by Rick Reilly
I noticed that Dennis didn’t make it in, either, but he was left with a ten-foot chip to a thirty-foot hole, which Jose Feliciano could make.
I hit the wedge, but I hit it off the toe, right, and it missed a hole the size of a basement foundation by a good five yards and was heading for a storage building. Whatever meager hopes I had were about to be crushed. Except—Holy Elfego Baca!—it hit a rock! And the rock sent it dead left into the hole! I was done! Five hours and ten minutes and I’d finally finished Hole No. 1 at scenic Socorro Municipal Link. My score: 19. I pretended to collapse like Pheidippides at the end of the first marathon. I was filthy, odorous, and spent. Aubrey, however, looked like she had just showered and was ready for Easter services.
I dragged my carcass to the shade of the building, where twenty or so were gathered.
Self: You never know—you could win this thing!
Undermining, evil self: No chance. Dennis is a god. Weren’t you watching?
I tried to be non-chalant, but I’m sure I was chalant as hell when I threw out to Dennis, “So how’d you do?”
Dennis: “Pretty good, sixteen.”
My heart fell …
“Except I had three lost balls.”
… only to swell with joy again …
“Oh, so you had nineteen, too?” I said, cavalierly.
“No, that includes the three lost balls.”
… only to be crushed in the end.
A little guy with a clipboard came up, shook my hand, and said, “I think you’re gonna get second. You were right with him, until the bottom of the mountain. And then his two shots were worth about three of yours.”
Horrid true self: Told you.
Caleb was already there and he had the red ass, figuratively and literally. He fell early. Slipped thirty yards down a cliff and ripped his pants and got cactus in his butt. And no tweezers! He wound up with a 22. “People are gonna ask me how I lost,” he said, looking scornfully at his brother and two friends, “but I’m just gonna tell ’em: ‘I didn’t lose. Them other three lost.’”
Socorro Mountain: divider of men.
One by one, the other intrepid souls tromped home, like a lost battalion reunited at Arles.
Scott the Grocer showed up looking like he’d lost a fight with a Cuisinart. His arm had a huge gouge in it. How’d that happen? I asked. His spotter cackled, “Going for the Bud Light afterward.” Scott looked bitterly at him.
Primo came in and announced, “I’m firing my spotters. But I found an arrowhead!”
I Hoovered about three very delicious, wet, and cold beers in about three very short minutes and then realized something. I never peed. The whole day. Teed off at 8:20, finished at 1:30. Never peed.
The stories started getting worse. Sharon, the wife of one of the older guys, Bill Hall, had to be carried down the mountain, a person under each arm. “I didn’t quit,” she insisted. “My legs did. I’d be walking along fine and they’d just give out. Next thing I knew, I’d be sitting down.”
Bill’s buddy, Chris Ritter, had to be escorted off after his first shot. Luckily, he was about a thousand yards from the road. The thirty-minute hike just getting to the top defeated him. Six hours later, he still looked like a guy four quarts low on blood. “Man, I was beat up before we even started,” he said. “My legs got all rubbery. My golf was fine. I hit the ball right to [his spotter’s] feet, but I couldn’t walk down to her.”
Mic, the bar owner, saved his best shot for last, a beauty that split the middle of the road. Only at the end, by the hole, the road becomes paved. So this miracle of a shot caught the pavement and bounced way past the hole. In fact, it rolled down the white lines another 400 yards, where it came to rest at a curve. That’s when a truck stopped and a little seven-year-old boy jumped out of the passenger side and picked the ball up. The kid hopped back in the truck and his dad drove off.
Mic and his scoring official saw it all happening, screamed, jumped in a car, and chased the truck down. They pulled the startled dad over and tried to explain to him that the ball they’d picked up was Mic’s, and it was in the middle of a tournament and Mic HAD to have it back. But the kid said no. So Mic got out his bag of balls and said, “I’ll give you three of these for just that one of yours.”
No.
“I’ll give you ten!”
No.
The dad finally made the kid, who was still wailing when they drove off. They measured how far it was coming back and figured out the shot went 1.5 miles in total. Gotta be one of the longest shots since Alan Shepard’s 6-iron.
