Sports in Hell

by Rick Reilly

  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?

  Soak in cold water.

  Broil at 261 degrees for 12 minutes, 26 seconds.

  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.

  2

  Ferret Legging

  Generally, these are the five places you should never put a live ferret:

  your garbage disposal

  the pope’s hat

  the Upper Larchmont Junior League Annual Fashion Luncheon

  your spaghetti sauce

  your pants

  And yet, against all sanity, I ignored this advice. In fact, in pursuit of the very real sport of “ferret legging,” I allowed a woman to put not one, but two live ferrets down my pants.

  While wearing no underwear.

  Sober.

  It’s an experience I would … well, let me just say that through therapy … well, maybe I should just start at the beginning.

  Ferrets (groinica attachius) are mostly tubular and often hairless and rather ugly, much like the lead singer for Midnight Oil. And those are their good qualities. They have teeth like barracuda and jaws like wood clamps and the attitude of divorce attorneys, which means if they chomp into you, there is a very good chance they are not going to let go until Arbor Day.

  Ask Ben Stiller.

  He was filming Along Came Polly with Jennifer Aniston, when a ferret he was holding (Aniston’s character kept a ferret) chomped Stiller’s chin and refused to release it. “I didn’t do anything! I swear!” the poor man told reporters. “We were doing this final scene where I come running after Jennifer and I’m holding the ferret. He did this crazy turnaround thing and he literally attached himself to my chin and then he didn’t let go. I had to get a rabies shot! I didn’t provoke him at all. Their teeth are sharp, like razors. I mean, they’re ratlike creatures. It was a horrible experience.”

  Incidents like this are what has earned ferrets the nicknames “piranhas with feet,” “fur-coated evil,” and “shark-of-the-land.” They have a spine like a Roto-Rooter probe and more muscles in their jaws than a basement full of Dobermans. They have the same general DNA as Haitian loan sharks. They are not just vicious rats. They are vicious rats who know Roger Clemens’ pharmacist.

  Actually, ferrets are not really rats—though the resemblance is uncanny. They’re kin to the polecat. They live for meat. Meat is to a ferret what heels are to Carmen Electra. In fact, the foot-long ferret (not counting tail) is so fond of meat that it makes an excellent hunter. A ferret can get down and through any tunnel a rabbit makes and chase it out the other end, where the hunter waits with hot lead. For a time in England, it became illegal to hunt with dogs, so hunters started using ferrets. Then it became illegal to hunt with ferrets, which, of course, didn’t stop your average Nigel. The story goes that one day the game warden came walking up to a ferret-using hunter, who had nowhere to hide his ferret, so he dropped it down his pants. Must’ve been a memorable conversation.

  Nigel (sweating): Hiyo, Warden Charles.

  Warden: Hiyo, Nigel. Good day for hunting.

  Nigel (biting own lip hard): Bloody good.

  Warden: Are you aware there are quite a lot of odd movements in your crotch region?

  Nigel (holding back tears): No! Truly?

  Warden: Truly.

  Nigel (shaking visibly): Well, I have a confession to make.

  Warden: Oh?

  Nigel: (weeping) You stir something in me, Charles.

  Anyway, it turned out a warm ferret is a better hunter than a cold ferret and the pants-dropping practice caught on. This started an argument in the tavern one night among the lads. Who among them could stand having their ferret down their pants the longest? This probably begot a bar bet, which started a sport, which, 200 years later, somehow, involved me.

  The rules of ferret legging are simple yet cruel: No wearing underwear. No declawing or defanging the ferret. Pants must be wool and clamped at the ankle. Belt cinched tight at the waist. No feeding the ferret beforehand. No drugging the ferret. No drugging oneself. Knocking the ferret off a particular part of your person is allowed, but only from outside your pants. Of course, this is like saying, “Lifting the steamroller off your foot is allowed,” because there is almost no getting a ferret off a particular part of your person once it has its heart set on it. Some people use screwdrivers. I’ve heard of people doing it with scalding hot water. Also heard it doesn’t work. The winner is determined in the same manner as an oyster-eating contest. The man who can keep them down the longest is the champion.

