Sports in Hell

by Rick Reilly

  Grumble, hiss, grumble.

  Finally, the door opened. I was greeted by the great man’s bare ass as he turned into the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Make it fast,” he growled.

  Apparently, I was to interview him in the shower.

  I did.

  It got worse. After the too-revealing shower interview, the toweling off interview, and the brushing of teeth interview, Knight shoved the bathroom door in my face so that he could take his morning constitutional. He left the door open a few inches and said, “What else you got?” Apparently, I was about to do a Man on the Seat interview.

  “Uh, well,” I stammered into that awful cavern. “Do you, uh, do you ever see yourself coaching in the NBA?”

  And as he proceeded with his morning duty, he said: “No, I don’t think so. See, I’m a guy who enjoys working with the younnnnnnngggggerrrrr type player, who—mmmggghh—still wants to learn somethinnnnnng about the game.”

  Therapy has not eased the pain.

  I have done so much of this type of reporting, I have formulated my Four Rules for Speaking to a Naked Man:

  1. Don’t acknowledge it. If you acknowledge it or mention it in any way, you’re gay. If they mention it, it’s funny, and you’re still gay.

  During his unforgettable play-off run in 2004, Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz hit yet another crucial home run to win a monstrously huge game. There must’ve been a hundred of us waiting at his locker afterward. The hulking Ortiz came out of the shower and began wading through the sea of humanity, wearing only a towel and a scowl. Suddenly, he stopped, spun around, looked down on this tiny, middle-aged, bald radio guy, leaned over him menacingly, and growled, “Did you just look at my NIPPLES?!?”

  The little guy was frozen with fear. He gulped for air and finally squeaked, “No.”

  Ortiz suddenly broke into a huge grin, slapped the little man on the back, and said, “Why not?”

  2. Always write on a legal pad. The pad is your friend. It serves as a barrier between you and “it.” “It” moves, the pad moves. Under no circumstances do you want to see “it,” even out of curiosity, even accidentally. Things get destroyed, like your self-esteem. Most of these guys have units that could serve as LAPD battering rams.

  3. Be alert. Just because they’re nude doesn’t mean they’re neutered. I once interviewed Pete Rose across a shower curtain in the Cincinnati Reds manager’s office in 1985, as he chased Ty Cobb’s hit record. I was asking him, as he lathered, how much he lost at the horse track that year. There was a pause in the steamy room. Then he suddenly began yelling, “You can’t crucify Pete Rose!” And then he threw his shampoo bottle at me. This is why the built-in shampoo wall dispensers of today are such wonderful inventions, in my opinion.

  4. It’s your job. Get over it. You want an interview, you’ve got to be OK with talking to guys with taco bits stuck in their junk. This is how they are. They’re used to constant nudity, like nurses or masseuses or White House interns.

  Some guys refuse to be interviewed naked, such as Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan—who wouldn’t even come to his locker until his tie was knotted—and former running back Eddie George. “I never felt like it was appropriate,” George says. “Now, maybe if I was endowed like some guys I’ve seen, I’d come out stark naked, put my knee up on a table, face the crowd, and go, ‘OK, who’s first?’”

  Other guys seem to relish it, like Johnny Damon of the New York Yankees. I’m still not sure I’ve ever seen Damon clothed in a clubhouse. The man is naked more often than the David.

  You might think, “What a great job for a female reporter!” but you would be wrong. It’s without doubt the hardest part of the job for women sportswriters. Most pro athletes are just slightly right of Charlton Heston and believe women have no right to be in a locker room at all. The rest just act like the cast of Porky’s 6.

  One of my friends was one of the first female American sportswriters—Betty Cuniberti of the Washington Post. One night early on, she was covering the Yankees and reportedly entered the clubhouse to find one of the team’s stars, buck naked, swinging his schlong like a lariat and cackling, “Hey, Betty, know what this is?”

  To which Betty—wonderful, unflappable Betty—answered, “Well, if it were bigger, I’d say it was a penis.”

