Sports in Hell (24 page)

Then there was a moment of silence for the troops, although I gotta believe if a soldier was there he'd have said, “Are you people crazy? This shit is dangerous!”

Then, through a big PA system, Jeff started explaining the rules and reciting all the disclaimers, and concluded with: “And remember: ‘No practicing!'” which, of course was the biggest lie since, “I thought it was flaxseed oil!” Everybody who was any good had been practicing feverishly. They even have a preseason. In fact, this particular preseason, at a party, Jeff stuck a Jart rather snugly in Shane's foot. “He wasn't watching,” Jeff explained. It remained in his foot for a second and took out a pretty nice swath of flesh. Lots of blood, as usual. Trip to the hospital, as usual. Thought it better not to tell the ER people the truth, as usual.

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:

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:

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 partner, 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.

A
nd 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
.