by Rick Reilly
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?”
9
Zorbing
It’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.”
Aubrey: You’re It!
Alex: I believe you know my attorney, Mr. Rothstein.
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? Percei
ved 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!
At last we climbed up those two waterfalls and, like Tom Sawyer and Becky, spied our first glimpse of sunlight in what seemed like months. I half expected CNN to be waiting as we crawled out. But, as it turned out, the only injury we had all day was at the free soup and bagel afterward. A guy from Canada was so starved and freezing, he burned his hand trying to hurry up the toaster.
Bagel toasting? Perceived danger: low. Actual: high.
Cave rafting as something to do for fun? Perceived: high. Actual? Lower than eel turds.
We arrived in Queenstown, the Extreme Sports Capital of the World, to a macabre site.
Three stories below the balcony of the apartment we rented, there was a funeral bouquet that marked the spot where, three nights before, a drunk young man had fallen off the roof, exactly above our apartment, trying to awaken a girl he’d met in a bar. Add to that the item in the paper about a parasailing instructor who wrecked into the lake the day before. An instructor! And the TV story about a rugby field at the end of a dirt runway at the Queenstown Airport. Several of the kicks had near misses with small planes. “Somebody’s going to die soon,” a neighbor said.
Queenstown: A Thousand Ways to Die.
In Queenstown, you can pay to bungee from a cliff, bungee from a bridge, bungee from a helicopter, ski from a helicopter, bungee from an airplane, parasail, parasail off a roof, bungee from a parasail, swing from one canyon wall to the other, snow luge, and land luge. You can hunt sharks, feed sharks, and swim with sharks. We rode on a 700-horsepower Jet-Ski boat (Jet Skis were invented here) down a narrow river, at times on no more than three inches of water, coming within a foot of rock canyon walls while spinning 540s. Queenstown mainlines thrills. We took a “flightseeing” trip in a little twin-engine that skimmed maybe 200 feet over 13,000-foot glaciers, then navigated a narrow fjord into Milford Sound on a runway no longer than a Hong Kong driveway.
All that was probably dumb. But none of them seemed dumber to us than Fly by Wire.
Fly by Wire involves strapping yourself into a rocket-plane contraption that looks like something Wile E. Coyote would’ve ordered from ACME. It’s about ten feet long, bright red, with a big propeller at the back. You lie facedown on it, with your legs all the way back toward the propeller and your arms extended out in front of you so you look like Superman in a bad helmet. They belt you in and hook the plane up to a steel cable that hangs down from an even bigger cable, which bridges two sides of a 1,500-foot-wide canyon. That’s it. It’s like a gigantic swing set, except instead of a swing you’re in your own mini-rocket. They tow you up, let you go, and for five minutes you fly around the canyon, steering this way and that as your stomach threatens to fall out of your mouth, though you’re still not as scared as the poor people on the observation platform below, whose haircuts you buzz at ninety-one miles per hour. Very bad place to work if you’re Shaquille O’Neal.
“Theoretically, nothing can go wrong,” the bus driver said as he took us up a heart-in-throat road to the canyon. “You can’t fly into the canyon wall and you can’t fly into the floor.”
To which I added, “No, we can’t do anything wrong. But you guys could? Right? Like not hook the cable up right?”
“I guess,” he said. “It’s never happened.”
I wanted to say, “Wrong, Bus Boy,” because, one time, something did go very wrong.
Fly by Wire was born out of a dream. A Kiwi named Neil Harrap woke up, made a bunch of drawings, turned it over to some engineers, and had it built. Everything went fine until the day a Swedish woman got into it and was happily zipping all over the canyon when she suddenly hit the handrail of the observation platform, breaking her arm. Turns out the winch that towed her to the top had slipped two and a half meters, just enough to change “buzz over” into “buzz straight into.” In America, she’d own Neil Harrap forever. He would cut her lawn and make her spritzers the rest of her days. But in New Zealand, the government paid for her medical bills and sent her on her way. And yet she lived!
Still, word got out about the wreck and tended to slow profits. Harrap took the idea to the U.S. instead, building three of them off I-35 in Fort Worth. He only had them open six weeks when nineteen inches of rain buried the whole site like Pompeii. Plan C: back to New Zealand, and Queenstown, where we found it.
