Or Desiree (Dez) Weimann, the little mortician’s-assistant running back. She’s got to be in the top three women in America at what she does, and yet she pays for her own equipment, pays for her own travel, and works a full-time job just to keep playing. Has Adrian Peterson ever had to do that?
And I can’t get out of my mind Leila Kulin, the woman with a face like an Easter Island statue who sat in that 261-degree sauna in Finland as though it were a park bench in Central Park. While the woman next to her was going into triple fits, she sat there and didn’t move so much as a cuticle. Her skin was literally frying and yet she didn’t even blink. Has Tiger Woods ever been more focused?
My Opie moment was this: Turns out “dumb” is in the eye of the beholder. You couldn’t see the face of one of those homeless soccer players as he soaked in a standing ovation and think it was anything but pure grace. Really, considering my preconceived notions of what these sports would be like vs. what most of them actually were like, maybe I was the dumbest of all.
Still, I did do one smart thing during this quest. About two and a half years into it, I married TLC. I love her. She loves me. And for lonely nights, she beats the bejesus out of ferrets.
Copyright © 2010 by Rick Reilly
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reproduce their photographs:
Chapter 2: Meagan J. Rhoten
Chapter 4: Rana Weaver, EMRTC/NMT
Chapter 13: Stefano Pasini/FOTO UP AGENCY
All other photos are courtesy of Cynthia Reilly, aka “TLC”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sports from hell : my search for the world’s dumbest
competition / Rick Reilly.
p. cm.
1. Sports—Miscellanea. I. Title.
GV707.R46 2009
796—dc22 20090212
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