That is where the fun starts, but not for you. No. You will be treated like a spy from somewhere on the Axis of Evil, until you can prove otherwise.… That is when you will find out how many friends you have left.
So that’s about it, folks, for the reasoning behind my tortured decision to fly with Anita to Honolulu tomorrow to participate, with many of our friends, in the oppressively lewd spectacle that is called the infamous Honolulu Marathon, which I have “covered” in my fashion for something like 21 years and never been disappointed by.
“Why are we doing this again?” I asked Anita as we packed for the trip. “Are we stupid? Don’t you remember what happened last year?”
“Of course I do,” she replied. “But I want to go anyway. We must go. I crave it. I want to lounge on the balcony, and swim with the dolphins, and drive naked across the mountains in a silver convertible with Don Ho crooning on the radio.…”
“Hot damn,” I said quickly. “I must have flipped out from massive stress for a minute when I was even thinking about canceling this assignment. I too crave the wonderful excitement of the race, and the rain beating down, and running along Kahala Avenue in the tightly packed mob of naked strangers who are all whacked on Ephedrine and crazed by too many pheromones in the air above the mob and the race and the mainly fanatical spectators who line all 26 miles of the race. And we will be there at the finish line, me and Mr. Rice.”
—December 4, 2002
Honolulu Marathon Is Decadent and Depraved
Trouble can come at you from any direction these days, like being chased through a crowded parking lot by a pack of vicious stray dogs, knowing they want to kill you, but not knowing why—or being hit by a wing that has just fallen off a military jet plane that ran out of gas and exploded.… The world situation has become so nervous and wrong that disasters that would have been inconceivable two years ago are almost commonplace today. They are not our fault, to be sure, but still we live in fear of them—and so do professional athletes.
I learned these things and many others on my recent assignment to Hawaii, where I did some special coverage of the Marathon and evaluated some of the newest Nike equipment, along with my usual public muttering, intense listening, and distended body shots in the evening, when the sun sank toward Japan.… On these nights I spoke extensively with players, coaches, and one University president who must confront and cope with the fears of modern athletes on an almost daily basis.
My old friend June Jones, head football coach at the state university, told me more and more of his younger players are plagued with a genuine fear of dogs.
“Dogs?” I said. “That’s weird—these islands are full of dogs, thousands and thousands of them.”
Hawaii’s football team isn’t a dog anymore, thanks to June Jones. “I know,” he replied. “They are like cockroaches, I hate the bastards.”
I laughed. “Don’t be silly, June,” I warned him. “Are you trying to tell me that the University of Hawaii football program has languished for all these years because the players are afraid of dogs?”
“Oh, no,” he said quickly. “Not just dogs—about half my freshmen believe they’ll be killed if they ever fly on an airplane.”
“What’s so weird about that?” I snapped.
He stared at me for a few seconds, saying nothing, and then he turned away.
I wanted to tell him that I was just kidding about the UH football program languishing (the exact opposite is happening, in fact: Hawaii has the look of a school on a fast track to becoming a major football power—but more on that later), but just then I was seized by two very small women from Russia who laughed and said they had something to show me.
Which was true. They had a gold Russian coin with my face on it. I was stunned and even shocked, but not for long. Of course, these were Marathon winners, wild girls from St. Petersburg who won here last year, extremely impressive little beauties who had made such a fool of me then. I knew their names, but this incredible gold coin had momentarily scrambled my brain.
“Don’t worry,” the more aggressive one told me gently. “We forgive you. Meet me at the finish line tomorrow and I will give you a big Russian kiss.”
“Where is Sean Penn?” asked the other. “I want to kiss him too.”
“Forget it,” I told her. “Sean has gone to Iraq, maybe forever.”
“So what?” said the first girl. “Who needs a screwhead like Sean Penn? I would rather kiss a dog.”
I smiled and wished them good night, so we could all get a few hours’ sleep before the big race. It was getting late in balmy Honolulu.
