Sports in Hell

by Rick Reilly

  We love Boris!

  Here in the stands!

  He’ll never sweat!

  He has no glands!

  How bored must you be to watch people sweat? Actually, you’d be amazed at how fun it is to watch a grown man come apart like a $9 Walgreens sweater. How often do you get to see a man go from normal to nuttier than Ross Perot in less than ten minutes? We watched a Bellarussian, for instance, dissolve for our amusement. He started out sane, just sitting there, minding his own business. Every thirty seconds, a pitiless stream of water came out from a ceiling shower in the center of the sauna and splashed on the molten-hot rocks, creating a 100-percent humidity in the room that would melt gold. About two minutes in, our man started rocking a little. At three his eyes started blinking oddly. At four he began twitching. At five his eyes got huge. At six he started swallowing each breath like a gulp of scorching soup. Then he started glancing wildly around the sauna, as if to say to the others, “Are you mad? Don’t you see what’s happening? They’ve locked us in a Crock-Pot!” He started madly wiping his eyes and mouth. He reached his hands out to his thighs to rub them, then realized he couldn’t, then did so anyway, crazily, wildly, like he was covered in lice. The judges flagged him once, then twice, and yet he would not stop rubbing. Then suddenly he lurched for the door and he was out and sanity and cool air whooshed back into his brain and suddenly he was normal and smiling again.

  Kind of like watching Tom Cruise be interviewed.

  One guy got in, sat down, and immediately bolted before they closed the doors. He grabbed the handheld mike and yelled, “Somebody farted in there!” Turned out to be a German TV comic. Backstage, a Dutchman held two bags of ice to his ears, thinking it might help. It didn’t. He lost. I heard one guy coming out tell another who was going in: “Every second after six minutes is sheer hell.” One German said his temporary fillings were rattling in his mouth the whole time. Not the kind of thing our hero wanted to hear before his turn.

  In each opening heat, only two of the six moved on, and our friend Rick Ellis from New York went 8:03 to advance. I was waiting to congratulate him when I noticed something awful. There were two big patches of skin missing on his upper lip, just under his nostrils.

  “Dude, were you by any chance breathing through your nose in there?”

  “Yeah, why?” he says.

  “Your skin is all gone under your nose! It’s burnt off!”

  He felt his upper lip in horror. He ran to the mirror. It was worse. The tops of his ears were split open and bubbling. Under his arms and on his back were bright purple patches. His forehead was painted bright red and blistering in front of his eyes. I took him to the beer garden to try to cool him off, but nothing helped. He was sweating like Pam Anderson at Bible study. “Man, I’m burning up. Even my tongue is burnt.” His wife begged him to quit, but he refused. Said he trained too hard. She shook her head.

  “What?” he asked.

  And that’s when they called my heat backstage.

  Gulp.

  On the way back there, I saw the great Finn saunist Leo Pusa, four-time champ, a stone-faced Greyhound bus of a man. I asked him for some quick words of wisdom before I went in, some secret he used to win all those titles. “I sat longer than the others,” he said.

  Let me write that down.

  I vowed to do whatever Timmo the Great did. He took a drink. I took a drink. He stretched his neck. I stretched my neck. Three times, he took a freezing-cold shower backstage, so three times I took one, so that by the time I got introduced, I was shivering like a newly shaved Chihuahua. As they were reading us the rules, each competitor’s fans were waving their nation’s flag and chanting encouragement. Then I saw TLC in the crowd, mouthing, “Don’t do it!” She’d said it before I left, too. “You know you can’t win, so why not get out first? You’re going to lose anyway!” She was right, of course. I mean, why try to out-eat Kirstie Alley?

  I drew seat No. 6 near the door. Timmo the Great was No. 2. We went in and it was so instantly, shockingly, insanely hot, my brain just stopped working. It was like walking into a bonfire and pulling up a chair in the middle of it. It was like putting your face over the white coals of your barbecue and shutting the hood. It was so hot that if I owned this sauna and Hell, I’d live in Hell and rent this place out.

  My strategy was to go in and keep time by the thirty-second water splashes, but that plan was scrapped approximately seven seconds in. It was just so goddamn hot I couldn’t think. Thinking literally hurt. I tried to stare at the rocks and not blink, because blinking hurt. I tried to take very few breaths, because breathing hurt. Leo Pusa had shown me how to sit, slightly hunched, with your hands under their opposite arms, each of them protecting the fragile skin at the small of your back. But I was cursing Leo Pusa because it didn’t help. Sitting hurt most of all.

  My back seemed to have ignited. I was sure flames were coming out with each breath. I was convinced my ears were literally on fire, but if I moved even slightly, they would hurt more. I tried sitting up higher, but it was hotter the higher you went. I tried crouching down more, but then I was nearer the hideous, unforgiving rocks. It was so awful I could only wish Barry Bonds were in here. And then came the hideous, cruel, pitiless splashes of water, lasting maybe three seconds each. I did not count them. I looked at nobody. I heard nobody. I saw nobody, just the red rocks, glowing, laughing, mocking. I would sooner have my kidney removed at Jiffy Lube than this.

  I decided to try to think of something to get my mind off the torturous pain, so I began to name every team in the National Football League. But my brain needed a CTRL-ALT-DEL. I counted the New York Jets. Twice. I was just about to bolt into the fresh air when—miraculously—the tall skinny guy next to me in seat No. 1 suddenly jumped up and ran out! Amazing! I wasn’t last! I had no idea how much time had elapsed—four minutes? Six? I was thrilled he had left, because I’d been told that as someone leaves, you get a lovely blast of cool air that gives you a five-to-ten-second respite. I looked forward to it with every cell in my body, but it didn’t happen. Nothing. The two guards let the man out very quickly and nothing good came of it. It was dispiriting. Like opening a big Christmas present and finding homework. I made a promise to myself: When I get to the point where I can no longer stand it, I’ll count sixty more seconds and then go.

  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 horrifi
ed 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 a
nd 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.