My pal Gordo likes to give me a hard time about liking off-the-wall sports — I live for curling, cornhole and hope to someday take a crack at Irish Road Bowling. I like regular sports too — basketball is my true love, and the Red Sox my one and only team. But baseball and basketball players often do what they do for all the wrong reasons, as guys like Johnny Damon proved this winter. I love sports like curling for one simple reason: people who play them do it because they love it, and for nothing else. When there’s no fame or fortune awaiting the winners, all that BS doesn’t get in the way of doing it for the love of competition.
This brings me to my latest obsession — The Iditarod Sled Dog Race. This obviously, if you know me, is something that I’d never actually do, but I respect the heck out of the fine people that pull it off. I fear them as well — they are all flippin’ crazy. OLN covered the “last great race” this year, and the coverage was strangely compelling — the trials that each musher goes through just to make it to the end is absolutely stunning — as is the scenery.
I also just finished reading Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod, a book written by two-time finisher Gary Paulsen. I’m often wary of non-fiction sports books — they usually manage to bore me about halfway through — but this read like a bestselling thriller, comically describing the absolute ridiculousness that was Paulsen’s run from Minnesota (where he learned to mush) to Nome.
My favorite part — Paulsen describing his attempt to make it out of Anchorage (just the ceremonial start of the race) alive:
“We went through people’s yards, ripped down fences, knocked over garbage cans. At one point I found myself going through a carport and across a backyard with fifteen dogs and a fully loaded Iditarod sled. A woman standing over a kitchen sink looked out with wide eyes as we passed through her yard and I snapped a wave at her before clawing the handlebar again to hang on while we tore down her picket fence when [the lead dog] tired to thread through a hole not bigger than a housecat…”
If you like sports and competition at all, give Paulsen’s book a read.