Sports in Hell (3 page)

Four seconds later, I decided I could no longer stand it.

So I started counting … One, two, three … I was pretty sure I was leaving out the “one thousand” between each number. It was the longest minute of my life. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure I made it a half minute because I can't remember if I saw a water splash. I would've had to have seen at least one, right? I'm telling you, in that kind of furnace, your mind just goes completely Paris Hilton. At the count of sixty, I came barreling out of there too fast for the guards to let me out smoothly. I must wait for them! The bastards! May your daughter's wedding be in one of these things!

In watching other heats, I'd wondered why even the losers came out grinning and raising their hands in victory, but now I know. The cool air was so beautiful, so redeeming, so life-giving, that you couldn't help but smile a cantaloupe and pump your fist at just breathing it. You are out. You are taking in lovely, fresh, icy air. You could French-kiss Osama bin Laden.

I looked at the clock. Three minutes, ten seconds? 3:10? That was it?

“But you guys were in there a good six seconds before they started the clock,” my buddy Thor said.

Well, OK, then. When did the first guy bolt?

“2:40.”

Which meant I'd counted my sixty seconds in thirty. Which meant I would make a very billable lawyer.

I took a gloriously freezing shower and then watched the rest of the heat on the TV in the back. Timmo the Great and another blond Finn teammate of his (they wore a spa maker's name across the cocks of their Speedos) moved on to the quarterfinals, in just over 7:30. Seven minutes and thirty seconds? It horrified me. I'm horrified for
them
. I still cannot comprehend the pain of another four minutes and twenty seconds. Backstage, Timmo was surprisingly pink. I went up to him, chummy, and slapped him on the back with congratulations. He turned on me like he'd like to knife me.

Note to self: Slapping backs a definite no-no among saunists.

The Japanese teen idol had withdrawn. He made it to the quarterfinals, but now his trainer wouldn't let him go on. “It is good to care about sauna,” the trainer scolded him, “but you must also care about the fans. You must care about the face they love.” It was probably a good thing. The guy was so ravaged by prickly heat he looked like a Christmas candy cane.

Thor had come up with a great idea during intermission. He was going to cook lunch in the sauna. With two eggs in his hands, he entered, but the heat slapped him sideways and he lost track of what he was trying to do. He learned what I learned: ten seconds in that sauna and your IQ suddenly goes straight to NASCAR fan. He set one of the eggs on the bench and the other up on a shelf, but as he was doing that, he managed to sit on the first egg. It instantly began to fry. No, seriously, it
fried
like it was at Denny's. But it was too hot for him to try to clean it up, so he bolted out. “Oh … my … God,” is all he would say.

Then there was the horrible tale of my friend Rick Ellis, the transplanted Russian from New York. He entered the quarterfinals with dozens of blisters on his body. We all told him he was crazy,
but he had no trainer and his wife held no sway. He climbed into the dreaded hot box, while we watched, full of dread. As he was going in, he looked like some of the worst guys coming out. You could tell that, instantly, even he saw it was a mistake on the order of Three Mile Island.

“Man, I knew I was in trouble right away,” he later said. “Soon as I sat down, I knew I had no chance. But when I felt behind my back and felt this big half-dollar-sized blister, I said, ‘OK, that's enough. I gotta get out.'”

He was the first out, at 4:15, and when we greeted him, I nearly ralphed. He was melting like the wicked witch. His forehead, his lips, and his ears were giant sacs of pus. His tricep was riddled with pebble-sized blisters, dozens of them. So much skin was hanging off him he looked like the world's most successful gastric-bypass patient. His forehead was a science fiction movie. His nose was cooked like a forgotten kielbasa. And this was just what we could see.

“I don't know, man,” I said. “Maybe you should go to first aid.”