  Former Washington Redskins lineman Dave Butz once told then–Washington Post writer Christine Brennan that if reporters were going to interview him while he was naked, then they should be naked, too, including her. Tit for tat, as it were. He probably had a point, but that policy could get awkward.

  Me: Do you feel like your problem with free throws comes from the broken right wrist you had when you were eleven?

  Shaq: …(wheeze) … (snort) … (cackle) …

  Me: Look, if you’re just going to laugh the whole time, let’s just forget the whole thing!

  But that got me to thinking, What if everybody in a sport WERE naked? The whole time—before, during, and after? The competitors, the refs, the hot dog vendors, Bud Selig, everybody? After all, the world’s first organized sporting competition—the Greek Olympics—were conducted in the nude. What happened to that? Why couldn’t there be an all-nude sports?

  I was about to find out why not.

  There are thousands of all-nude competitions all over the world, but most of them are “naturist” colonies, which seemed to violate our vague and very self-serving rules of the quest, one of which was that anybody could try to qualify for it. Besides, I once did a column on a nudist colony just north of Tampa and I have seen naked tennis. It is not pretty. While serving, there’s no place to stick the second ball. And you are constantly hoping the winner doesn’t jump the net to shake hands.

  TLC found a man called The Ancient Brit, who had made it his life’s goal to climb all the Scottish peaks over three thousand feet, nude. I figure the low altitude is to ensure against frostbite. He’s also led nude kayaking trips and camping adventures. He offered to lead us on any sort of nature trek, sport, or climb, complete with any pictures we wanted, as long as we were both nude. “Really,” he wrote, “I’ve got no problems with you taking pictures of me naked. No problem at all.” And he attached about fifty pictures of himself, which, when we opened them, made us gasp.

  The man was hung like a Clydesdale. Honestly, it was a baby arm. Just thinking about it now gives me a facial tic.

  That’s about when TLC discovered what was billed as World Naked Bike Race Day. Actually, it was two days—March 8 for the Southern Hemisphere and July 14 for the Northern Hemisphere. The idea is to stage an all-nude bike race through some of the world’s largest cities to find out who …well, to make a statement about … uh, to prove … what, exactly?

  “It’s a symbol of how naked bicyclists are in the big city when drivers refuse to share the road,” said a poster to the website (www.worldnakedbikeride.org). “We’re naked and helpless and invisible. But not on this day.”

  OK, so it’s not exactly a Vietnam protest. But it’s something, right? Besides, I’m a bicyclist. When it’s nice out, I like to do my errands around town on my bike. Nobody’s ever knocked me off my bike or forced me into a ditch, but they’ve come very close.

  I went to the website’s FAQ page.

  Can I get hurt riding naked on a bike?

  Only if you don’t wear any sunscreen.

  But what about, you know, hurting Coach Johnson?

  No, it won’t! No hurting or damage will occur if you ride your bike in the normal manner. It will feel just like riding with clothes, but cooler.

  But what about hygiene?

  Some people fear that they will catch something from the seat or make the seat dirty just by sitting on it naked. Unless you (or your seat) have particularly terrible hygiene already, there won’t be a problem …

  Reassured about my down under from Down Under, we set off.

  We were to meet on the midsummer’s day of March 8, 2008, at Archibald Fountain in Hyde Park, downtown Sydney, at noon. Not sure how I fe
lt about hearing “bald” and “hide” in regard to my first nude bike race, but there it was.

  First thing I did was rent a bike, but when I said to the rental clerk, “So a lot of people renting for the big nude race tomorrow?” he looked at me like bats were flying out of my nostrils.

  “Sorry, mate?” he said.

  “World Naked Bike Race,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Never heard of it,” he said. He seemed to be hanging on to the bike a little longer than I thought he should. Made me feel better, though. At least my bike seat had probably never been in this thing before.

  I wondered exactly how a naked bike race would work. Where, for instance, would you pin your number? Where would you put your fiver for emergencies? Would you really want to draft too closely behind another man?

