Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

by Dave Barry

  Here are some other predictions: I look for the TV networks to provide helpful expert analysis by ex-players who utilize technological wizardry such as the “electronic chalkboard” to make simple running plays seem like brain surgery. I look for 19,000 third-down situations, all of them Crucial. In any group of five players, I look for four of them to be Probably the Most Underrated in the League. I look for Second Effort, Good Hang Time, and a Quick Release. I look for yet another Classic Super Bowl Match-up like the one we had last year between two teams whose names escape me at the moment.

  I look for a video rental store that’s open all weekend.

  Why Sports Is A Drag

  Mankind’s yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history, dating back to the time, millions of years ago, when the first primitive man picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the air, and whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first primitive umpire. What inner force drove this first athlete? Your guess is as good as mine. Better, probably, because you haven’t had four beers. All I know is, whatever the reason, Mankind is still nuts about sports. As Howard Cosell, who may not be the most likable person in the world but is certainly one of the most obnoxious, put it: “In terms of Mankind and sports, blah blah blah blah the 1954 Brooklyn Dodgers.”

  Notice that Howard and I both use the term “Mankind.” Womankind really isn’t into sports in the same way. I realize things have changed since my high-school days, when sports were considered unfeminine and your average girls’ gym class consisted of six girls in those gym outfits colored Digestive Enzyme Green running around waving field-hockey sticks and squealing, and 127

  girls on the sidelines in civilian clothing, claiming it was That Time of the Month. I realize that today you have a number of top female athletes such as Martina Navratilova who can run like deer and bench-press Chevrolet pickup trucks. But to be brutally frank, women as a group have a long way to go before they reach the level of intensity and dedication to sports that enables men to be such incredible jerks about it.

  If you don’t believe me, go to your local racquetball club and observe the difference between the way men and women play. Where I play, the women tend to gather on the court in groups of random sizes—sometimes three, sometimes five, as if it were a Jane Fonda workout—and the way they play is, one of them will hit the ball at the wall and the rest of them will admire the shot and compliment her quite sincerely, and then they all sort of relax, as if they’re thinking, well, thank goodness that’s over with, and they always seem very surprised when the ball comes back. If one of them has the presence of mind to take another swing, and if she actually hits the ball, everybody is very complimentary. If she misses it, the others all tell her what a good try she made, really, then they all laugh and act very relieved because they know they have some time to talk before the ball comes bouncing off that darned wall again.

  Meanwhile, over in the next court, you will have two males wearing various knee braces and wrist bands and special leatheroid racquetball gloves, hurling themselves into the walls like musk oxen on Dexedrine, and after every single point one or both of them will yell “S-!” in the self-reproving tone of voice you might use if you had just accidentally shot your grandmother. American men tend to take their sports seriously, much more seriously than they take family matters or Asia.

  This is why it’s usually a mistake for men and women to play on teams together. I sometimes play in a coed slow-pitch softball league, where the rules say you have to have two women on the field. The teams always have one of the women play catcher, because in slow-pitch softball the batters hit just about every pitch, so it wouldn’t really hurt you much if you had a deceased person at catcher. Our team usually puts the other woman at second base, where the maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to help out in case of emergency. As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am anyway, but there’s no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal with it. She’s been on the team for three seasons now, but the males still don’t trust her. They know that if she had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, deep in her soul, she would probably elect to save the infant’s life, without even considering whether there were men on base.

  This difference in attitude between men and women carries over to the area of talking about sports, especially sporting events that took place long ago. Take the 1960 World Series. If we were to look at it objectively, we would have to agree that the outcome of the 1960 World Series no longer matters. You could make a fairly strong case that it didn’t really matter in 1960. Women know this, which is why you almost never hear them mention the 1960 World Series, whereas you take virtually any male over age 35 and even if he can’t remember which of his children has diabetes, he can remember exactly how Pirates shortstop Bill Mazeroski hit the ninth-inning home run that beat the Yankees, and he will take every available opportunity to discuss it at length with other males.

  See that? Out there in Readerland, you females just read right through that last sentence, nodding in agreement, but you males leaped from your chairs and shouted: “Mazeroski wasn’t a SHORTSTOP! Mazeroski played SECOND BASE!” Every male in America has millions of perfectly good brain cells devoted to information like this. We can’t help it. We have no perspective. I have a friend named Buzz, a SUCcessful businessman and the most rational person you ever want to meet, and the high point of his entire life is the time he got Stan Albeck, the coach of the New jersey Nets, to look directly at him during a professional basketball game and make a very personal remark rhyming with “duck shoe.” I should explain that Buzz and I have season tickets to the Philadelphia 76ers, so naturally we hate the Nets a great deal. It was a great honor when Albeck singled Buzz out of the crowd for recognition. The rest of us males congratulated Buzz as if he’d won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

  It’s silly, really, this male lack of perspective, and it can lead to unnecessary tragedy, such as soccer-riot deaths and the University of Texas. What is even more tragic is that women are losing perspective, too. Even as you read these words, women are writing vicious letters to the editor, expressing great fury at me for suggesting they don’t take their racquetball seriously. Soon they will be droning on about the importance of relief pitching.