“Nah, I'm fine!” he insisted. “Although it does kinda hurt back here.” He lifted up his shirt and there it was: this horrible, huge, pus-filled sac—the size of a $3 pancake—just hanging off his armpit. His wife gasped. TLC turned away in horror. Thor and I swallowed, fascinated. “Dude!” we both said.

When we dragged him to the first-aid EMT, the guy said, “You must go to the hospital. Within twenty-four hours, when these blisters break, you will lose lots of fluid. You will be highly susceptible to infection. We can't do anything for you here. It is too serious.”

So TLC and I piled him into our rented Volvo and took him to the hospital, where, as we were leaving, his wife was shaking her head.

I got back to find I'd been inserted into something called the Wild Card Final, involving six qualifying-heat losers whose sufferings
somehow amused the crowd enough to want encores. Wonderful. I vowed to go 3:11.

This time, somehow, it was even hotter, if that's possible. The bench was a wok. The skin on my back felt like the first night of Florida vacation when you've burned the bejesus out of your back and sides. But this time—counting all the cars I've ever owned—I managed to push through to four minutes, the second to come out again. My time was four minutes exactly. This time, the winner was a Bellarussian with about eight teeth total, who went just over six minutes. The guy who took second place, a milk-white Swedish guy I call Casper, was in the shower, looking defeated. “I knew I couldn't beat him,” Casper said. “I think he was drunk. I'm not sure he knew what he was doing.”

Good rule of thumb: never enter a sauna contest with someone who can't feel pain going
in
.

What's scarier than the men were the women. They were absolutely the meanest, toughest, and least attractive women this side of Rikers Island. They were all huge chunks of petrified wood, straw-haired and brute-faced, who looked like they just ate a lunch of boiled children and testicles. They were even more stern in the sauna than the men, and every bit as good. A former champ—Natalya Trifanova, also a Bellarussian—once actually lasted longer in the women's final than Timmo the Great did in the men's, but Timmo insists he could've stayed longer if forced to. There was talk that soon the women and men will compete in one field—like the Boston Marathon—to see, for once and all, who suffers best.

“Women are more tolerant of suffering by nature,” Natalya grunted. “Because of childbirth and things like this.” She is just slightly less expressive than a gulag wall. I asked her if she has a boyfriend. “Yes, we train together.” No smile. No nothing. This is not a girl you buy lingerie for. Or propose to. She just comes over to your house one day and barks, “Today, we marry,” slams
you with a shovel, and drags you down to city hall by your haircut.

Our favorite woman, though, was a Finn named Leila Kulin who looked like Brun Hilda's lesbian aunt. She had these two long ponytails down each side and a huge ruddy face that could stop a front-loading Caterpillar. She was about five-two, 220 pounds, and most of that was face and the rest sheer will. She sat with her back to the piping hot bench, that face staring straight ahead, and she
never
moved. She didn't tic, she didn't flinch, she didn't lean, she didn't shift, she didn't even twitch. Her blood type was asbestos. Mannequins move more than she did.

So, naturally, the women's final came down to Brun Hilda and the brickish Natalya, and it has got to be the greatest final of all time, either sex, in WSC history.

At seven minutes, Natalya was starting to crack, fidgeting this way and that, wiping her face, checking impatiently on her feet and looking at the ceiling. Plus, she was competing against Mount Sit-more, Leila the Stone, who still hadn't moved, not a millimeter. Nothing. She's not human. She was born without nerve endings. Or a hypothalamus. Against this granite opponent, Natalya looked like a squirrel trapped in a microwave. She was blinking three times a second. She was gulping air. She kept shifting her haunches this way and that, trying to find a comfortable spot, but of course, the joke was, there are none.

Her eyes were wide as hubcaps. She moved to rub her legs as though they were on fire and she had to put them out, but she knew she mustn't, so she stopped herself. Instead she rubbed over them, over and over, an inch above them, as though rubbing
near
them would help. We were seeing a woman be electrocuted, battery by battery, right in front of our eyes. Finally, she couldn't stand it and she snapped. She started rubbing her legs up and down, madly. The judge jumped up and showed a red card and motioned her out. Disqualified. But get this—
she wouldn't come out!
The judge beckoned again.
Get out!
But she wouldn't!

