The Umpire Has No Clothes

by Walter Witty

  AIR SHOW KILLS 152

  Air races which ESPN at first called “thrilling” nonetheless turned deadly for mannequins in Dallas when two fighter jets collided and crashed in a ball of flame into a crowd of test dummies on the tarmac. The F16s were being raced at supersonic speeds by the Pentagon, which was filming a recruiting film in attempts to justify spending $50,000,000 in development costs per jet by purporting to defend South Korea and Afghanistan (which buys Russian oil to fuel them, and hires engineers from India to maintain them.) The on-board 20mm cannons, which fire 6000 rounds a minute at $10 per shell, did not fail during the show, as evidenced by the riddled carcasses of unused Bethlehem Steel box cars set up as targets. Charges by critics that the only live targets the jets have ever engaged were the $200 sheds Osama bin Laden taught the Taliban to erect out of plywood in remote desert hills by the hundred, (and whose positions were then leaked to the Marines), were dismissed, as well as the statement by Nobel Prize winning economist Walter Mills that, “This is an economic war game, and Osama is winning with breathtakingly ironic success, even from his grave.” Happily, the pilots ejected in time, and “feel awful about what happened,” which is more than can be said about their commanders, who are calling them “heroes” for helping use up the budget in order to justify increasing it next year. As for the crowd of eight thousand real taxpayers in the stands, nothing was said. . . . although promoter Lt. Dudley Doright declared, “If there’s a silver lining, it’s that everyone who is anyone is truly safe. . . although we feel sorry for those who are not.”

  RELIGIOUS FANATICS FOILED IN HOLLYWOOD BUST

  Across the street from the Beverly Hills Church of Scientology, a SWAT team today burst in on a gathering of the INNER CIRCLE, a secret and selective group of actors, singers, models, designers, and sports commentators who have sworn allegiance to the cell’s God. Under interrogation, actress Calista Flockhart shared her group’s goals. “We intend to rid the world of anyone who can’t afford Fendi and Gucci. If people never heard of you, you’re not really alive anyway, and therefore you shouldn’t be polluting a beautiful planet which we, in fact, own. Am I right?” Sixteen canisters of Sarin gas were found on the premises, along with assorted land mines, rocket launchers, Stinger missiles, and crates of poisoned Poison perfume. In addition, it was learned that God’s bodyguard—Kevin Costner—had been promised a return to the A list from the dreaded C list once he completed his mission in Wichita against “those who are not even on the Z list.” When it was suggested that God herself was now on the Z list, Costner first seemed stunned by the blasphemy, then whispered, “Hey, maybe there’s a place for me and Harrison in the Trinity, after all?” Raising his voice, then, Costner added, “Ally be praised!”

  DIEry ENTRY 5: Who’s Keeping Score, Anyway?

  Listen, I know a guy who actually has 600 VHS video tapes of games, and he’s just scratched the surface of what’s out there. Some Saturdays, when he could be painting his house or at least ferreting out the raccoon in his attic, (which, incidentally, is tearing out boards to build its own man cave), he just sits and rewinds tapes to watch and re-watch tennis matches played ten years prior. The balls go back and forth, just like they do now. No difference. NONE. Think about that. Why is the score TODAY and even THIS VERY INSTANT more important than yesterday’s scores? What makes a score of ten minutes ago more important than one ten years ago? Scores are just numbers. They don’t accumulate like the Deficit does. Or like the years do off your life, as you watch, and which you will never get back. I hear you shouting about record books, but who reads those, and where are they kept? There’s so many scores, so many stats, now, that you could fill entire libraries with those record books. Jorge Luis Borges would have trouble tracking all the records of sporting “events,” and he wouldn’t find the justification for it any more than you can! And it’s not just visual records that you’ll accept. Sometimes you listen to some nut on the radio with the vocabulary of a third grader attempt to describe to you each and every trajectory (and spin) a ball takes on each (and every) play. If the announcer never made it to the fourth grade, big deal, you say. Doesn’t matter. In fact, you seem to PREFER it. But let me remind you: a score is still just a number, like the number of water damaged tiles on that ceiling you’re not fixing. A ball is still just a ball. And Time? Well, that’s what we’re all running out of. . . or from Einstein’s perspective, an illusion. Kinda like the ego is an illusion. In short, your number will soon be up, and here you are obsessed with someone somewhere (this very instant) making it into a record book that no one ever takes the Time to read because they’re too busy watching New balls flying in New games. Can you say “dysfunctional?” Add to this a pathological need to identify with fellow fanatics, and to symbolically kill one’s rivals while bolstering a fragile egotistic delusion of grandeur. (I say fragile, because, even if you actually play sports yourself, and so might appear to be a babe magnet and not a face and stomach for radio, you’re still obsessed with the next score, as though the one you just heard didn’t matter much. Or as much as you thought it would.) On top of this, players are shuffled around like trading cards in Monopoly’s Chance deck, and if they don’t go directly to Jail after Pennsylvania Avenue they pass Go to jump cities for Free Parking on Park Place. In the post-game analysis, the record books may show that while we diddled and dawdled, the world ended with a whimper (something about not making the playoffs.) Let’s just hope there’s someone left to change the numbers on the “leader” board.

