Tel Aviv - Back home in Tel Aviv and not a minute too soon. I feel like the
Coyote these days, forever chasing a cocky Roadrunner, out of ACME tricks,
hungry, and sick to hell of boulders falling on my head. It doesn't take five
minutes for me to get in, pile through the backed up newspapers at my door,
find out that the water heater has burst, and after wading through a soaked imitation
Persian carpet, discover a fax jammed in the machine telling me to cover the
World Championship Female Mud Wrestling Competition to be held in Bat Yam. Yippee.
Back to work.As if the Super Bowl wasn't bad enough. An ungrateful editor closed my travel allowance (as one of only three paid employees, never, I repeat, never should my travel allowance be closed) and swore to his god in whatever heaven it is that he believes in that the sun would freeze into a solid block of ice before he paid for me to cover the NCAA tournament. I'm not out yet, though. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. Now where the hell did I put that Scotch?
I've always loved wrestling. Dusty Rhodes was one of my three childhood sports idols. Tommy Lasorda and Dr. J being the others. Yeah, I know. Lasorda was a lousy pitcher. But what a coach! Look what he did with David Lopez.
For me, women's wrestling will always be a drunken frat party at good ole Phi Delta Mu, my college home away from home where one fine winter day I cornered Susie Weatherspoon, a shiksah from Fort Walton, in the corner of the upstairs john and did her for a whopping ten minutes. Then she came to her senses and socked me in the jaw. But that night we had wrestling downstairs in the alumni room. Big breasted women fighting it out in a ring of mud, socking each other, clawing at each other's skin, kicking, punching, tossing, until finally the inevitable moment came, the moment we had all been hoping for, praying for, pleading for: one gal ripped the other's top off. Then the roof came down. Man did we mess things up. I've still got this scar on my upper thigh from that night. I've always been too afraid to figure out who put it there.
The World Championship Female Mud Wrestling Competition was quite the event. But "Female" is overstating it. The gals from China and Uzbekestan hardly qualify as being of the feminine nature: muscles to rival Hulk Hogan, beards, thighs the size of transmissions. And what kind of mud was that? Barely an inch thick. No slippage. No half naked chick falling on her back while another jumps her. No full frontal nudity. Not that I would have wanted it after lookin at those gals. Even the Americans scared me. I think that they're former hockey players.
I lasted about half an hour in that joint. Lucky for me the bar was open. Nothing like a half a dozen Carlsburgs to make you forget that you might miss March Madness. And I just know that North Carolina is going all the way this year. Either them or Princeton. I'm not counting the Tigers out yet. Alas. 'Tis but a dream, as old William might have said. Either that or "Here's mud in your eye."