East (so weak in fact that 94 percent of Korean lawsuits are settled by a coin flip), they managed to get away with this blatant theft. But if you look at the bricks and mortar of the arts, you’ll see that tae kwon do is exactly the same as karate. Illegal face punching? Check. Thin, wispy gi to allow airy comfort in the crotch region? Check. A dizzying array of kicks so powerful they could decapitate a butterfly? Double check. Do yourself a favor: when trying to decide between taking up karate or tae kwon do, choose suicide instead.

Since we’re on the subject of kicking arts, I have to mention savate. Indulge me for a moment and consider the consequences of this scenario: You live in early-nineteenth-century France. You are gainfully employed as a boot-shining apprentice working under a man who cleans horse manure from the filthy streets of Paris, and out of nowhere the king of England comes into your personal space and starts shoving you around. You’ve got on your big ass-kicker boots (shined to perfection). This guy is in your grille, giving you a hard time. And, most important, a closed fist is considered a deadly weapon in early-nineteenth-century France (yeah—I didn’t make that up). What are you gonna do? The answer is obvious. Develop the lamest fighting style in the history of Europe, centered around kicking your opponent
exclusively
with your cool boots, occasionally releasing a quick flurry of slaps, and pretending you invented a martial art. News flash: kicking with your foot isn’t a new martial art. It already has a name. It’s called incorrect technique.

If one nation of people knows how to a kick correctly, it’s the Thais. They’ve practiced their trauma-inducing shin-bone-on-thigh-centric martial art for a millenium now. Legend has it that muay thai arose when the Burmese army kidnapped a Thai warrior. Khanom Tom, as he was known, fought his way to freedom by defeating ten straight Burmese opponents. The queen of Burma was impressed by his manliness, released him and gifted him with two beautiful Burmese wives—because that’s what always happens in national genocides. If you win a few kickboxing matches, they let you go free. It’s not like they would drag you through the streets with a rope tied around your neck for having the
audacity
to win one match against their soldiers, let alone ten. Anyway, from this obviously true story about some obviously true character in an obviously true war, the national sport of muay thai was born. A martial art in which two men stand in front of each other and trade kicks to the thighs/body until somebody drops. If any sport were a candidate for Mensa athletic competitions, this would be the one. Having a game plan is frowned upon. Moving sideways or disengaging garners negative scoring. Blocking punches (with anything other than your face) is outright illegal. The only legal/traditional way to fight in muay thai is to stand in front of your opponent like a moron, bomb kicks into his midsection, and occasionally (probably randomly), check a kick or two thrown by him. So thank goodness the practitioners (aka human punching bags) of this sport know correct kicking technique. Because, lord knows, if you take up muay thai, you’ll certainly be absorbing a lot of kicks.