by Rick Reilly
Uh, see, this flamingo jumped him and …
Anyway, Jeff ended his speech with: “OK, let’s get to work.”
Work?
I guess it’s possible, since the payout was $300 a person for first, $200 for second, and $100 for third—plus your name on that T-shirt forever—which meant everybody was giving up their NCAA amateur Jart standing, which meant they were professionals, which meant maybe it was work.
Partners were drawn from a hat, which made absolutely no sense, since two extremely good players could get each other and walk away with it (Shane, for instance, got his father, who is also slightly bat-guano crazy about Jarts) and two players who suck at Jarts worse than Dick Cheney sucks at hunting could get each other (I got a thin, curly-brown-haired woman named Allysa Blankenship who hadn’t seemed to ever have thrown a Jart in her life).
“Actually, I played my first game the other night,” said Blankenship, thirty-six, who works for a company that makes spoons and reels. That was one more game than I’d ever played. We were screwed. Maybe there’s a squirrel-hunting division?
Suddenly, the triple-elimination tournament was on. There were four matches going on at once, four Jarts per match, which meant sixteen Jarts flying pretty much all the time, which made the center of the yard a very good place to aerate your neck. Also, you realized right away, this was the single worst place in the world for wearing open-toed sandals, which is what TLC was wearing. Luckily, she was over by the beer tent, getting hit on by the Steve Garvey–looking character who sang the national anthem and had been hitting on her, nonstop, ever since. The guy had all the lines:
“What’d you think of my vibrato?”
“Really? You used to teach history? Tell me about, I don’t know, WOODrow Wilson.”
“Is it just the light, or are your eyes really that blue?”
So she finally excused herself on the grounds that she had to keep notes on my match for the book and quietly came over and stood about eight feet behind me. If she’d have been there from the beginning she’d have noticed that Alyssa Blankenship is to the World Jarts Championship what Jose Feliciano is to the Indy 500. Lovely woman, Alyssa Blankenship. Very friendly. Great laugh. But sometime in her life she underwent a coordination bypass operation. She’d begin swinging the Jart forward to throw it and let it go at the bottom of the arc, so that it would fly—no joke—five feet in front of her and then thwangggg! into the grass. The next time she would let it go well past the usual release point, so that it would fling straight up in the air and nearly pierce the ball caps of the people in the next game over. Or she would suddenly just haul off and throw it farther than some Ford Explorers go on a gallon of gas.
One of these instances was ten seconds after TLC was taking her quiet position behind me and putting her little digital camera to her face. The next two seconds happened in super slo mo:
Alyssa’s very dangerous right arm, suddenly swinging forward like she’d had 100 cc’s of Barry Bonds High-Quality Arthritic Rub.
Me watching said Jart fly over my head.
TLC, face buried in camera, snapping photo of the plastic ring on the grass.
Alyssa’s eyes getting very big.
Me, suddenly spinning around in horror.
Jart, going splat, directly into TLC’s ankle.
It seemed like it took a full second before TLC jumped up as though chomped by a snapping turtle. She was quite surprised to find a rather large gash in her ankle and a very big, pointy, heavy red Jart lying at her feet.
Definitely should’ve Flamingoed.
Alyssa Blankenship covered her mouth in embarrassment as TLC hopped on one foot while holding the other, wincing.
“I … am … SO … sorry!” Alyssa moaned.
Shane and Jeff came over, looking like they’d just swallowed hand grenades. “This is so—weird!” Jeff apologized. “We’ve almost never had anybody injured, ever!”
“Except for this pre-season,” I corrected.
“Well, yeah, except for the pre-season.”
Smarmy Anthem Man practically pulled a hammy getting over to see if my girlfriend was going to be OK. “I can take her to the ER right now, if you want,” I think he said to me. “That way you can stay in the tournament.”
Very caring fellow.
As we bandaged TLC up, I pointed out to Jeff that since TLC wasn’t in the competition, she hadn’t signed the waiver, which meant she could sue. I looked at Shane’s brand-new home and yard and said, “What’s your equity in this thing?”