  The all-time record for withstanding the pain of ferrets down the trousers is, believe it or not, five hours and twenty-six minutes by a furry little man in Yorkshire, England, named Reg Mellor. One time, Outside magazine asked Mellor if the ferrets ever bit his crank.

  “Do they!” Mellor answered. “Why, I’ve had ’em hangin’ from me tool for hours an’ hours an’ hours! Two at a time—one on each side! I been swelled up big as that!” And he pointed to a large can of instant coffee.

  Not a comforting passage for the greenhorn ferret legger to read.

  Ferret legging has fallen in glory since its heyday in the ’70s. People decided it was cruel. Not to the ferrets, to the people. Great Britain banned it, which hurt a lot. Hell, you can’t even own a ferret as a pet in California or Hawaii. Far as we could tell, only two places in North America still participated in legging: Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Richmond, Virginia.

  But Manitoba apparently took too much heat from animal rights activists (if they only knew) and axed it in favor of “ferret racing,” which involves ferrets running through a series of plastic pipes and tubes. Yuck. Now, if they released a rabbit two feet ahead of the ferret, perhaps coated in bacon grease, you’d have something.

  That left Richmond, which was featuring ferret legging at its annual Richmond Highland Games & Celtic Festival, an event with the motto: “Music, Food and Large Men Throwing Stuff.” The ad promised that these large men would heave giant rocks and flip telephone poles end over end. Plus, they’d be wearing kilts while doing it. Are those good things to combine? Kilt-wearing men and knife-toothed ferrets? Isn’t that sort of like having R. Kelly at the Girl Scout Jamboree?

  To get a little background on the coming event, TLC began e-mailing a woman from the Richmond Ferret Rescue League named Paige Collier, who informed her that I would “almost certainly” be fine, that yes, I would be putting them down my pants without underwear, but that everyone is only allowed to go three minutes and can quit anytime they want during those three.

  That’s it? Three minutes? Five hours and twenty-three minutes shy of the world record? I was almost, dare I say, disappointed. Then Paige Collier wrote, “Would you like to see bios of the competing ferrets?”

  This came as a shock to the both of us. Ferrets have bios? Who knew?

  “Send the bios,” I said, since I make it a rule to know as much as possible about the things I’m putting down my pants. They came. Each bio arrived with a photo and a paragraph or two on the celebrity ferret. Here is an actual ferret bio she sent:

  Peppy … was surrendered to the Richmond Ferret Rescue League approximately 6 months ago, and is about 2 years old. He is a white, crimson-eyed male, who runs faster in reverse t
han drive. He is suspected to be deaf, but this doesn’t slow him down. This is his first year participating in the ferret legging.

  The mind nearly blows a gasket at all the questions this one single paragraph sends richocheting around the noggin. For instance, what does that mean, “surrendered”? Was Peppy involved in some kind of police/ferret standoff? And why is Peppy only suspected of being deaf? Couldn’t you simply smash two cymbals next to his ears and see if Peppy jumps? Or is the fear of that reaction exactly why he’s still only “suspected”? And, my God, if Peppy really is deaf, and he is my ferret, does that mean he can’t hear me screaming? And why for the love of Christ does he go faster backwards? What kind of hideous hellbeast is this? And crimson eyes? Whose ferret was it, Charles Manson’s?

  There were more. Mocha …is one of our therapy ferrets. What kind of therapy does Mocha practice? Aroma? Paco …is not particularly fond of other ferrets. In other words, Paco has killed most of the other ferrets. Tosh … has an awesome personality. Oh, yeah, he does this great Jay Leno impression and, like, he’s always got gum.