  CHAPTER 5: Witty Wife

  What’s happened in the past year or so is very unnerving. First Kim complained about me laying around the house on weekends, saying that if I didn’t want to take her dancing I should at least get myself a hobby. “Okay, okay,” I agreed. Since I was already a tool-and-die man, I figured I’d set up a little metalworking shop in the garage. Putter around and maybe build some lawn furniture. But then we had this big argument over China taking up where North Korea left off. I knew Kim liked to watch wrestling on TV, but I was flabbergasted to hear her take the hawkish Republican side. So one day when she started yelling her lungs out over me laying in our hammock while our grass grew half an inch higher than Ed’s next door, I started calling around to various aerospace contractors and computer stores. It was really just a gag in hopes of watching her wig out. But then this guy over at the junkyard takes me serious and tries selling me sixty sheets of surplus titanium he just bought from a Russian Army/Navy catalog, along with six cases of vodka. Before long I’m dipping into our vacation fund so I can buy an old Minuteman booster engine that’s been collecting rust in a warehouse in Huntsville, along with enough SIMM chips to upgrade my Dell to fifty gigs. After that I’m assembling a fuselage in the back yard—and boy, did that really shut Kim up! Trouble is, she stopped talking to me completely when she found out I’d also taken a second mortgage on the house.

  Kim did like the publicity for a while. The first time I gave my missile a four-second test burn for the benefit of the police SWAT team who’d surrounded us, she actually stood up for me. I even overheard her argue about how I was saving the American taxpayer millions by helping update our Afghanistan-depleted military reserves as a private citizen. Kim praised my fiscal accountability too, letting them know that I don’t pay eighty bucks for a screwdriver like those wasteful Pentagon boys do. I felt so proud at that point that I only interrupted to admit that although my contribution wasn’t much, if EVERY neighborhood handyman and ex UPS driver upgraded their computer and built an ICBM beside his bird bath, the world would be so much safer as a result. Then, I said, all the terrorists out there would know we can be as insane as they are, and we’d have the world’s respect at last!

  Luckily, we managed to calm everyone down by serving fried chicken. And by the time I started talking about how I was helping the government concentrate on big issues like health care and out-of-control-celebrities some of them had even lowered their M-16s. Soon after the question and answer period of my lectu
re, though, I did confess that my missile didn’t really house a warhead—just a canister of some spent nuclear fuel rods I’d picked up along the interstate. Not only were they calmed by this point, they promised to take up a collection to see if they could help me buy a decent second-hand Cold War nuke through Amazon.