She was a half-cooked rabbit trying to escape an oven. She tried to get up, but her legs were baked stiff. She was paralyzed! The crowd gasped. She motioned the officials to come get her, but they didn't! They seemed transfixed by the situation. Or perhaps the idea of walking into a burning building gave them pause. And what was the Stone doing while a woman goes stark raving bananas next to her? Nothing! The Stone was pitiless. The Stone didn't even look at poor Natalya.

You're dying? Never heard of you
.

Natalya motioned the judges again,
Come get me!
At last, they went in—and you could see the heat hit them in the face like a Holyfield right—but they couldn't get her off the bench! It's as though she was glued! One try! Two tries! Nothing! She was going to die in there, in front of 500 people! Finally, they got a third man, and they were able to scrape her off the bench. They tried to get her into a wheelchair, but it was like trying to put an elm tree into a box, limbs were everywhere, and spasming. At last they folded her into it and raced her to the cold showers.

And now, finally, the Stone moved. And what moves! She leapt up off the bench in utter joy and barreled through the sauna door like Jesse James out of the Silver Dollar. She was bouncing up and down as they dragged off the poor quivering lump that used to be Natalya. Her winning time was 10:31, but you got the feeling she could've stayed in there and watched
Dr. Zhivago
. “I could've gone fifteen minutes at least,” she said. I believe it.

Meanwhile, backstage, they were pouring icy water on Natalya from three different directions, trying to save her life. And standing there, quietly, in the fourth shower was the Great Timmo, who was going to compete in mere minutes in the men's final. He saw her and looked away, shook his blond head a little, took a cleansing breath, and tried to get the image out of his mind.

It couldn't be comforting. He was the next gladiator up after they'd wheeled the last one off in sixty-three pieces.

•   •   •

Just before the men's final, Rick Ellis returned from the hospital. He was a walking bandage. Gauze covered both ears, his entire forehead, his nose, every square inch of his back and sides, some of his chest, practically everything but his knuckles, which probably should have them. From the look on his wife's face, I knew what was coming next: They'll be turning his sauna into a shoe closet. “Guess I'm glad I didn't bet on me,” he admitted.

Finally, the men's final arrived, and when the four pretenders bolted for their lives, it left the two favorites—Timmo the Great vs. Markku the Fu. They just sat and sweated and took furtive glances at each other, waiting to see if one of them would do the other the great favor of expiring so they could get the hell out. Ten minutes. Eleven. Twelve. It was a Hades standoff.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Markku the Fu stuck his hand out sharply for Timmo to shake it. Timmo looked at the hand for just a moment, as if to say, “What the hell?” It was a shocking moment. The man was congratulating his rival on winning when the event wasn't even over yet! It was like Kobe Bryant stepping up to take the game-winning three and LeBron James offering his hand in congratulations just before he shoots it.

Timmo looked at the hand and shook it, whereupon Markku the Fu jumped up and flew out of the door, followed like a noon shadow by Timmo the Great, champion again, in a winning time of 12:26. Sounds like a recipe, doesn't it?

1. Soak in cold water.
   

2. Broil at 261 degrees for 12 minutes, 26 seconds.
   

3. Serve.
   

The winner was humble. “I was guessing he was better than me today,” the great man said afterward, just slightly redder than a freshly cooked Maine lobster. “So I was surprised he shook my hand and left. Nobody's ever done that before.”

And what did Timmo the Great get for suffering longer than every other person? Sauna speakers.

Hey, congratulations on eating more hams than everybody else! Here's your free ham!

I worked my way over to him, shook his hand, and said with a grin: “Well done!”

He stared blankly at me.

Note to self: Saunists don't like puns.