  There was also very helpful and detailed information about such possible dungaree divers as Karma, Marley, Zack, and Clyde. If I had to pick one of those four to have down my pants, I suppose it would be Marley. Hopefully, he’d be higher than Snoop Dogg, find a small place to cuddle up near my ankle, and just veg. Thinking about it, I came up with a short list of ferrets I would definitely not want in my pants:

  Fang

  Adolf

  Psycho

  Lockjaw

  Dahmer

  Anyway, fast-forward to late October and me, at the end of a long ESPN road trip, pulling into the Richmond Highland Games & Celtic Festival to put a live animal down my pants in the pursuit of great journalism.

  “Is that the deal Richard Gere was into?” my brother asked.

  “No, no, different thing entirely,” I said.

  Then my son, Kel, weighed in.

  “Ferret licking?”

  “No, not ferret licking,” I said. “Legging.”

  “Because I’d pay to see you do some ferret licking.”

  Smart aleck.

  The festive color and pageantry of the Richmond Highland Games & Celtic Festival took place in a picturesque and charming … parking lot. No lie. A giant dirt parking lot next to the Richmond Raceway Center. Inside was the answer to the question: Hey, whatever happened to all those geeks from high school drama club?

  Turns out a highlands festival is kind of like a Renaissance fair, except way more plaid. Everywhere you looked were tanless people dressed in Elizabethan costume, most of whom weren’t in any shows. Bulbous men in kilts. One woman was in leggings, a kilt, and a Darth Vader helmet. One entire pink, fat family of four was dressed identically, down to the little pom-poms on their socks—red kilts, white shirts, boots, and tam-o’-shanters. People walked around all day just dying to say something in faux Shakespeare.

  Pimple-riddled teen in corn dog line, wearing palace guard get up, complete with sword: Forsooth, their cupboard is wanting ketchup!

  Pimple-riddled teen’s mom: A pox on their tent!

  It was a great place to go on a diet, featuring Scotch eggs, Cornish pasties, Celtic ice cream (Hey, who wants a scoop of “whisky & clover”?), colcannon, and deep-fried Mars Bars. The many, many activities included punkin’ chunkin’, sheepdog shows, blessing of the animals, Kirkin’ o’ the Tartan, a woman playing the dulcimer, darp, and the psaltery, many swords, way too many bagpipes, and very large men in kilts heaving twenty-pound bales of hay with pitchforks over twenty-five-foot-high goalposts.

  On the other hand, there was the giant Guinness truck with ten—count ’em, ten!—taps. And axe throwing! You could stand about twenty feet from a wooden bull’s-eye and a wrinkled man with breakfast in his beard would teach you how to throw an axe, end over end, and make it stick. Five people would do it at once, only a few feet apart. Many of whom had just left the Guinness truck. And kids were welcome! Now, that’s a sport.

  I somehow made it past the Guinness taps over to Young McDonald’s Farm, where the ferrets waited, about thirty of them, in a playpen, squirming and burrowing under, above, and through each other in a kind of massive king of the hill game. A gray-haired, very skinny woman wearing a fanny pack kept barking: “In the box, please! In the BOX!” It took me a minute before I realized she wasn’t talking to the visitors but instead to Peppy, one of the ferrets, about his commode habits. The scolding went ignored.

  On a table, there was a sign: Did you know, ferrets catch human influenza and are used in scientific research? Without ferrets, we wouldn’t have a flu vaccine!

  There should’ve also been a sign: Did you know that without ferrets, 13.7 percent of the world’s jokes wouldn’t have a punch line?

  The very skinny woman wore a T-shirt featuring a doe-eyed ferret princess riding a rainbow against a field of stars—maybe from the My Little Ferret collection. It turned out to be Rita Jackson, one of the three women in the Richmond Ferret Rescue League. And so I tried, “Where’s Peppy’s leash?”

  This, naturally, made me as welcome as a non-furry carnivore could be and got me instant introductions to the other League leader, Marlene Blackburn, an attractive brunette of about thirty-five. Turns out they have about a hundred ferrets in all in the rescue center, which is not a center at all but just three women who are willing to live with thirty to forty ferrets in their homes and, one would think, very few men. Rita alone had thirty-eight ferrets, two “free-roaming” ferrets, seven dogs, and three cats. Maybe not something you mention on Match.com.