Against all odds, Alyssa the Missa and I won our first-round opponent by defeating a guy who was fairly drunk and a man who’d injured his throwing hand in a fistfight two nights before. Us 1, Alcohol 0.
During the break, Shawn sidled up to me like a KGB agent and asked if I’d like to see “the stash.”
The stash?
“Yeah, the stash of Jarts.”
Shane said the stash keeps the WCJ alive. He said he’s obsessed with finding more, since every year, more Jarts break. (Ankles can really damage a Jart.) Every year, they get harder and harder to find. You can’t buy them new, of course. You can’t find them in any used sporting goods stores. Even eBay doesn’t allow them on their site. Someday, there will be no more. Shane is running Edsel races, collecting Braniff miles, gathering dodo bird feathers. Time is running out.
So how does he get the Jarts? He devotes half his life to it. He has a Google alert ding him every time a box of Jarts shows up on eBay. It usually takes eBay about a day to find out about a new, illegal Jarts item, and then get around to deleting the entry and warning the seller, so Shane has to act fast. He sends the unsuspecting seller an e-mail that reads something like:
Dear Jarts Seller,
In less than 24 hours eBay is going to cancel your auction, as the selling or buying of Jarts on eBay is banned. But you can call me if you want to sell them. I’ll give you $35.
Sincerely,
Shane Davis
Shane’s garage was a Jarts museum. It was like going to the Havana Auto Show. He had about thirty sets of Jarts of every make and stripe, just about everything but the original Jarts invented in the 1960s by a dentist named Lawrence Barnett in his barn in Fort Edward, NY.
“This has never been opened,” he said, handling a set of black-and-white Jarts like a box of Fabergé eggs. “Someday, this box is going to pay for my kid’s education.”
To Jartmouth, obviously.
Just then, Shane’s wife walked in. “Is he showing you all his dang Jarts again?” she said, rolling her eyes. “My God, they’re everywhere! It’s so annoying!”
Behind every great man is a wife who would love to give his collection to the Salvation Army.
Anyway, because of all this, Shane has become the Jarts czar of North America. Some people call him Jart Boy. He gets three e-mails a day from people about how to get Jarts, run a Jarts tournament, or get invited to his tournament. “This year, we had a guy from Seattle who wanted to fly in,” Jeff told me. “But we only let in our friends. We don’t want this thing to get famous.”
It was two days before I realized that was a crack at me.
But the question had to be asked: What happens when you finally run out? When you can no longer find any Jarts anywhere in the world? What happens to the tournament then?
Jart Boy took a dramatic pause, looked me square in the eye, and said, gravely, “I guess that’s when we start manufacturing them ourselves.”
It was a chilling moment. Like being in the room the very first time one housewife looked at the other and said, “Midge, I really think I’m going to rip the Do Not Remove tag off that pillow.”
Alyssa the Missa and I immediately lost the next game, 21–10, to two women, one of whom grabbed her crotch to distract me every time I threw. Women, by the way, have never been on the winning team in the fifteen years of Jarts, for no apparent reason. Open-toed sandals, maybe?
While we were being soundly fricasseed by Miss Charm School and her partne
r, I had time to think about tournaments I hoped La Crotch Grabber would enter next: the Blind Jarts Open, the Parkinson’s Sufferers Open, and perhaps the Special Olympics Nighttime Jart-Off.
Just then, a woman showed up with her baby. Everything seemed to stop. People turned and stared at her as though she had a wolverine in her stroller. She had an expression on her face like, “What did I do?!?” Bringing your baby to a Jarts tournament is like bringing Snoop Dogg to a DEA convention.
Then we lost 21–3 to a fat guy and his skinny partner, then to a pair of guys who could’ve beaten us on crystal meth, which meant we’d lost three times and we were out.
To celebrate, I opened my can of beer with a sharp Jart plunge. Very satisfying.
