Sports in Hell (9 page)

Buoyed, I let the next one rip, very high, a little leaky, straight downhill. I radioed ahead: “You guys got it?”

“Got what?” Tony said.

“My ball.”

“Yeah, we're ready.”

“What?”

“Tell us when.”

“When what?”

“Tell us when you're gonna hit.”

“I already hit.”

“You already hit?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Please tell me you're kidding.”

“No. We didn't know you hit. We have no idea where it is.”

“No?”

“Absolutely no clue.”

“Crap.”

The thing was as lost as Amelia Earhart. We finally gave up. That meant I was now going to be hitting six.

“You really gotta make sure we know you're hitting,” Tony said. You think?

Now it was really getting hot. My boxers were crawling. My jeans felt about 165 degrees. The horseflies were holding a convention near my ears. And I was losing my swing. My spotters were moving from the last glow of inebriation to the first shafts of headaches. They looked like they might stage a mutiny, especially after my sixth shot—a Newt Gingrich: short and right.

But that's when I saw Dennis.

He'd changed clothes already—“I sweat so much,” he admitted. And no wonder. The guy hit it farther than many SkyWest flights. About 50 percent farther than me.

“Wow,” I said. “What do you lie?”

“That was six,” he said.

Holy cow! It was a revelation.

Self:
We're in this thing!

Buzzkill self:
What about Caleb, you cheesebrain?

“Seen Caleb?” I tried, casually.

“Uh, I think he's having trouble,” Dennis said. “Lotta lost balls.”

Holy Christ! You're a real boy, Pinocchio!
I started picturing myself giving the winner's speech.
“Well,”
I'd say,
“if there was one hole that was the key to my round, I'd say …”

I knocked my last shot off the mountain. From there on, it was strictly straight drivers over endless vistas of flat cactus and scrub. Dennis and I seemed to be doing it together, but he was denuding the ball and I was merely hitting it. It was like the difference between a Corvette and a Corvair. Still, it looked like he was having
trouble finding some of his moon launches. The sun mocked us. It was exhausting, like being on a Lubbock tar crew. Were there no goddamn cart girls on this freaking hole?

“What was that, eleven?” I asked Aubrey, sweat pouring into my retinas.

“Thirteen,” she said, hair blowing back from her face in her own spring breeze.

Finally, mercifully, the twenty-foot flagstick came into view. Another couple of slugs and Dennis and I would be there. Then I thought of Mike Stanley's warning: “I've seen guys get all the way down there and then blow two or three shots trying to get it in the stupid hole.”

Didn't seem possible to miss a hole the size of a swimming pool. I guessed I was about 150 yards out—a 9-iron usually. Since I didn't have a 9-iron, I figured I'd try to punch an 8-iron. If I made it, it'd be 18. I saw Dennis was closer to the hole than I was, but who knew what he was laying? Caleb had self-immolated, was the report. The grocer was coming down by blimp for all anybody knew.

“What if there's a tie?” I asked.

“Play-off hole,” Aubrey said. “From the bottom to the top.”

Funny girl.

So I hit the punch 8 off the dirt, only it didn't punch, it ballooned. It went maybe a hundred yards, which left me still fifty yards out. Bummer.

I noticed that Dennis didn't make it in, either, but he was left with a ten-foot chip to a thirty-foot hole, which Jose Feliciano could make.

I hit the wedge, but I hit it off the toe, right, and it missed a hole the size of a basement foundation by a good five yards and was heading for a storage building. Whatever meager hopes I had were about to be crushed. Except—Holy Elfego Baca!—it hit a rock! And the rock sent it dead left into the hole! I was done! Five hours and ten minutes and I'd finally finished Hole No. 1 at scenic Socorro Municipal Link. My score: 19. I pretended to collapse
like Pheidippides at the end of the first marathon. I was filthy, odorous, and spent. Aubrey, however, looked like she had just showered and was ready for Easter services.

I dragged my carcass to the shade of the building, where twenty or so were gathered.

Self:
You never know—you could win this thing!

Undermining, evil self:
No chance. Dennis is a god. Weren't you watching?

I tried to be non-chalant, but I'm sure I was chalant as hell when I threw out to Dennis, “So how'd you do?”

Dennis: “Pretty good, sixteen.”

My heart fell …

“Except I had three lost balls.”

… only to swell with joy again …

“Oh, so you had nineteen, too?” I said, cavalierly.

“No, that includes the three lost balls.”

… only to be crushed in the end.

A little guy with a clipboard came up, shook my hand, and said, “I think you're gonna get second. You were right with him, until the bottom of the mountain. And then his two shots were worth about three of yours.”

Horrid true self:
Told you
.

Caleb was already there and he had the red ass, figuratively and literally. He fell early. Slipped thirty yards down a cliff and ripped his pants and got cactus in his butt. And no tweezers! He wound up with a 22. “People are gonna ask me how I lost,” he said, looking scornfully at his brother and two friends, “but I'm just gonna tell 'em: ‘I didn't lose. Them other three lost.'”

Socorro Mountain: divider of men.

One by one, the other intrepid souls tromped home, like a lost battalion reunited at Arles.

Scott the Grocer showed up looking like he'd lost a fight with a Cuisinart. His arm had a huge gouge in it. How'd that happen? I asked. His spotter cackled, “Going for the Bud Light afterward.” Scott looked bitterly at him.

Primo came in and announced, “I'm firing my spotters. But I found an arrowhead!”

I Hoovered about three very delicious, wet, and cold beers in about three very short minutes and then realized something. I never peed. The whole day. Teed off at 8:20, finished at 1:30. Never peed.