  I soon learned more about ferrets than any human should. For instance, ferret owners must trim their toenails (the ferrets’, not their own) and—if you have any sense at all—sand down their teeth, which are a half inch long. Also, the center will take any ferret, even the hardship cases. They get all the survivors from the University of Virginia research projects, for instance. One time they got twenty-four. I’m assuming all of them had the flu.

  “We’re a no-kill shelter,” said Marlene proudly. And it made me think, do the non-no-kill shelters advertise that? “Yes, we’re a kill shelter. Just bring Nibbles on down and we’ll box him up.”

  In all seriousness, it’s wonderful that caring, patient women like these are willing to give these little furry creatures a home, because ferrets are just really, really unattractive. Two or three had absolutely no hair at all. They looked like Hebrew Nationals with feet. “Oh, those have adrenal cancer,” Rita said. “They’ll all get adrenal cancer eventually. Ninety-nine percent end up like Buster here.”

  Cool! How do I get one?

  This was their seventh year doing the ferret legging at the festival. “At first we got so many complaints,” Marlene said. “It made it into the paper and people started calling us and writing us and writing the district attorney’s office saying it was cruel to the ferrets. The DA called me and I had to explain to him, ‘Look, there’s absolutely no cruelty in this at all. We only put them down for three minutes … They’re therapy ferrets. They’re used to it. Ninety percent of the time, they’re trying to go up your pants leg anyway.” Hell, that makes them no different than, say, David Spade.

  “So they don’t scratch and fight and bite when they’re down there?” I asked.

  “No! Most won’t,” she said.

  Most?

  “What do they eat?”

  “Well, they’re carnivores, so we give them meat-based ferret food.”

  “What, exactly, will they do while in my pants?”

  “Well, no matter where you put them, they want to dig. They’re scratchers and diggers.”

  Wonderful.

  Just then a sweaty guy just slightly rounder than Bob’s Big Boy spoke up. “I’ve had them accidentally down my pants, and right away, you want them out.”

  Accidentally? The mind reeled.

  “Our goal is to get through the day without anybody getting stepped on, bit, lost, or stolen,” Marlen
e said.

  She’d be wrong. She’d be very wrong.

  • • •

  I had one large, fortifying Guinness and one nutritious pasty and walked over to the 100-by-100-foot ferret legging square, where the fans were already six deep, gnawing on their meat pies, anxious to see ferrets dine on those dumb enough to volunteer. A group of thespians called the Sterling Sword Players were the hosts of the thing, since the ferret women are not exactly, you know, show people. Now, usually I’d stab two forks in my eyes before I’d watch a group called the Sterling Sword Players, but these people were actually funny. And the main host, a big, bearded mall marketer named Kevin Robertson, was even funnier. He was hollering, “Ferret legging in five minutes! Be afraid! Be very afraid!”

  I asked him how he got started being a professional ferret legging MC.

  “Three years ago,” he said between barks. “The director [of the festival] came up to us and said, ‘We’re going to have ferret legging here and we’d like you to be the host.’ And we all thought it was a band. We’re thinking, ‘Ferret Legging? Cool name! Wonder what they play?’ So the next day, up come these ladies with their cages full of ferrets. And we go, ‘Excuse me, who in the world are you?’ And they say, ‘Oh, we’re the ferret legging.’ And we were just dumbfounded.”

  One time, a man who was mostly tattoos showed up and Kevin chose him. On went the sweatpants. Down went the ferret. Start the clock. Very soon, the ferret was rising back up above the man’s waistband, poking his head up and looking around like he was trying to decide what he’d wear that day. So Kevin took the mike over to Mr. Tattoo and said, “He’s done that three or four times now. Can you tell us how he’s managing to do that?”