  Batting Clean-Up And Striking Out

  The primary difference between men and women is that women can see extremely small quantities of dirt. Not when they’re babies, of course. Babies of both sexes have a very low awareness of dirt, other than to think it tastes better than food.

  But somewhere during the growth process, a hormonal secretion takes place in women that enables them to see dirt that men cannot see, dirt, at the level of molecules, whereas men don’t generally notice it until it forms clumps large enough to support agriculture. This can lead to tragedy, as it did in the ill-fated ancient city of Pompeii, where the residents all got killed when the local volcano erupted and covered them with a layer of ash 20 feet deep. Modern people often ask, “How come, when the ashes started falling, the Pompeii people didn’t just leave?” The answer is that in Pompeii, it was the custom for the men to do the housework. They never even noticed the ash until it had for the most part covered the children. “Hey!” the men said (in Latin). “It’s mighty quiet around here!” This is one major historical reason why, to this very day, men tend to do extremely little in the way of useful housework.

  What often happens in my specific family unit is that my wife will say to me: “Could you clean Robert’s bathroom? it’s filthy.” So I’ll gather up the Standard Male Cleaning Implements, namely a spray bottle of Windex and a wad of paper towels, and I’ll go into Robert’s bathroom, and it always looks perfectly fine. I mean, when I hear the word “filthy” used to describe a bathroom, I think about this bar where I used to hang out called Joe’s Sportsman’s Lounge, where
the men’s room had bacteria you could enter in a rodeo.

  Nevertheless, because I am a sensitive and caring kind of guy, I “clean” the bathroom, spraying Windex all over everything including the 600 action figures each sold separately that God forbid Robert should ever take a bath without, and then I wipe it back off with the paper towels, and I go back to whatever activity I had been engaged in, such as doing an important project on the Etch-a-Sketch, and a little while later my wife will say: “I hate to rush you, but could you do Robert’s bathroom? It’s really filthy.” She is in there looking at the very walls I just Windexed, and she is seeing dirt! Everywhere! And if I tell her I already cleaned the bathroom, she gives me this look that she has perfected, the same look she used on me the time I selected Robert’s outfit for school and part of it turned out to be pajamas.

  The opposite side of the dirt coin, of course, is sports. This is an area where men tend to feel very sensitive and women tend to be extremely callous. I have written about this before and I always get irate letters from women who say they are the heavyweight racquetball champion of some place like Iowa and are sensitive to sports to the point where they could crush my skull like a ripe grape, but I feel these women are the exception.

  A more representative woman is my friend Maddy, who once invited some people, including my wife and me, over to her house for an evening of stimulating conversation and jovial companionship, which sounds fine except that this particular evening occurred during a World Series game. If you can imagine such a social gaffe.

  We sat around the living room and Maddy tried to stimulate a conversation, but we males could not focus our attention on the various suggested topics because we could actually feel the World Series television and radio broadcast rays zinging through the air, penetrating right into our bodies, causing our dental fillings to vibrate, and all the while the women were behaving as though nothing were wrong. it was exactly like that story by Edgar Allan Poe where the murderer can hear the victim’s heart beating louder and louder even though he (the murder victim) is dead, until finally he (the murderer) can’t stand it anymore, and he just has to watch the World Series on television. That was how we felt.

  Maddy’s husband made the first move, coming up with an absolutely brilliant means of escape: He used their baby. He picked up Justine, their seven-months-old daughter, who was fussing a little, and announced: “What this child needs is to have her bottle and watch the World Series.” And just like that he was off to the family room, moving very quickly for a big man holding a baby. A second male escaped by pretending to clear the dessert plates. Soon all four of us were in there, watching the Annual Fall Classic, while the women prattled away about human relationships or something. it turned out to be an extremely pivotal game.

  Snots At Sea

  Like most Americans, I was thrilled to death last February when our wealthy yachting snots won the coveted America’s Cup back from Australia’s wealthy yachting snots.

  It was not an easy victory. Our boys spent years experimenting with different designs for their boat before they came up with the innovative idea of having a submerged nuclear submarine tow it. “That was the real breakthrough,” explained Captain Dennis Conner. “We could hit nearly 50 miles per hour without even putting up our sails. Plus we had torpedoes.” It was American ingenuity at its best, and I think that, as a nation, we should be inspired to take up sailing as a popular mania, similar to the way, in previous years, we have taken up Bruce Springsteen and being Re publican.

  I have done some sailing myself, and let me tell you: There’s nothing quite like getting out on the open sea, where you can forget about the hassles and worries of life on land, and concentrate on the hassles and worries of life on the sea, such as death by squid. My son, Robert, has this book entitled Giants of Land, Sea, and Air, Past and Present, which I like to read to him at bedtime to insure that he won’t fall asleep until just after dawn. Here’s what this book says regarding squid: “The giant squid may reach a length of 55 feet, including its 35-foot tentacles.”

