Break a Leg

The Sporting Life:

The Public Professor’s Sports Column

It all began when I agreed to perform a wedding.  As in, I’ll be the guy instructing the happy couple to say, “I do.”  While I DJ’d a couple of weddings in grad school, I’ve never performed nuptials, or even thought about it.  But when a couple of friends and former students who’ve been together for a decade asked, I was honored to say yes.

The wedding will be in May, and to make it semi-offical, I registered with The Church of the Latter Day Dude.  Personally, I favored registering with The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I think you really need to defer to the Happy Couple on these situations.  I even let them pick out the tie I’ll wear at the ceremony.  They went with a shiny purple number.

Once you get this committed, you’re in for the whole kit and kaboodle. So when the groom-to-be invited me to his bachelor party, it was a no-brainer.  Would it be Vegas?  Atlantic Citiy?  Or maybe even Canada’s bachelor party hotspot, Windsor, Ontario?  None of the above.  After tossing around some ideas, he chose a a weekend of skiing in West Virginia.

Now the question is staring me in the face: To ski or not to ski?

I didn’t grow up skiing.  I’m from the motherfuckin” Bronx.  I grew up playing stickball and ringolevio.  But I did get a chance to do it a few times in high school.  I went to Kennedy HS, and there was this legendary gym class called “Camping and Winter Sports.”  It was a real racket, and if you were lucky enough to get hip to it, as I did when my friend Kevin clued me in, you were set.  I took the course three times.

The class never really met as a class per se, or in a gym or anything like that.  Instead, most Fridays we went ice skating at the rink on Broadway and W. 237th street that eventually became a Loehmann’s.  And there were also two big field trips.  First was overnight camping in a state park.  Thirty teenagers from the Bronx in the woods.  Not exactly smores and ghost stories.  It was a tent-hopping, drunken bacchanal.  Mostly stuff like listening to Deep Purple on a boom box while hitting a bottle of Coke spiked with rum, though my friend Erik once took mescaline, hallucinated, blacked out, and came to in his tent, buck naked with popcorn strewn everywhere.

But the real highlight of the course was the skiing trip to Big Vanilla, about an hour and a half north of the city.

I first got on some skis at age sixteen.  From then until age twenty-two, there were about a half-dozen ski trips in all: three with that high school gym class and maybe three more with friends during college.

I took to it well, given my lack experience and relatively advanced age.  I was a skinny kid and never boasted the best hand-to-eye coordination, but I’ve always had pretty balance.  And though I can be intensely lazy, I do like to go fast.  So it wasn’t long before I was barreling down the tougher blue courses, searing a straight line through the snow, racing to the bottom.  I never got good enough to go for a black diamond, but that was fine, because I never had much interest in gracefully carving an endless letter S into the mountain.  I don’t know.  Maybe when I was a kid I spent too many weekends watching the syndicated, b-rate, car and sports program All Things Fast and Beautiful, hosted former Houston Oilers Quarterback and Playgirl model Dan Pastorini.  Either way, all I really wanted to do was race to the bottom as fast as I could.

After my late-blooming, late-80s fling with the slopes, I didn’t ski again for about twenty years.  I finally got another chance about five years ago when I went in with a variety of Scots, Germans, and assorted American ne’er-do-wells to rent a cottage in Pennsylvania.  I spent the morning falling down.  But by the afternoon, I was screaming down the blues just like I used to.  The next day I felt as as stiff as Mitt Romney talking to a black person, and elected to hang around the lodge instead of going for a second round.

So what do I do this coming weekend?  I’m arriving late Friday afternoon, so that day’s a no-go, and we’re leaving late Sunday morning.  So really, it all comes down to Saturday.  I’m on the fence at the moment.  Part of me says, Go for it! Live fast and shred those mediocre courses!  But then again, I’m forty-four, completely out of shape, very rusty on skis, and was never really that good on them to begin with.  And there is a certain allure to spending the day drinking whiskey, smoking cigars, and playing poker.

I guess I only have one question.  Would you sign my cast?