Okay. I’m now 54 but there’s something in me, like most guys, that tells me that aging is about nothing more sinister than a change of emphasis. My challenge is not my bum knees, it’s just a question of which Olympic sports I want to play.
I despise golf. I’m still too young to accept that degree of decrepitude. Skeet shooting would be just about right if I had a shotgun, but I don’t. So I’m proposing two new sports for the Olympics, and needless to say, I’m pretty sure I could win.
First one: throwing up crumpled up pieces of paper into wastepaper baskets. I became really, really good at this when I spent a year as a staff writer for the local daily paper. Being a features writer, I came in at 9:00 a.m. and had the newsroom to myself. From where I sat I could see six wastepaper baskets, ranging in degree of difficulty from zero–the one right next to my chair–to the full 10.0.
Having played a lot of darts helped but this sport demanded a whole ‘nother set of skills, kneading and wadding the paper in your palm until it’s a pure springy sphere, aerodynamically perfect, faintly slick with skin oils that will lower the frictions, balanced perfectly so it won’t fade left or right at the last second. It’s an art. Imagine if the discus throwers had to make their own disci. They’d be knocking out spectators and judges all over the place.
I trained ruthlessly. If I missed I took a step back and tried again until I was in the next room, banking it off the windows, off a computer screen.
My other sport: orange peeling. (You can train for this in a newsroom, too.) Orange not to exceed to the diameter of a baseball. Winner is the one who produces the longest unbroken peel. I started competing in college, though I wasn’t on an orange scholarship. Just one of those things you feel you have to do. We had good facilities, in that silverware and oranges were readily available, and by the end of my first year I was regularly peeling eight feet.
Let me give you a tip, speaking as an expert: don’t use a knife, use a teaspoon. And another thing, avoid those oranges with the thick skins. Too brittle. Go for the navel oranges with the thin, leathery skins.
Now, you may say that orange peeling degrades the Olympics because it’s a science rather than an art. But let me tell you, when you see that strip of peel, thin as a shoelace, curling around its own invisible axis and the sweet fruit plump and radiant beneath it, juice virtually springing through the membrane, if you don’t think of Dorothy Hamill spinning inches above the shining ice, then there’s no hope for you.
Sunday April 13, 2008
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5 users responded in this post
2. I liked that you turn something simple, like throwing paper into a wastebasket, into a whole new game. The paragraph about golf seems a bit of place however, I would try to work it into the rest of the piece better, or you could probably do without it all together.
3. I thought the piece was funny, and took two things one would normally consider boring and made them into potential Olympic sports. I like the mention of skeet shooting in the beginning, because it provides a nice contrast to the relatively calm and peaceful sports of throwing crumpled paper and peeling oranges. I noticed an issue with this sentence: “Orange not to exceed to the diameter of a baseball.” It seems to me that it would sound better with “orange is” otherwise it just sounds weird to me.
2. The first idea was great – the second less convincing for me
Entertaining, but it didn’t really grab me. It’s ok.
2-3. “It’s a science rather than an art” – love that. And I like how it’s sort of Zen yet it has that Western thing going on w/the competition. I also like that it tells us something more about you that makes you even more endearing.
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