  My point is that while you should of course enjoy your sailing experience, you should take the routine marine precaution of being constantly aware that a creature the size of Yonkers, New York, could be oozing and sliming along just beneath the surface, watching you with humongous eyes. Another one of Robert’s books, The Big Book of Animal Records, states that the eye of a giant squid can get to be—this is an Amazing True Nature Fact, coming up here—16 inches across. Think about that. Think about the size of the whole eyeball. Think of the pranks you could play if you got hold of an eyeball like that.

  DELIVERY ROOM DOCTOR: Well, Mr. and Mrs. Foonster, here’s your newborn child!

  NEW PARENTS: AIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

  But this is not the time for lighthearted humor. This is a time to learn Safe Boating Practices, so that your sailing experience will not be ruined in the event of a squid attack. Here is the procedure recommended by boating safety experts:

  1. Do not panic. Remember that the squid does not necessarily want to eat you. Oh, sure, it wants to eat somebody, but this does not have to be you.

  2. Shout: “Here! Eat Ralph!”

  Boating safety experts recommend that you always keep a supply of unpopular guests on hand to push overboard as emergency marine sacrifices. They do not, however, have to be named Ralph. You can just claim they are named Ralph, because you are dealing with a squid.

  OK, that takes care of boating safety. Now let’s talk about the kind of boat you should select. There are many different kinds, the main ones being yachts, swoops, tankers, frigates, drawls, skeeters, fuggits, kvetches, and pantaloons. These are all basically the same. The only important factor to bear in mind, when selecting a boat, is that it should be “seaworthy,” meaning that if for some reason you accidentally drive it into another boat, or a reef, or a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, you will not be held financially responsible.

  This means the type of boat you want is what veteran mariners refer to as a “stolen” boat, or, if this is not practical, a “rented” boat.

  I rented a boat once, in the Virgin Islands. My wife and I did this with another couple, and we agreed that I should be the captain, because I had the most sailing experience, in the form of sitting on various people’s sailboats drinking beer and remarking upon the weather. Fortunately the boat we rented had a motor in it. You will definitely want this feature on your sailboat too, because if you put up the sails, the boat tips way over, and you could spill your beer. This was a constant problem for Magellan. I put the motor on whenever we wanted to actually get somewhere, or if we came within two miles of something we might run into, such as another boat or a Virgin Island. On those rare occasions when I did attempt to sail, I was hampered by the fact that the only nautical commands my crew understood were:

  1. “Pull on that thing.”

  2. “No, the OTHER thing.”

  3. “No, the thing over THERE, dammit.”

  4. “Never mind.”

  Our navigational policy was always to steer the boat in the direction of restaurants and hotels that had real bathrooms. Our boat allegedly had a bathroom (or as we say aboard ship, a “bathroom”), but it was about the size of those styrofoam containers you get Egg McMuffins in, and it was mostly filled with the marine toilet, a complex and punitive device that at any moment you expected to see a tentacle come snaking out of. Which is why the No. 1 rule of the sea is: If you absolutely have to use the marine toilet, you want to send Ralph in there first.

  Sic, Sic, Sic

  I would have to say that the greatest single achievement of the American medical establishment is nasal spray. Oh, I realize it can be overdone. A friend of mine named Tatnall claims he knew a woman who was so addicted to nasal spray that she carried some down the aisle on her wedding day. Her hand would go darting under her veil, and a snort would resound through the church. Tatnall swears this is true. So I fully agree that nasal-spray abuse is a serious problem and we certainly nee
d some kind of enormous federal program to combat it.

  But aside from that, I feel that nasal spray is a wondrous medical achievement, because it is supposed to relieve nasal congestion, and by gadfrey, it relieves nasal congestion. What I’m saying is that it actually works, which is something you can say about very few other aspects of the medical establishment.

  This is especially true when it comes to figuring out what is wrong with sick people. My experience has been that doctors will give you a clear-cut, understandable diagnosis only if you wander in with, say, an ice pick protruding from your skull. And even then, you have to pretend that you don’t know what’s wrong. If you say, “I have an ice pick in my skull,” the doctor will become irritated, because he spent all those years in medical school and he’s damned if he’s going to accept opinions from an untrained layperson such as yourself. “It conceivably could be an ice pick,” he’ll say, in a tone of voice that suggests he’s talking to a very stupid sheep, “but just in case I’m going to arrange for a test in which we remove a little snippet of your liver every week for eight weeks.” So your best bet is to keep your mouth shut and let the doctor diagnose the ice pick, which he will call by its Latin name.

  If you have a subtler problem, however, you may never find out what’s wrong. For example, a few months back, one side of my tongue swelled up. I tried everything—aspirin, beer, nasal spray—but my tongue was still swollen. So I went to a doctor. His receptionist began my treatment by having me sit in the waiting room where I read a therapeutic article in a 1981 issue of National Geographic. That took me maybe an hour, during which I learned a great deal about this ancient tribe of people who managed to build a gigantic and photogenic temple in a jungle several thousand years ago despite the fact that they were extremely primitive at the time.