  For her part, TLC began to regard the whole affair as a fat-cell convention. She wanted no part of it, a fact that disappointed the organizer to no end once we got to Archibald Fountain. “You sure you don’t want to come along?” said Marte Kinder, a tall hippie in a tie-dyed T-shirt and a hat with a plastic sunflower. He had scraggly dreds, a full foodcatcher, and sandals. In other words, exactly the sort of person you’d think would organize the Sydney portion of World Naked Bike Race. “I think you’d really, really like it!”

  She looked at him like he was Willard Scott offering sexy time. No chance. She’d meet me later.

  More troubling, it was beginning to look like Marte and I were the only two going.

  “People are staying away because they think we’re going to be arrested,” Marte confided.

  Arrested?

  “That’s irony, eh? People arrested for being naked right next to statues of naked people!”

  “Arrested?” I said, this time out loud. That’s about when I noticed the two cops waiting in a squad car about a hundred feet away.

  “Well, yeah,” Marte hemmed. “They say they’re going to arrest us if we do it naked. But they can’t arrest us! The law says that indecent exposure must be willful and obscene. So let’s say a hurricane comes and whips your pants off; that’s neither willful nor obscene. But let’s say it rips your pants off and at the time you were masturbating. That’s obscene but not willful. But let’s say you—yourself—rip them off to masturbate, that’s both.”

  This was starting to be a very bad idea.

  Furthermore, Marte pointed out, even if we do get arrested, the T-shirts and the DVDs they sell go toward a fund to defend bicyclists in court. I saw no T-shirt stands or DVD sellers. Instead, I saw myself rotting in a Sydney jail, having monthly meetings with Marte’s idiot brother-in-law lawyer, eating vegemite sandwiches three times a day, and fending off the advances of a former roadie from Men At Work.

  Besides, Marte says we won’t get arrested because the cops don’t know where we’re going. “While the people will be exposed,” Marte said, “the routes will not.”

  And where ARE we going? I asked.

  “We will leave here and reconvene at the University of Sydney,” he said. “That’s where we’ll undress and paint ourselves.”

  Paint? Reconvene? What the?

  It was becoming clear that this was not a race at all. “I wouldn’t call it a race,” Marte hedged. “I’d call it more gentle exercise.” In fact, he said, it wasn’t called World Naked Bike Race, it was called World Naked Bike Ride.

  What was next? Oh, yeah, and it’s not “Naked,” it’s “Nuked.”

  “How far is it to the university?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Marte said. “I was hoping some other people would show up and lead us.”

  Wonderful.

  But as we waited, people began showing up. Odd, unwashed, sleeping-in-fridge-boxes people. An old, dirty man rode up—his entire life needing a shave—wearing pants that clearly were not originally his. The waist was so big on him that he had to double them over and cinch them with a belt. The fly was permanently down, as was the brim of his bucket hat. He had shoes with no laces in them, and a very stained white shirt. He was either homeless or a flasher. He did not seem like an ardent bicycle-rights activist, if you asked me.

  Three guys from Newcastle showed up on bikes, although they were all smoking and looked like they wouldn’t make it past the first hill, much less the first cop chase. But at least they had experience with it, unlike Marte or me. They’d done it the year before in Newcastle. “After the race, they had a big party and everybody stood around naked cooking sausage,” said one of the three, a bristly man with one eye.

  Among the things I’d be willing to do naked, grilling sausages over open flames is not one of them.

  Finally, an actually recently-bathed person showed up: a young guy named Luigi, who arrived with a killer body, a painted-on fake handlebar moustache, big black-rimmed spectacles with no glass in them, and, scrawled on his back, cryptically, “Don’t Vote for Silvio!”

  A very tan, very gay man showed up, without a bike. Said he’d run alongside us. He was followed by a fat man in orange sweats with a ponytail down his back. We still didn’t have a single woman.

  “Maybe this isn’t going to work out?” I asked Marte.

  “Sure! Sure it will. We expect more than a hundred people!”