  I thought Kim was proud, herself, when Bush visited to congratulate me for invoking the spirit of “private enterprise.” George, as I recall, said over and over how this might revise history books to make him the hero, too. His fondest hope, he said, was that my spirit of cooperation would spread to those on the fence about donating to the new Bush Library at Disney World. Not only did Kim smile for the photographers as the former prez rattled on, she seemed to take great pleasure in showing them my launch facility, which consists of my now sentient Dell (nicknamed “Dr. Strangelove”) linked to a shortwave radio in my greenhouse. What’s more, I even overheard her discussing how my efforts might make dictators everywhere take a powder after the Cubans confirmed what was going on. At this point an active Pentagon general interrupted to reward me with a canister of nerve gas, circa 1958, to enhance my arsenal. The only stipulation was that I had to get a Doberman to protect it. Naturally my neighbor Ed was so jealous by then that he swiped my Silver Star off the barbecue grill.

  Yet it was Kim’s ejection from the Garden Club that showed me the truth of my error. It was all right while Hillary was consoling her, but when everyone left in Avis Rental cars she had to deal with the ladies of our community, who hadn’t slept for days, and insisted there might be an accident. My problems were compounded when during the night Chuckles—my three month old Doberman—suffered a mysterious malady which left him paralyzed from the muzzle down. I called the White House on the suspicion that my nerve gas was leaking, but the switchboard operator told me our current Prez was at a stadium christening ceremony in Buffalo, and suggested I call former VP Cheney instead. Dick was visiting Floyd Cramer, a plumber in Baton Rouge who’d successfully assembled a makeshift Cruise Missile out of galvanized pipe, and so merited a Gold Star, or maybe an Unobtainium Medal. When that call wouldn’t go through either, I then dialed Scuba World and ordered a wet suit and air tank. By nightfall I’d buried my leaky canister in a landfill outside of town, on top of which they didn’t plan to build another Starbucks and movie theater until May of 2016. Soon breathing easier, I replaced the missing canister with a tank of laughing gas so no one would suspect.

  Funny, how odd and deceptive life can be. Ever since this incident Kim has been sleeping in the guest room, and watching the WWF on an ancient tube TV we have set up in there. She won’t listen to me when I explain to her that I’m only doing this because Washington needs all the diversion it can get. Only time she perks up and wants to trade insults anymore is whenever I suggest that the wrestling on TV is fake!

  DIEry ENTRY 6: The Horror!

  George Orwell once said that, “Sport is war without the shooting.” He was dead right. Now he’s just dead. Although he does come back to life at odd moments for Walter Witty before I awaken in a clammy sweat. But before I show you that horrific Orwellian future world we will soon inhabit if we don’t downgrade sports to “just a game” status, (ruled by vampires, ghouls, and zombies), let’s revisit my (actual) unfortunate past.

  I lost my two front teeth to an elbow during a required basketball class in the ninth grade. Then a jock came down the hallway after class and—because I wasn’t going to be playing for the society team—slammed a pile of books onto my head while I wasn’t looking. This put me into traction for a week, with a crushed vertebrae that left me with permanent numbness in one hand and a low grade ringing in my ears.

  Sports and violence: my contention is that they go together hand in claw. Do we need to go through a long litany of players who got arrested for an entire gamut of violent offenses? Some of these clowns played defense by resisting arrest and shouting, “Do you know who I AM?” The implication to this question is that the player is above the law, above your pay grade, and above criticism. Kinda like a god. . . or banker. Who are you, by comparison? A mere worshipful fan (or, rather, religious fanatic.) Am I saying that all sports fans are clueless nut job taxpayers who gets led around by corrupt politicians, or (by the nuts) by sports deities hyped by artificially sweetened deals as a sideline to promoting season tickets? Of course not. Walter is saying that. He also reminds me of the historic connection of sports with war.

  You see, ever since ancient times, when the Hittites and other Bronze Age Indo-European teams donned feathered helmets and jerseys to slaughter each other on endless fields of nightmarish competition, the phrase “being a good sport” has had a double-edged meaning (much like any sword sharpened on the fabled satiric stone.) Good, as we know today, also means bad. (As in the twisted value reversal “you bad.”) Wrong is also right (bankers), up means down (housing pre-2007), and black means white (attacks on Obama’s mother and birth certificate.) To say a competitor was “slam-dunked” and is now “slap happy” after a “full court press” meant that the contestant failed to score (kill) his opponent trapped in a box canyon, and is walking-on-Air-Jordans ecstatic that his team, after the playoff, only held his head under a horse’s watering trough and slapped him around a bit. . . they didn’t do a “grand slam” (five minutes under) or “take cuts” in a genitals-first “double header” (after which two former accessories were knocked “out of left field” by the reigning “switch-hitter.”)

