Sports in Hell by Rick Reilly

it’s scary!”
    That’s exactly what I thought, except when I stood across from my opponent I noticed he was not standing. He was sitting in a wheelchair.
    He had long hair, a green T-shirt, and was drinking a Steam Whistle. His name was Russell Kinkelaar, twenty-eight, from Lindsay, Canada. He’d been in the chair since he was four, when a drunkdriver hit him and his uncle. The uncle and the drunk died and Russell has been paralyzed from the waist down ever since.
    Nice. If I lost, I was out. If I won, I’d have beaten some poor uncle-less guy in a wheelchair.
    Now I was perspiring at the hairline. In the distance I could hear people doing cheers at some other table. And instead of concentrating on my first throw, I kept thinking, “What in hell does a Rock Paper Scissors cheer sound like?”
    Fingers, Knuckles
Cuticle, Nail!
Our Phalanges
Never Fail!
    There was a drunk guy standing next to me, part of my pool. “You nervous?” I asked.
    â€œNah,” he slurred. “I come for the dollar beers. I drove all night, eight hours from New York, just to come to this.”
    I stared at him. “Uh, the beers are five bucks.”
    He looked at me like I’d told him he was drinking turpentine. Then he looked at his beer. “Dick nipples!” he said.
    The referee called Russell and me forward. Thirty people gathered around to watch, and exactly one of them was rooting for me—TLC. And she was caving a little. “Well, wouldn’t it be
nice
if he won?” she whispered. The ref drew us together. I sort of hunched over to be more down to his level. I heard somebody
tsk-tsk
. I guess this makes me an ass.
    Nonetheless, I stuck with my plan, playing the rube. I asked the ref a few dumb questions. One was, “Is it best out of ten?” The other seven looked at me judgmentally. Then I threw Scissors, which cut his Paper nicely. The crowd groaned like I’d just put a kitty in a blender. I don’t remember what the hell I threw after that, but I beat him in the first game, two out of three. Then he beat me two out of three. The crowd roared their approval. All tied. He spun his chair out away from me to steel himself (sorry—figureof speech) and then back toward me. For the rubber game, I started with Paper, figuring wheelchair or no wheelchair, guys never open with Scissors with so many people watching, and I was right. My Paper clobbered his Rock. Then I threw Rock, for no reason at all—and he threw scissors and I was through Round One-A.
    Very, very light applause and a few scattered boos. Russell took it well. “I tried to change it up in the first round,” he admitted, “but nothing worked. Then you just beat me bad in that last game.”
    He looked so sad, I realized even I felt bad about beating him. But not as much as to not remind you that my personal record was now 3–1.
    Right after us, the drunk guy from New York lost his first game and got so pissed he ripped off his entire bib. Safety pins went flying, except for one of them, which bent and poked him in the chest. And that’s when I said, “Uh, it’s best two out of three. You haven’t lost yet.”
    He looked at me and looked at his crumpled bib and said, “Dick nipples!” And then he lost the next game, too.
    Now there were four of us. I was first up, except my opponent—a tall, dark-haired guy in a button-down shirt—was on his cell phone. It was me and the ref and the crowd waiting for the guy to finish up. “OK, OK!” the guy was saying into his phone. “OK! Extra large! What? I don’t know! Whatever color they have!”
    The ref said, “Sir, you must hang up now or you
will
forfeit.”
    Guy on the phone: “I don’t know! A hundred percent cotton! I gotta go!”
    The ref started the game instantly and the guy was completely flummoxed and I beat him 2–1 in the first game and 2–0 in the