I'm madder than an Aryan Nations chemist on a busman's tour of an Iraqi milk factory about these goody-two-shoes safety freaks who want to ban the birthright of every healthy, red-blooded young male in this country, the right to throw himself off a bridge attached to a bungee cord and participate in extreme sports. Somebody tell me what's wrong with a little derring-do? And the more radical the better, I say!
Michael Kennedy and Sonny Bono are heroes, dammit! They're men who prove that in America you can't play too hard. You know how Elton John and Bernie Taupin rewrote "Candle in the Wind" for the late Princess Di? I've rewritten "Sympathy for the Devil" for Michael. My new lyrics go "I shouted out who killed the Kennedys / When after all it was just a tree." If Mick and the boys were smart they'd record it im-mediately, but let's face it, their action sports days are over. Keith Richards would rather just poke fun at Elton John for being foofy than actually do something about it.
Skiing head-on into a pine is a good start, but how about a return to some of the real extreme sports, the ones where men really prove something, the ones where would-be Evel Knievels really confront the void and look death in the eye? I'm talking about alligator wrestling. Your Endangered Species Stump Pants suddenly seem more meaningful when you put them on to subdue a 300-pound bull gator. And I bet Nike could clean up manufacturing sportsbarrels to go over waterfalls in. Swoosh! Show me a radical young athlete who's willing to strap on a pair of wings and jump off the Statue of Liberty with no bungee cord in sight and I'll show you an extreme sportsman after my own heart. Tightrope walking between skyscrapers? ESPN2, where are you?
Now that MGM is opening extreme sports theme parks in Las Vegas, you know that management teams and fraternities are soon going to be taking trips on the Deliverance cruise. What's the action sports equivalent of the Ned Beatty scene in that movie? Men, jump off bridges while you still can! And aesthetic considerations aside, I've always wondered why corporations send their junior executives on extreme sports weekends. What, you've bungee jumped in the Rockies, now you're going to work more efficiently? You've stared down the abyss and now you really feel alive, and you can't wait to get back to 60-hour work weeks and scintillating conversations in the men's room about the 401K plan? 401K? Isn't that that mountain in Nepal? I hear they're sending us heli-skiing there next year!
It's not enough anymore to go to a ski lodge, ride the little chair up the mountain and experience the thrill of skiing down it, and then retire to the bar and have a drink with a snow bunny in front of the fire. Boring! Lazy! The neon-suited sporting types of today feel guilty enough just being there and spending all that money, and with all that gear. Leisure time for them is the time to live intensely and fully, to locate some missing piece of themselves and make themselves whole, and conversely to see life as it is by stripping away all kinds of fat. It has to be extreme and it can't be mundane. They've got to pummel themselves into the ground and beat themselves into oblivion and high-five each other all night for surviving it. The same stuff they do at work and in those sports bars they go to. Radical.
It all goes to show that extreme sports are good for the gene pool. Of course people die doing street luge. It's nature's way of making sure guys who are willing to strap themselves to a skateboard and head into traffic don't reproduce themselves. And you don't have to be Stephen Jay Gould to know that the species is going to be better off when the parasailing gene is bred out of it. Listen, no one's going to tie a rope to me. I'm not interested. But that's just me. I will survive.
Plus, you really have something on the other guys in the frat when you end up on the wrong end of a bungee cord that's been used one too many times. Although it's hard to say "Been there, done that" when you're dead, they'll know you would've. Maybe you can spell it out some night during Naked Coed Ouija.
I'd like to locate a death wish in here, but only the already dead need to feel alive in this way. We're dealing with people who wouldn't know the void from a Taco Bell. You don't take a beeper into the void, and isn't that what that electronic device called "Peeps" is, a beeper for avalanches? How extreme is that? You want extreme? Get lost in the drifting snow, survive, and become a yogi. When a new generation of garishly clothed snowboarders finds you in your tattered Northface rags and asks you where the best powder is, tell them this: Some people don't need excessively lightweight Maniak Goggles with their insane detailing and revolutionary styling to confront the void; they do it every day without them. They don't have to pay someone to tie a rope around their waists and push them off a bridge. But hey, have fun.
Mr. Slotcar Hatebath is an anagram of this column's writer's name. He lives in Allston, MA.