Hoping he’d worked the bugs out, I climbed onto the liftoff platform. The guy running the whole thing, Darryn Tarkington, thirty-two, said that while I was in the air, he’d tell me what I was doing wrong via giant signs. Then he started holding them up to demonstrate:
Turn earlier
Turn later
Full power
Crap
Give up
I went second—right after a big, handsome, twenty-three-year-old kid from Melbourne. As he was getting out, elated, I was getting in, slightly panicked.
“You didn’t sweat this thing all up, did you?” I kidded, starting to lie down, face-first, into the bizarre little plane.
“Nah,” he said, “but I did piss myself.”
Feeling weak in the knees, I was looking for a way out. I’d noticed small planes and choppers and even a biplane fly overhead. “I notice the planes coming by,” I said to Darryn. “Aren’t we kind of close to the airport?”
“Yeah, but this is controlled airspace,” he said. “They need permission to fly over us.”
“But what if they forget to ask?” I thought. “Wouldn’t I still be dead?”
By then, Darryn was pointing out the red emergency stop button “in case anything goes wrong,” and also the green button to request another minute at an extra $15. One minute for $15. You don’t see prices like that this side of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch. For some reason, I kept thinking of that poor kid and the funeral bouquet, and I was laying 7-to-5 I’d hit the red button before I’d ever hit the green. I felt the winch start to tow me backwards up the hill, whether I was ready or not. “Say hello to the goat for me,” Darryn said as he waved good-bye.
The goat?
Sure enough, a hundred feet below me there was a goat, nibbling at the cable as it winched me up. Wait. The goat is eating the cable? What if he bites through it? Jane! Stop this crazy thing!
Too late. I was at the top—about 250 feet above the platform—and it was time for me to gun the engine and start strafing and soaring, except I felt nauseous, tilted ninety degrees upside down like that, watching the damn goat nibbling at my mortality.
Just screw it, I said, and I squeezed hard on the gas lever, which not only released the towing cable but goosed the plane so hard my hand slipped off it, which meant now I was just free-falling toward the platform, fishtailing as I went past everybody, in much the same style as a drunk America West pilot. I was sure I saw Darryn reaching for the Crap sign. I regripped and pulled hard and went flying up to the other side of the canyon, turned hard to the left, and felt my stomach do the rhumba in the zero gravity that was created at the top of the arc. Suddenly, I had only one thought:
Thank you, Neil Harrap.
Fly by Wire is not just dumb and dangerous. It’s dumb and dangerous and wonderful. It’s like driving a go-cart in midair. I buzzed TLC and then I buzzed the goat and then soared toward the top of the canyon on the other side. Now I had the hang of it. I’d get to the apex, then bank hard as if I were in a Sopwith Camel, feel this amazing zero-gravity rush, and then come
swooping down the other side like a hawk after a rabbit. I swooped up and down that canyon, left and right. It was like being on that giant swing set, only Godzilla is your dad, and he’s gotten ahold of A-Rod’s roid stash, and he’s pushing you so hard from one side to the other you think you’re going to bump your head on a Quantas flight.
There was a hiking trail along the ridge of one side of the canyon and I noticed a guy stopped, looking at me. I supposed he was a little shocked to suddenly see a man, strapped to a rocket, gunning right at him. I think it caused him to squeeze his raisins pretty tight.
When the fifteen-second warning buzzer sounded, I hit that green button like a heroin-addicted lab rat. And I kept pushing it. I would’ve spent a month’s salary on that damn button if I could’ve, but you only get one push. Still, it’s not often in life you suddenly get an extra minute after you thought you were done.
“I’d like a button like that,” TLC observed afterward.
Funny girl.
After a while in Queenstown, you get so amped up doing all these adrenaline-rush sports that you start to lose a little perspective. For instance, there was this exchange in the apartment:
TLC: You want to take a swim?
Me: A swim?
TLC: Yes.
Me: And what, they pull you behind a cigarette boat or what? You mean like an air swim? Like you dive off a cliff and swim through the air until the cable catches you? Or what?
TLC: No. (Pause.) Just a swim. In the pool. The swimming pool.
Me: Ohhhh, right.
And then we found it. The Fort Knox of Dumb Sports, a place called The AgroDome, outside Rotorua, where they had more dumb sports than Liz Taylor has chins.
They had Shweeb. They had Swoop. They had Zorb. We had no idea yet what they were, but we knew we wanted them all. And it was odd to hear people’s conversations near the ticket booth, as they contemplated which ticket packages to buy.