The final scoreboard:
Dennis: 16
Me: 19 (that score would’ve won it the year before, mind you)
Caleb: 22
Primo: 22
Scott the Grocer: 25 (nice comeback)
Mic: 30 (plus two for moving the ball)
Bill Hall: 32
Chris Ritter: Nearly dead
Matt and Jason: Having a beer
Aubrey: Bluebirds tying ribbons in her hair
According to my calculations, if I played a full 18 at Socorro, I’d have shot 342 and it would’ve taken five days, three hours, and twenty minutes.
Or, in other words, one round with Charles Barkley.
5
Rock Paper Scissors
As a parent, you try to be fair. So, at our house, when there was a massive dispute that we couldn’t settle between my middle son, Jake, and his brother or sister, I’d always say, “OK—Rock Paper Scissors.”
And the tears would stop and both kids would smile a little and then I’d count, “OK—one, two, three, shoot!”
And every single time Jake would win.
And as he’d run off happily with the last cookie or the found football card or, later, my car, I used to think, “Man, that’s the luckiest kid I ever met.”
Until one day, years later, I was in Las Vegas, when a poker announcer named Phil Gordon bet me $10 he could beat me in Rock Paper Scissors—best out of ten—and he’d give me the first two. And then he proceeded to fricassee me seven out of eight.
“How can that be?” I swore. “It’s just pure luck, right?”
Wrong. Turns out Phil Gordon was a pro. In fact, Gordon hosts a $10,000 Rock Paper Scissors tournament in Las Vegas every year. It was the equivalent of having Betty Crocker walk up to you and go, “Wanna bet me in a bake-off?”
Gordon said I had a “tell” every time I’d go to throw Paper. He said I’d form it at the top of my arc and he’d see it and simply put down Scissors. He said newbie males always play a lot of Rock, so he countered with a lot of Paper. It reminded me of a bit from The Simpsons, in which Bart and Lisa are going to play Rock Paper Scissors for the last cupcake.
Lisa, thinking: “Poor, simple Bart. Always throws Rock. Every time.”
Bart, thinking: “Rock! Good ol’ Rock! Nothing beats Rock.”
Gordon also said rookies rarely throw the same hand three times in a row. So anytime I played, say, Scissors, twice in a row, he knew on the next throw he could safely choose Paper and have zero chance of losing and 50 percent chance of winning.
“It’s not luck,” Gordon said, snatching my ten-spot. “It’s skill.”
And it hit me, right then, that Jake knew all those rules, too. It wasn’t luck, it was skill. And that I was the crappiest parent since Jose Menendez.
It really gnawed at me how bad I was at RPS, so when TLC informed me that there was a world championship in Toronto every year—put on by the World Rock Paper Scissors Society, no less—I entered it immediately ($50, Canadian) and vowed to win it.
OK, not win it. But beat the knuckles off some people.
OK, win at least one match.
Pretty soon I was inside a world I never knew existed. For instance, I never dreamed I’d read a quote like this one from Dave McGill, who won a $50,000 RPS tournament in Vegas: “God gave me a gift. It’d be a shame not to pursue it.”
Wow. Really, Dave? Your fingers are a gift from God?
The Avalanche—three Rocks in a row.
The Bureaucrat—three Papers in a row.
Paper Dolls—Scissors, Paper, Scissors.
The Tax Cut—Paper, Paper, Scissors.
The Bible—seven straight Papers.
The Guillotine—seven straight Scissors.
I never knew I’d wind up learning all the different variations of the game around the world.
In a lot of countries, it’s called RoShamBo.
In Indonesia, they play Man Elephant Ant. The Man stomps the Ant. The Elephant crushes the Man. The Ant gets inside the Elephant’s brain and drives it mad.
In Philadelphia, some people play a two-handed game called Microwave Tin Cat. Microwave bakes Cat. Cat shreds Tin. Tin blows up Microwave. Not a good game, though, because using two hands means you can’t hold your beer.
My kids invented Bird Worm Gun. Bird eats Worm. Gun shoots Bird. Worm crawls inside gun and, uh, gums it up so the mechanism can’t fire. OK, so they were six.