The final came down to Shane and his dad vs. Shane’s brother and a tall athletic guy named Travis, who somehow was no relation to Shane and yet a good Jartist himself. The mood grew tense. In fifteen years, working like a slave on this tournament, scrounging Jarts worldwide for this tournament, buying a home just for this tournament, Shane had never won it. So, just before it started, he did a startling thing. He went into the garage and brought out the College Education Jarts.
Epic, dude.
It was the best two out of three to see who would be considered—arguably—the two best Jarts players in America. Sort of like competing to see who were the Two Best Rotary Phone Dialers in America.
In the end, Shane and his dad won and I really thought Shane was going to cry. Everybody was backslapping him and shaking his hand, and then suddenly a wellspring of emotion rose in him and he went into that angry-jubilant-defiant thing that male winners in sports do nowadays where they suddenly seem to be angry, and he started yelling, “This is MY house! This is MY house!”
Actually, Shane, once TLC perfects her limp, it’ll be ours.
13
Homeless Soccer
And now, introducing the starting lineup for your United States of America World Cup soccer team:
At one forward, a man who slept six months in a graveyard this year, Ray-Ray!
At defenseman, fresh from a bust for cashing stolen checks and possessing a weapon, Pop!
And at goalie, a man who lives on the streets because, as he says, “guys steal from you in the shelters,” Reggie Jones!
Did I mention that this is the starting lineup for the United States of America homeless soccer team? And they are playing in the Homeless World Cup?
Yes, against all logic, the Homeless World Cup actually exists. This one was scheduled for Copenhagen in August 2007. How could it get any dumber than this? You combine a very dumb sport by itself—soccer—with an even dumber premise, and you’re there! The main question I had was: If a homeless team did happen to win the Homeless World Cup, where would they put it? In their grocery cart?
The more I thought about a homeless World Cup, the more disgusted I got. This one didn’t seem just plain old dumb-as-feet dumb. This one seemed abusively dumb. Of all the things the world’s homeless cried out for, I thought, corner kicks did not seem to be one of them.
Dumber still was that forty-eight countries would be competing. Forty-eight countries had nothing better to do than scour their streets looking under wads of old newspapers for soccer players? Exactly how would you identify the best homeless soccer players in your nation, anyway? Hey, you! Under the bridge! Let’s see your bicycle kick! And how on earth do you schedule practices? There ain’t exactly a phone tree, I was guessing.
Then we read there were going to be huge stands set up for the fans. Fans? To watch homeless people play soccer? What exactly was the amazing skill they’d display? Drinking and dribbling at the same time? Was there a large demand to watch guys in mismatched boots take penalty kicks?
You knew there was going to be more sandbagging than the Donald Trump Member-Guest. The rules were vague. Basically, you had to be homeless within the last year, or in rehab, or in asylum. OK, the bad news: Your house just burned down. The good news? You’re starting at forward.
You could picture the Brazilian coach going, Uh, this is our striker, Ronaldinho. Many is the night he has spent on the streets. Yes, he was in his limo, but still.
Mostly, the whole idea just seemed cruel. Seemed like somebody’s idea of a yuk at someone else’s expense. Let’s watch these bums stumble around and throw up! Be hilarious on YouTube! How stupid was it to spend 3 million euros flying the world’s homeless to a damn soccer tournament when that money could go to, I don’t know, homes?
Man, was I wrong.
Usually in Copenhagen, everybody looks like Sting, including the women.
But on this week, everybody looked like Moms Mabley. Dentally speaking, first-grade class pictures have more teeth. This was soccer? The so-called “beautiful game”? There was one catcher’s-mitt-faced woman named Isabel—she played for Spain—swear to God, not a single tooth in her head.
That’s how you knew, right away, that this whole thing might be real. Because these people really were homeless. You could tell by the epidemic boniness and the asphalt-carved skin and the Oakland airport haircuts. These people really had been pulled up from their steam grates and their doorsills and flown to Denmark to play, of all things, soccer. Not just play soccer, but play soccer in the middle of Copenhagen’s main square, right in front of City Hall, in two walled soccer pitches the size of a kids’ YMCA basketball court, with full stands on each side and game announcers and the Crown Prince of Denmark watching, for the love of Jesus.