  Getting back to current atrocities, there could be another reason why a jock would shout, “Do you know who I AM?”

  Because he doesn’t know, himself.

  That’s right. This could be a cry for help. I mean, take the NFL. The sport is so brutal that players are required to do many of the same things the gladiators once did before getting their heads lopped off. One is to target other player’s injuries. True, they don’t give you a trident or sword like they did in Rome or in Greece, back when the Spartans paved the way to the Olympic Games. But the effect might be the same. And very soon, near retirement, that player is staring down at a dwindling check and wondering how long before he won’t be able to sign it. . .or recognize the name on it. (Mohammed Ali wasn’t the only one with this problem.) If only he’d gone into banking, he realizes, there would have been no consequences to his battles. Or if he’d been a gangster rapper, he could have dissed everybody—including handicapped kids—without ever getting into a ring or onto the gridiron, and come out of it smelling like a rose-scented Glade plugin. Who is he, now? Just another cripple up cripple creek. (Or a has-been commentator forced to break for commercials pushing diabetes-water on fat kids.)

  Are you ready to find salvation from sports yet? To free your mind to see how deep the rabbit hole goes? Let’s see. Just repeat after me: “My name is (fill-in-the-blank), and I’m a sports addict.” Did you do it? If so, that’s a first step. Only eleven more to go. Glory, hallelujah! Now that you know who you are in the universe (i.e. not much), I’ll bet you’re already feeling empowered to take new baby steps to save the Earth while saving your sanity and discovering a whole world of possibilities. Right??

  What is there other than sports, you ask? Is. . .that your question?

  You didn’t say the words, did you. You’ve still got ESPN on in the background. I can hear it. Okay. So try suicide. That’ll do the trick.

  CHAPTER 6: The Case of the Solitary Cyclist

  Beside the tall red fence.

  A breeze blowing warmly.

  Late afternoon.

  With my homemade periscope I could see Mrs. Robbins through the French windows, coming into her kitchen with a big bag of groceries, back from the store. Mr. Robbins was in his usual place, watching TV on the patio, and didn’t offer to help.

  Mr. Robbins was HUGE. Way he looked, he might have weighed a ton. And he just sat there in the lounge chair out back while his wife did all the shopping, went to work, and did the dishes. Used to be he was the State cycling champ, but gradually the kids took over,
and he was one of those who had to be first or nothing. Or so it’s said. Now he never rode his bike anywhere. He had a stand beside him where he’d put his crackers, beer and things, and he’d just sit there eating and watching, eating and watching in the warm mornings, the hot afternoons, the cool evenings while his gut hung out of his belt like great folds of dough. Since the redwood fence was erected, it didn’t bother him to move out of the house onto the patio with the wide screen HD TV Mrs. Robbins made the mistake of buying. Mom said something about him being lazy, and being out of a job. Dad said a few things Mom would have washed my mouth out with soap for saying. He was tired of hearing about those old trophies at their lodge meeting.

  “So what’s going on?” repeated Pete Fibbs, my sometimes friend and classmate.

  “Shhhhh. . .she’s inside,” I said, waiting for the argument I’d heard every night for weeks and weeks. ”She’s taking the groceries out of the bag.”

  “What’s the, uh. . . fat guy doin’?”

  “Watching TV again.”

  “Watching TV,” Peter Fibbs mimicked in a dead monotone, then let the silence soak it in. ”And I’ve got to go home, Wally. We start school tomorrow, ya know. High school.”

  I turned and whispered hotly. “Will ya wait a minute? She’s coming out on the patio now. She’s got a can in her hand. This is it. This is where she lets him have it!”

  The TV droned, babbling like a happy baby off under a cloud-crowded sky.

  Pete stood beside my kid brother Jonny, shaking his head impatiently as we listened.