Future Olympian

I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of sad the Olympics are over. It was the sort of mindless television I could absorb, cocktail in hand, before going to bed.

In other words, perfect.

You only have to watch a sport a few minutes to instantly become an expert.

“Oh, I dunno about that dive, Sherry, it was kind of splashy,” I’d say to TV after having watched all of three minutes of the men’s 10 meter platform.

I joked to the wife that surely there must be an Olympic sport that I could do, even though I’m just about 54, have no discernible athletic skills and the coordination of the average slippery log.

(By the way, when it comes to slippery logs over creeks, I don’t even try to cross on them anymore. I’ve taken so many dives over the years, that I just wade in the creek. It’s easier. That’s how uncoordinated I am.)

So I looked at the list of sporting events that I just might be able to do.

Several are simply out the question. I can’t possibly win any sprints, races or swimming events.

Water polo looks like fun, until I realized that their feet aren’t touching the bottom. They’re swimming all the time. I took swimming in college as an elective. It was swimming and canoeing. I learned a lot about canoeing from the course.

But the swimming was a different sort of hell where the instructor had us tread water in the deep end until he got tired of yelling at us or we drowned.

I also can’t do diving. For one, my best dive is the cannonball, and secondly, since watching Dominic Fargnoli almost drown after going into Black Creek from the rope swing in eighth grade, I’ve had an aversion to heights and water.

(If you’re wondering how many teens will stand on the bank and watch a kid drown in a creek the answer is almost all of them. It surprised me when Scott, one of the least compassionate people I knew at the time, jumped in and hauled Dominic out of the water. The rest of us just kind of shrugged. I mean, Dominic wasn’t that far from shore, and no one was really expecting him to drown. But I digress.)

I thought about some of the canoeing events, but then I actually saw the people in the canoe. I could spend 10 years cross fit training and never come close to being in as shape as they are.

I guess I could try shooting, but I’ve watched that before, too and boy, those guys and gals are super good and have spent a gazillion hours honing their skills.

I have a rusty 870 in the closet and a couple of boxes of buckshot in case of some sort of end-of-the world scenario happens.

The nice thing about buckshot is you don’t have to have great aim, and it will blast through the average door pretty handily.

Self defense is not exactly an Olympic sport.

There was one Olympic “sport” I could do and there were plenty of guys doing it. They lugged around cameras and shot the people with the real athletic skills.

Now that’s something I could definitely handle.

P.S. If you’re the person that recently sent a well-reasoned letter in response to a recent letter we ran about out-of-staters, please re-send the letter. I can’t seem to find it in the 11,000 emails in my inbox. But I did read it and would be more than happy to publish it.