And what were they watching? Merely some of the worst soccer known to man. Pitiful dribbling. Clueless passing. Goalies diving for the ball a second and a half after it had come to rest in the back of the net.
The games were two seven-minute halves. Most teams had a few women. No rules on playing them or not. Three players on the pitch plus the goalie. Two could play the whole field, one had to play only on the defensive half. Although, with the field only seventy feet long and the goalies generally having all the athletic skills of grouper, plenty of goals were scored by defensemen just firing from their own end line.
But there were two things homeless players did far better than the pros:
1. Draw fouls. In trying to draw a whistle from the refs, your true World Cup soccer player will get brushed lightly with a kneecap and then fall to the ground and writhe around like he’s been pole-axed. When your homeless World Cup soccer player writhes around, it’s much more believable, probably because he usually has been shot before, and …
2. Celebrate. After every game—even if it was 21–0—all the players would gather in the center of the pitch, form a line, grab hands, raise them over their heads with utter joy, and then go rushing up to the crowd with a festive “Heyyyyyy!” Every time, the crowds would give them standing ovations and the players would hug and the referees would hug and the opposing coaches would hug. You’d have thought they’d all just won the European League Championship. Only it wasn’t fake or cheesy or over the top. You could just feel what a singular moment it was for homeless people—people that this crowd would usually cross the street to avoid—to be cheered lustily and long and honestly.
Actually, once you met them and heard some of their stories, you damn near wanted to hug them yourself. Like a kid on the Ghana team who became homeless when he lost all his papers while traveling in South Africa. Without ID, he had no way of getting home, getting a job, nothing. So he walked into a mall and stole the first thing he saw—a candy bar—then walked up to the security guard and said, “I stole this.” Only they didn’t send him home to prison, they sent him home to a mental institution. Which turned out to be a break, because that’s how he found the Ghana soccer team.
Or the Australian team captain, goalie Adam Smith, who had enough holes in his eyebrows, nostrils, lips, and ears to easily display the entire jewelry collection of all four Desperate Housewives. Adam usually sleeps in a parking lot. Not in a car. Under a bush. Possibly because he’s a schizophrenic. Which might be a rule violation in itself. Hey,
no fair! They’ve got two guys in goal!
The other thing I should mention about Adam is that he robs banks.
“See,” he explained, “I got a court order to stay on a certain kind of drug. And I hated that drug. Just hated it. I appealed and appealed and they wouldn’t let me off it. But then I found out that the only way to have the (order) rescinded was to be sentenced to a prison term of two years or more. So I went and robbed a bank. It wasn’t much money, really. I was just walking in and robbing one teller. But nobody caught me! So I robbed two more. I really thought I’d gotten away with it. But then, four months later, somebody saw me on Crimestoppers and turned me in. I was going into work and I was greeted with the butt of a gun right in my forehead.”
Now, you tell me, who else would you want as your captain?
But our favorite player was a young kid on the Zimbabwe team named Faral Mweta, just for the fact that until the moment he checked into the team hotel, he had never slept anywhere with walls, carpeting, or plumbing. Never! In Zimbabwe, Mweta lives under a piece of plastic, though this in itself is an achievement. With inflation at 100,000 percent at tournament time, the sheet of plastic and the poles he needed to hold it up went for one million Zimbabwe dollars. Mweta couldn’t afford that, so he had to go out and cut down branches instead. His roof is flat, though, so when it rains, the roof collapses on him. Either way, he sleeps on mud floors. So you can imagine his face when he checked into his fifteenth-floor room in his Copenhagen hotel—a one-star hostel to you, heaven to him.
“Oh, oh, oh!” he beamed when recounting the moment. He threw his head back and laughed, with his huge smile just completely annexing his whole fabulous face. “When you compare it to what I’m used to? Oh! Oh, oh, oh! It’s the best! It’s amazing! It’s awesome! You must understand, I live without electricity and water. Oh! To have a comfortable bed? To wake up and go straight into the bathroom without having to go outside? To simply switch on a light? Oh, it’s awesome! I wake up each day and I am SO happy!”