And I never thought I’d know all the official, certified RPS rules, including:
No touching your opponent’s throw. For instance, no taking your Rock and crushing their Scissors. No cutting up their Paper with your Scissors. No covering their Rock with your Paper. Apparently, your opponent has the right to then form Fist, and punch you with it.
No launch pads. This is when you slam your right-handed throw into your open left palm. Very bush league. That was going to be a personal hardship, since that’s always the way I did it.
No throws are allowed except the Big Three. This would mean no Bird, Well, Spock, Water, Bomb, Matchstick, Texas Longhorn, Lightning, God, or Fire, a Copenhagen specialty in which league players can throw Fire once a month, killing everything. You can’t go down that slippery slope. Pretty soon you’ve got Napalm beating Fire, Nuke beating Napalm, Nova beating Nuke, that sort of thing.
I learned, too, that people take this very seriously. Women get manicures. Competitors dress up. A man named Antony Maanum of Overland Park, Kan., keeps his hands in oven mitts during tournaments. His hands are just that hot.
I learned that there are long, heated philosophical arguments at international RPS conventions over things like:
Does Rock “smash” Scissors or merely “blunt” them?
Can a pair of scissors really cut an entire piece of paper with one snip or should, in fact, it take two wins by Scissors to defeat Paper?
Should prosthetic arms be allowed? (World RPS Society president Doug Walker says no. “It opens the possibility for infrared technology to send signals to the arm to instantly fire a throw a millisecond before it hits, giving it an unfair advantage,” he once wrote. No, he really did.)
You laugh, but the stakes can be enormous. Once, there was a fabulously wealthy Japanese electronics firm that decided to auction off its set of fabulously valuable paintings by Picasso, Van Gogh, etc., which would produce a fabulous commission for the auction house that got the fabulous deal. The CEO heard proposals by the two biggie houses—Sotheby’s and Christie’s—and found both of them to be worthy. To settle the stalemate, he decided they should RPS for it. The auction houses sweated out what to do. Sotheby’s decided it was just a game of chance and went with Paper. Christie’s consulted the eleven-year-old twin daughters of an employee, who suggested Scissors because “everybody expects you to choose Rock.” Christie’s won the contract and the millions.
“Chance?” Pah!
As the 2008 world championships grew close, I began forming my impenetrable strategies:
Strategy #1: If my opponent is a woman who looks nervous, new, and/or drunk, I’ll throw Rock on the first throw. I knew women like to throw Scissors. It’s the female equivalent of Rock. Something to do with sewing.
Strategy #2: To make my opponent think I’m nervous, new, and/or drunk, I’ll do really stupid things like sputter, “Now wait, is it one, two, three, shoot? Or, one, two, three and you throw on three?” And they’ll think, “What a Velveeta brain. He’s throwing Rock.” And my Scissors will shred their Paper in one—not two—snips.
Strategy #3: I’ll watch for “double runs”—in other words, somebody throwing the same throw twice. For instance, if my opponent plays two straight Papers, I know he won’t throw a third Paper. Most people, even the wisened, never throw three straight, so I can safely throw Rock. Will I be able to think that fast? Depends on how much I drink.
Strategy #4: I’ll take the advice of Graham Walker, also president of the World RPS Society (Doug’s brother), who suggests an inspired strategy: Play the throw that would’ve lost to your opponent’s last throw! He says inexperienced or drunk or scared players will subconsciously play the throw that beat their last one. “Therefore,” Walker writes, “if your opponent played Paper last throw, they will very often play Scissors, so you go Rock.” Genius!
Strategy #5: I’ll throw more Paper than a New York Times delivery boy. According to statistics kept by God knows who, Scissors gets thrown 29.6 percent of the time, which is 3.73 percent under what you’d expect, which is 33.3 percent, which means Paper is safer than other throws. Then again, the 2006 winner, Bob “The Rock” Cooper, won with Scissors, so maybe not.
Strategy #6: I’ll mind-numb. For instance, if you want your opponent to throw Scissors, you “seed” the throw. You say a few words that begin with that letter—scintillating, super, sick—and they will often throw Scissors! Hey, it’s science! If I say to you, “OK, you ready? Ready to rock ’n’ roll? Right on!” You’re thinking Rock, am I right? Which I will humiliate with my powerful Paper and laugh deeply.