The stories started getting worse. Sharon, the wife of one of the older guys, Bill Hall, had to be carried down the mountain, a person under each arm. “I didn't quit,” she insisted. “My legs did. I'd be walking along fine and they'd just give out. Next thing I knew, I'd be sitting down.”

Bill's buddy, Chris Ritter, had to be escorted off after his
first
shot. Luckily, he was about a thousand yards from the road. The thirty-minute hike just getting to the top defeated him. Six hours later, he still looked like a guy four quarts low on blood. “Man, I was beat up before we even started,” he said. “My legs got all rubbery. My golf was fine. I hit the ball right to [his spotter's] feet, but I couldn't walk down to her.”

Mic, the bar owner, saved his best shot for last, a beauty that split the middle of the road. Only at the end, by the hole, the road becomes paved. So this miracle of a shot caught the pavement and bounced way past the hole. In fact, it rolled down the white lines another 400 yards, where it came to rest at a curve. That's when a truck stopped and a little seven-year-old boy jumped out of the passenger side and picked the ball up. The kid hopped back in the truck and his dad drove off.

Mic and his scoring official saw it all happening, screamed, jumped in a car, and chased the truck down. They pulled the startled dad over and tried to explain to him that the ball they'd picked up was Mic's, and it was in the middle of a tournament and Mic HAD to have it back. But the kid said no. So Mic got out his bag of balls and said, “I'll give you three of these for just that one of yours.”

No.

“I'll give you ten!”

No.

The dad finally made the kid, who was still wailing when they drove off. They measured how far it was coming back and figured out the shot went 1.5 miles in total. Gotta be one of the longest shots since Alan Shepard's 6-iron.

The final scoreboard:

According to my calculations, if I played a full 18 at Socorro, I'd have shot 342 and it would've taken five days, three hours, and twenty minutes.

Or, in other words, one round with Charles Barkley.

A
s a parent, you try to be fair. So, at our house, when there was a massive dispute that we couldn't settle between my middle son, Jake, and his brother or sister, I'd always say, “OK—Rock Paper Scissors.”

And the tears would stop and both kids would smile a little and then I'd count, “OK—one, two, three, shoot!”

And every single time Jake would win.

And as he'd run off happily with the last cookie or the found football card or, later, my car, I used to think, “Man, that's the luckiest kid I ever met.”

Until one day, years later, I was in Las Vegas, when a poker announcer named Phil Gordon bet me $10 he could beat me in
Rock Paper Scissors—best out of ten—and he'd
give
me the first two. And then he proceeded to fricassee me seven out of eight.

“How can that be?” I swore. “It's just pure luck, right?”

Wrong. Turns out Phil Gordon was a pro. In fact, Gordon hosts a $10,000 Rock Paper Scissors tournament in Las Vegas every year. It was the equivalent of having Betty Crocker walk up to you and go, “Wanna bet me in a bake-off?”

Gordon said I had a “tell” every time I'd go to throw Paper. He said I'd form it at the top of my arc and he'd see it and simply put down Scissors. He said newbie males always play a lot of Rock, so he countered with a lot of Paper. It reminded me of a bit from
The Simpsons
, in which Bart and Lisa are going to play Rock Paper Scissors for the last cupcake.

Gordon also said rookies rarely throw the same hand three times in a row. So anytime I played, say, Scissors, twice in a row, he knew on the next throw he could safely choose Paper and have zero chance of losing and 50 percent chance of winning.

“It's not luck,” Gordon said, snatching my ten-spot. “It's skill.”

And it hit me, right then, that Jake knew all those rules, too. It wasn't luck, it was skill. And that I was the crappiest parent since Jose Menendez.

It really gnawed at me how bad I was at RPS, so when TLC informed me that there was a world championship in Toronto every year—put on by the World Rock Paper Scissors Society, no less—I entered it immediately ($50, Canadian) and vowed to win it.

OK, not win it. But beat the knuckles off some people.

OK, win at least one match.

Pretty soon I was inside a world I never knew existed. For
instance, I never dreamed I'd read a quote like this one from Dave McGill, who won a $50,000 RPS tournament in Vegas: “God gave me a gift. It'd be a shame not to pursue it.”

Wow. Really, Dave? Your fingers are a gift from God?

I never knew I'd know the names for all kinds of three-throw RPS gambits, such as:

I never knew I'd wind up learning all the different variations of the game around the world.

• In a lot of countries, it's called RoShamBo.
  

• In Indonesia, they play Man Elephant Ant. The Man stomps the Ant. The Elephant crushes the Man. The Ant gets inside the Elephant's brain and drives it mad.
  

• In Philadelphia, some people play a two-handed game called Microwave Tin Cat. Microwave bakes Cat. Cat shreds Tin. Tin blows up Microwave. Not a good game, though, because using two hands means you can't hold your beer.
  

• My kids invented Bird Worm Gun. Bird eats Worm. Gun shoots Bird. Worm crawls inside gun and, uh, gums it up so the mechanism can't fire. OK, so they were six.
  

And I never thought I'd know all the official, certified RPS rules, including:

• No touching your opponent's throw. For instance, no taking your Rock and crushing their Scissors. No cutting
  up their Paper with your Scissors. No covering their Rock with your Paper. Apparently, your opponent has the right to then form Fist, and punch you with it.
  

• No launch pads. This is when you slam your right-handed throw into your open left palm. Very bush league. That was going to be a personal hardship, since that's always the way I did it.
  

• No throws are allowed except the Big Three. This would mean no Bird, Well, Spock, Water, Bomb, Matchstick, Texas Longhorn, Lightning, God, or Fire, a Copenhagen specialty in which league players can throw Fire once a month, killing everything. You can't go down that slippery slope. Pretty soon you've got Napalm beating Fire, Nuke beating Napalm, Nova beating Nuke, that sort of thing.