We arrived at the starting line sometime around 4 in the morning—one hour before starting time—but the place was already a madhouse. Half the runners had apparently been up all night, unable to sleep and too cranked to talk. The air was foul with the stench of human feces and Vaseline. By 5 o’clock huge lines had formed in front of the bank of chemical privies set up by Marathon President Doc Barahal and his people. Prerace diarrhea is a standard nightmare at all marathons, and Honolulu is no different. There are a lot of good reasons for dropping out of a race, but bad bowels is not one of them. Will they finish? That is the question. They all want that “finishers” T-shirt. Winning is out of the question for all but a handful: Mbarak Hussein, Jimmy Muindi … Ondoro Osoro maybe. These are the racers. For them, this is a race.
The others, the runners, were lined up in ranks behind the racers and it would take them a while to get started. The top Kenyans were halfway finished, running four abreast, before the back of the pack of 30,000 tossed their Vaseline bottles to the side and passed the starting line and they knew, even then, that not one of them would catch a glimpse of the winner until long after the race was over. Maybe get his autograph at the banquet.
We are talking about two distinct groups here, two entirely different marathons. The Racers would all be finished and half drunk by 8 in the morning, or just about the time that the pack was pouring through the halfway point. The pros run smoothly, almost silently, with a fine-tuned stride. No wasted energy, no fighting the street or bouncing along like a jogger. These people flow, and they flow very fast. Watching the Racers race is like watching Kobe Bryant in the open court or Michael Vick turning the corner. Each one of them is literally one in a billion. A Racer in full stride is an elegant thing to see.
The marathon has become too big for the original group to handle; it is now the fourth largest in the world. When I first came to cover the spectacle in December of 1980, there were 8,000 runners. Today there are more than 30,000—10,000 more than last year alone. The small group of individuals who have run this race for years are overwhelmed, and the strain is obvious. This year the race brought in more than $62.5 million to the local economy, the bulk of which is spent on painkillers and bottled water.
Marathon running, like golf, is a game for players, not winners. That is why Callaway sells golf clubs and Nike sells running shoes. But running is unique in that the world’s best racers are on the same course, at the same time, as amateurs, who have as much chance of winning as your average weekend warrior would of scoring a touchdown in the NFL.
There are 30,000 of them now and they are all running for their own reasons. And this is the angle—this is the story: Why do these buggers run? What kind of sick instinct, stroked by countless hours of brutal training, would cause intelligent people to get up at 4 in the morning and stagger through the streets of Honolulu for 26 ball-busting miles in a race that less than a dozen of them have any chance of winning? This is the question we have come to Hawaii to answer—again. They do not enter to win. They enter to survive, and go home with a T-shirt. That was the test and the only ones who failed were those who dropped out.
There is no special T-shirt for the winner, but there is a $40,000 check. In the end the Kenyan men swept the first four spots and it was all East Africans until the Japanese placed eight through 15. Hussein held off Jimmy Muindi to win by four seconds at 2:12:29—a pace of 5:03.2 pe
r mile. Muindi ran at a pace of 5:03.4 per mile. To lose a 26-mile race by 4 seconds would be more than most of us could bear, but these men simply pack up and get ready for the next race. On the women’s side, the top three places were taken by Russians. The winner was Svetlana Zakharova, who surged past Albina Ivanova, the Russian national record holder, in the 25th mile to win in 2:29:08. I do not know the connection between Kenyan men and Russian women.
At the postrace awards dinner at the Outrigger Canoe Club, one of the Ethiopian women was offering around a blue plastic gasoline jug of special homemade Ethiopian liquor. It was an iffy proposition. It tasted recently distilled. I recognized the taste as being very close to white lightning, Kentucky mountain moonshine, what we used to call thunder road whiskey.
It is not really the most logical thing to do—akin to accepting cocaine in an airport bathroom from a stranger—but in the scale of things, drinking it seemed like the most normal thing to do.