I was ready.
The night before the tournament, Toronto was whippy and freezing but the designated RPS bar was heating up with some of the more famous teams and faces of the sport. There was:
David Bowie’s Package
Running with Scissors
Fistful of Sneer
We met Scissors Sister, who came all the way from Australia. We met former world champion Master Roshambolah, who, as always, denied he was the world-famous Master Roshambolah and instead insisted he was the Midnight Rider. “Master Roshambolah doesn’t enter these anymore,” he said in an odd accent.
Then we met a man who may have explained why. His name was Pete Lovering, a plain kind of man with a plain kind of face who was a walking cautionary tale. Lovering won it all in 2002—the first-ever RPS world championship—and then shrank from the enormity of what he’d done. Trying to live up to it became such a stone around his neck that he cracked under its weight. “The pressure just became too much,” Lovering said. “I’d practice more and just get worse.” He’d come to the RPS world championships and get eliminated in the first round year after year. “My kids would beat me constantly!” Then he muttered bitterly to no one in particular: “Them and their childlike minds.” Now he doesn’t play at all. It was like seeing Koufax at twenty-five with no slider. He slunk off into the night with his cup of coffee—a human blunted scissors, a defeated exhibit of what a what-have-you-thrown-for-me-lately sport can do to a man.
We met the much-feared Norwegian team—a six-person outfit whose “federation” had publicly stated that its goal was a Norwegian world champion by 2010. OK, so it’s not exactly JFK promising a moon landing within ten years, but it’s something. Naturally, as a proud American, I couldn’t help but take on their champion, a twenty-five-year-old smug blond kid in a blue blazer and tie, no less. I pretended to have no clue what I was doing, tricking him into believing I’d throw Rock. Then I threw Scissors and slashed his Paper. Stunned, he came back with a pathetic throw—Scissors, the throw that had beaten his last one—only to find my powerful Rock waiting for him. You should’ve seen his coach’s face fall like a globally warmed ice floe, as if to say Uh-oh. We came 5,000 miles for this?
My personal record at that point: 1–0.
Then I beat a Yahoo! girl who was giving out bo
ttle openers if you beat her, which I did, although I think she was just happy to get rid of her approximately 1,000 bottle openers. (Personal record: 2–0.) I was feeling very good about myself until I met a woman from Philly named Mister Iz (pronounced quickly: “mysterious”) who cleaned me out in two throws (2–1).
“My strategy is: Whatever I’m thinking, I do the opposite,” Mister Iz explained. So if she’s thinking she should throw Scissors, she throws its opposite, Paper. Or is its opposite Rock? Mister Iz didn’t know. We didn’t know. But since she’d just come from winning the Philadelphia city championship, she didn’t want to know and instead guzzled a large portion of her beer, trying to shake the notion out of her brain. Maybe RPS is like golf or sex or Congress. The less thinking, the better.
Met the Minnesota Hustlers, too. They were two African American businessmen who bilk innocents for a hobby. They’re that good. Word was that Tax Cut—so called for his penchant for throwing Paper, Paper, Scissors—had locked himself in a room and practiced against a mirror for an entire year. The duo’s m.o. is to go into a bar—any bar—and dream up some dumb little argument with somebody there. For instance, if they see the guy getting the last Heineken, they’ll say, “Oh, damn. I wanted that last Heineken!” The guy will feel bad, but they’ll say, “Tell you what, why don’t we Rock Paper Scissors for it?” Then they’ll purposely lose. And then they’ll say, “Dang! I KNOW I can beat you! Let me try again.” And they’ll lose again. Then they’ll say, “Let’s bet five bucks.” Now the guy is feeling good and goes for it and wins and the trap is set.
Hustlers like them play “street,” which is first guy to win ten hands, one right after another. No stopping. No time to think. Speed throwing. “You lose the first couple just to see what kind of patterns they throw,” David (Tax Cut) Brookins said. “People will throw patterns and don’t even know it. Soon as you have his pattern figured out, you bring down the hammer.”