  Finally, a Chinese girl arrived with a tie-dyed T-shirt that just barely covered her crotch. It appeared she was wearing no pants. Her face was smothered in half-applied sunblock. She wore shiny patent-leather half-boots. And yet she wasn’t as bizarre as the next woman, who rode up on a miniature girl’s bike with little colorful plastic spoke riders in the wheels, purple tassels, a banana seat, and wearing a dress that Goodwill would’ve rejected. “I found it on the dump!” she crowed.

  We assumed she meant the bike.

  That’s when one of the cops climbed sheepishly out of his squad car. He put on his hat and ambled over to us at about one block per hour. He looked like he’d rather be sawing off his own hand than coming over to talk to us. He looked down as he walked, perhaps hoping not to see anything ugly—and it was almost all ugly. When he finally got to us, he said to the one-eyed guy, “Are you organizing this?”

  “Organizing what?” the one-eyed guy said, coyly. But then ruined it by rolling over on Marte. “He is,” he said, pointing to Our Peerless Leader.

  The cop turned to Marte’s feet and said to them: “You’ll follow all the road rules—”

  “Yes, absolutely!” Marte said.

  “Stay in single file—”

  “Of course!”

  And then, almost as an afterthought, he kicked the ground and said, “And no full nudity. You’ll get a warning and then you’ll be arrested.”

  Groans and complaints from the group.

  “No, no. Absolutely no, uh, genitalia,” he said, now staring at his own feet.

  The gay guy called out, “Is it against the law?”

  “No full nudity,” the cop repeated, starting to sneak away.

  “But if a woman is riding a bike and she’s on the seat, then not everything is showing, is it?” Marte said, putting a very fine point on things.

  “No full nudity,” the cop kept saying. And he was still saying it as he walked away.

  “What about wearing a sock?” Marte hollered.

  “What if we’re painted?” said the ponytailed guy. “Paint is a cover-up!”

  You can imagine the shock on people’s faces as we rode through the streets of Sydney, what with a woman on a five-year-old’s bike and an old lecherous man who could barely pedal and a gay guy running alongside and Mario from Donkey Kong and a pantsless white-faced Chinese woman. It looked like the Tour de Glands.

  After about forty-five minutes and six wrong turns, we eventually got to the university. We pulled over to a grassy spot near a cricket field, at which point Marte started handing out a three-page paper upon which were written suggestions of what people could write on their bodies. Such as:

  Less gas, more ass!

  Ride a bike! Take a bus! Sell your car!

  Indecent expo
sure to cars!

  Then all of them broke out all kinds of body paint, stripped down to complete starkers, and started painting themselves and each other.

  “Nice wicket,” some guy hollered from the cricket field.

  So this was my moment of truth. Was I really going to do this? I took a look around at the group. In the age of cell phone cameras, was I really going to add my nakedness to the Sydney touring company of Hair?

  Still, a chapter is a chapter. I took off my shirt. Took off my shorts. And I was just about to take off my boxers when I heard, “Police. Can I see some ID?”

  My heart became a block of ice. End of the road. I could see the headlines, “Yank in Crank Prank.” I turned around to face my executioner and it was just the one-eyed guy. “Ahh, I’m only tuggin’ your chain, mate!”

  Oh, no you’re not, pal. Not now. Not ever.

  That’s when I decided I’d just ride in my underwear. Does that count? No? Tough.

  There seemed to be only one fairly sane man there—one of the three Newscastles, a chiropractor named Michael, who seemed perfectly normal except he wanted me to paint “God Is Love!” on his back. He worked in Idaho for fifteen years and just decided he needed a change in life, so he and his wife and four kids moved across the world to Australia.

  Me: Do they think it’s funny, you doing the nude bike thing?

  Michael: Uh, no. My wife doesn’t really much care for it. In fact, I’d say she’s kind of anti. It’s actually one of the few problems we have in our twenty-four-year marriage.

  Me: Why doesn’t she?

  Michael: Because she thinks everybody should stay in their little puritan boxes that the Christian world has pushed everybody inside of.