—December 16, 2002
Public Shame and Private Victory
I would like to take as much personal credit as possible for the San Francisco 49ers’ mind-shattering victory over those poor bastards from New York last Sunday, but alas, I cannot. It would be like Jack Nicholson beating his chest and bragging/ boasting that he alone was responsible for the Lakers’ last three NBA titles.
Jack would never do that, of course. He is an honorable man and a totally loyal Lakers fan. He would never think of betraying them and calling them “doomed” just prior to another doomsday play-off with the Sacramento Kings—never bet against them in public or scorn their genetic makeup, never curse them on the Internet or announce on TV that he was switching his love to the Clippers from now on. No. Jack is a decent person.
Indeed. And I, apparently, am not. Because I did all those hateful, treacherous things to the 49ers last week, and I did them as publicly as possible.… I raved, I babbled, I even threatened to piss down their spines to consummate our divorce.
It was horrible, frankly, and I was deeply embarrassed by it on Sunday when San Francisco erupted from out of the bowels of footballs’ foulest graveyard to play 20 minutes of the finest and bravest and most beautiful come-from-behind football in 49er history, to beat the crazed and bewildered Giants by one truly desperate point, 39–38.
It was incredible, incredible. I came very close to going crazy toward the end. All around me, people were screeching and weeping and hammering on the bar like victims about to be executed. They were Giants backers, not just fans or fun bettors. No. They were Players, high rollers, serious, hardbitten people who had come from both coasts of America, England, Poland, and even Switzerland for this annual orgy of gambling on the NFL play-offs.… These people have been here before, they know the rules: Unlimited betting, no violence, with no mercy expected and none given. Caveat Emptor.
It would not be fair, at this point, to continue this thorny saga without confessing that I had, in fact, bet heavily on the Giants to Lose by no more than three points. Ho ho. That’s one way of putting it, anyway. Yes sir, I was wise, I was suave and shrewd to figure out some way to win my bet and remain faithful to the 49ers at the same time.
But that would be a lie, eh? Right. So let’s have a look at what I was saying about the 49ers this time last week. To wit:
In a column titled “Death of the 49ers,” I said, “They will go nowhere in the play-offs.… They are a puffball team with no soul and the Giants will beat them like sick rats.… I piss down the spines of the craven 49ers.”
Wow. That is horrible, eh? That is really stupid, vengeful stuff. That is ugly and wrong. It sounds like something you’d hear out of some sleazy drunken sot. It is embarrassing.
I will not comment on that—but I will say that I owe the San Francisco 49ers a profoundly sincere Apology for that berserk outburst. It was rude, and cruel, and degrading—and most of all, it was Wrong, disgracefully wrong, dismally Wrong, painfully Wrong.… I fouled myself by saying it, I humiliated my family. They shunned me like some kind of filthy stinking animal with evil in its heart, and I suffered.
Hot damn! I feel wonderful now. I feel beautiful and pure, now that I finally got that dumb bitch of a Shame off my chest. I feel like my old self again, only better—and I did, of course, Win so many, many complex Bets that day that I felt like a combination of Bill Walsh and Genghis Khan. It was like winning some kind of brutal lottery, where the winner gets obscenely rich and all the losers get castrated. I felt almost Holy.
Ah, but those suckers are gone now (except for one or two that I look forward to fleecing again, this week) and things have calmed down around here, if only for a few nervous days, and then it will start building again.… This is a hard life, out here in the wilderness, but it is all we really know, so we do the best we can, and we cope with it pretty well.
Which reminds me that I also won heavily with the Jets and the Falcons on Saturday. Heavily. You bet. Those foreigners got what was coming to them, this time around. Their luck ran out. They lost everything, and we had no pity on them. It was fun.
In one high-visibility situation, Anita flogged the arrogant Ewing brothers from Charleston so smoothly and so cruelly that they lost control of themselves. They had given NY plus 3, and by halftime they were gloating and flouncing around the room like rich peacocks. It was disgusting. I was tempted to give both of them a taste of my 225,000-volt safety stick that I use against intruders—right then these two pompous bastards were looking very much like nasty intruders to me.… But cooler heads prevailed, and the second half got under way without incident.
