Big Mike: The Game Behind The Games (Redux)

(We inadvertently posted this piece yesterday. Monday is Milo’s day. Just as he was preparing to hit Publish for his masterpiece, he noticed this piece was already up. Immediately he was on the phone, threatening to take his literary pearls elsewhere. It took no less than a half-hour’s-worth of groveling, a case of Jack Daniel’s, and the arrangement for a midnight visit to his office of a trio of high-priced call girls to calm him down. Oh, and the presentation to him of a solid gold plaque bearing the inscription, “Gary, Indiana’s Greatest Writer.” Our ordeal of prostration took so much out of us, we were too exhausted to include images and links in this re-post. Go to the original post if you want to see them. — The Eds.)

The Winter Olympics are finished, thank goodness. Now it’ll be two good years before I’ll be bombarded with information about athletes I don’t care about and sports that are so pointless as to be parodies of themselves.

Didn’t I warn you a couple of weeks ago when all this year’s Olympics fuckery began that it would be chock full of emotional pornography? Sure enough, as Benny Jay wrote Sunday, some skater performed despite losing her mother. There are six-plus billion of us on this crazy planet. People drop like flies every second of the day. When someone I know cashes it in, I’ll weep. If a friend or a colleague loses a loved one, I’ll be johnny-on-the-spot at the wake or to help them sit shiva. But I won’t salivate like Pavlov’s dogs every time some NBC sportscaster rings the death knell.

This year’s Olympiad may be best remembered not for the poor guy who was killed when he flew off his sled or even for the skater but for the inexplicable interest it has generated in curling. Yup. Curling.

It’s the hottest thing right now. In a Washington Post story the other day one of the Canadian curlers claimed there are a million of her fellow citizens who engage in the sport…, er, thing. That means one of every 34 Canadians enjoys watching a giant paperweight with a handle on top sliding down the ice while a couple of goofs furiously sweep the surface ahead of it. They’re nuts.

A few years ago poker became the hottest thing in the world. It seemed as though every network and cable channel began carrying poker tournaments. Think of it! A game where people sit there, motionless, doing all they can to mask their emotions was being aired a dozen times a day. Watching paint dry would have been far more compelling — at least there’s a color involved.

But I swear to you, poker is a cavalcade of laughs compared to curling.

Yet people all over this lunkheaded land are getting giddy over it. “Fans far and wide were drawn to Canada’s No. 2 sport,” the WashPo story asserted. “… Many fans took time to try to understand the strategy and idiosyncracies. New curling clubs already are being formed in warmer places like Florida and North Carolina.”

Are people that bored in those two states?

Chicago came thisclose to getting the 2016 Olympics. Poor Benny Jay almost had a baby worrying that the International Olympic Committee would tab our town for the “honor.” Public parks would be paved over for one-off concrete arenas, Richie Daley’s cousins and campaign contributors would become (even more) enriched by sweetheart construction and concessions contracts, and embarrassingly poor neighborhood folk would be shipped off to the equivalent of Siberia (Ford Heights?) so they wouldn’t be seen on network TV. All in the name of bringing the city some mythical “world class” cachet.

We really dodged a bullet there, folks. The Vancouver Sun estimated a year ago that various arms of Canadian government — local, provincial and national — had by that time already ponied up $6 billion to make the quadrennial sports/advertising orgy go on. Six years from now, the even bigger summer games would cost us several times that amount. Like we’ve got it to spare.

Who knows what pyramid schemes Richie Daley would have concocted to pay for the 2016 bash? He’d probably begin by slashing expenses — schoolkids don’t really need textbooks, do they? And he might have sold more of the city’s assets — the sidewalks, say — to private operators.

All this talk about money, games, poker, and pyramid schemes reminds me of the one and only time I’ve ever played poker with a bunch of guys.

We played at the Arlington Heights home of a guy named Lester. He was the captain of my 12-inch softball team back in the ’90s. He was geekily earnest — he’d solemnly shake hands with every player as soon as each showed up for practice or the game.

We all arrived at Lester’s house that Friday night, opened our bottles of bourbon, lighted up our five-dollar cigars and looked expectantly at our host. “Deal ‘em up,” one guy said. Instead, Lester lugged out a bunch of charts on easels and a whiteboard. “I just wanna show you guys something before we play,” he said. We all glanced at each other.

Lester proceeded to extol the virtues and wonders of Amway. Oy. “You may ask why I’m so committed to Amway,” he said, which we hadn’t but he told us anyway.

He’d survived a near-death experience a few years before, he said. He was gassing up his car late at night when a guy came up, stuck a pistol in the small of his back and demanded his wallet. He smartly turned it over but, for the hell of it, the gunman pulled the trigger. Lester went down like a sack of flour. Fortunately — maybe miraculously — the bullet lodged in his spine and didn’t do much more damage than to give him a cranky back for the rest of his life.

Anyway, as he recovered, Lester decided not to waste another moment of his life. He’d devote all his energies to making a fabulous living for himself and his family. In fact, he was going to let us all in on the secret of his success.

He drew flow charts showing how scads of money would pass from our countless potential clients to us. The charts described perfect pyramids. Amway makes Bernie Madoff look like a three-card monte player on the el.

None of us exhibited the slightest interest in enrolling. The night wasn’t a total loss for Lester, though. He cleaned each and every one of us out by the time the game broke up.

Richie Daley, the International Olympic Committee and NBC would have been proud.