The score went from bad to worse almost instantly. The Giants scored easily, making a mockery of the SF pass defense. The score was 38–14, and the Giants were just getting warmed up. I could see 55 or even 66 lurking just around the corner. The 49ers seemed beaten, and bored. I gritted my teeth and began chain-smoking cigars, good cigars, just to keep my nerves calm and my temper deeply concealed.
The game was interrupted now and then by White House– inspired commercials showing half-naked children smoking dope and killing each other with guns, or murdering a judge in Turkey, because stupid little Henry over here got weak and smoked a joint.… that Fool! He was just another useless victim of the War on Terrorism.
But so what? Wild things were happening on the TV screen. Suddenly the crowd was screaming and whipping on each other as the hapless 49er offense suddenly came alive like rock lizards. The lifeless worm of yesteryear was turning into an invincible golden snake with countless arms and legs. They were terrifying.
And the rest is History, folks—it was like seeing the Frankenstein monster come alive with a brain full of lightning. The Giants were ripped to shreds. They were utterly demoralized. It was pitiful. They were like helpless bums being chewed up and spit out, right in front of our eyes. They withered and turned to jelly. I felt sorry for the poor fools.
Okay. In closing, I’ll take Atlanta and Tennessee on Saturday—San Francisco and Oakland on Sunday. That’s it for now. Mahalo.
—January 7, 2003
Shooting the Moon with the Raiders
I was just settling down to watch the horrible 49er game on Sunday when a meteor crashed into a deserted pasture somewhere above my house and all the lights went out. My first thought was that somebody in the neighborhood had touched off an underground nuclear device, or maybe it was another earthquake, like the one that hit San Francisco during the 1989 World Series.
I felt the house shudder for a few seconds, but there was not much real noise—just a big Thump, then nothing.…
“What the hell was that?” said the Sheriff, coming up from an underground sheep laboratory. “Are you people doing some shooting up here?” he asked. “I just felt some kind of tremendous impact shock. It felt like a plane crashing.”
“So what?” I giggled. “The game is starting. Nothing else matters now. The joke is over.”
Indeed. The mob in the not-quite-sold-out coliseum was whipping itself into a frenzy as the Raid
ers took the field and began strutting and strolling around on the sideline and snapping footballs back and forth to each other, not talking much, just looking cool and acting sinister like any other gang of extremely high-priced, fine-tuned assassins on a big day at work.… Near one end of the Raiders bench, Jerry Rice practiced sprinter starts and quick bursts of speed, then flapped his hands crazily to loosen them up. It is a trick I use frequently, for the same reason, and I recommend it highly.
We had just suffered through another shameful, weak-minded performance by the chicken-crap 49ers. Their season came to a dismal end at the hands of the hard-rocking Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 31–6. It was horrible. I took one long, last look at that crowd of pampered, neurotic little bastards who have meant so much to my professional fortunes for so many years—and I regretfully said, “So long, you swine. I’m moving my act across the Bay to Oakland, where we still know how to win.”
You bet, buster. That Tampa game was so disgusting that I turned in my badge. It was humiliating. I wanted to hurt somebody. “Where is Al Davis tonight?” I said to Anita. “I want to be with him.”
“No, you don’t,” she said firmly. “You’d better start concentrating on this game, or these gamblers are going to make a whimpering fool out of you. They still hold a grudge from what happened last year, when they pushed themselves to the brink of their own possibilities, only to be chopped off at their knees at the last moment, and they are still bitter about it.”
“Are those creepy bastards finally out of the valley?” asked the Sheriff. “I can never relax until they leave town.”
“Then stay on your toes,” I warned him. “Only one of them left. The other one will be here any minute, and he’s all cranked up about being fleeced.”
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