Read Online Sports in Hell by Rick Reilly - Free Book Online Page A

you would French-kiss a fat man, would you believe me?
    If not, then you’ve never been to Socorro, New Mexico, a patch of cactus and rattlers an hour south of Albuquerque. Socorro is famous for two things: (1) the world’s only three-mile-long golf hole, and (2) blowing stuff up.
    They do both on Mt. Socorro, and it has slightly more explosions than Fallujah. It’s the home of New Mexico Tech, which conducts antiterrorist demolition research for the Department of Defense. They build fake factories, stores, and schools and thenblow them to Bejesus and back, using every assortment of letter, car, and backpack bomb you can dream up. The ground in town is constantly trembling. Someday, the gas station is going to blow up in Socorro and nobody’s going to notice for three days.
    One day a year and one day only, they stop the bombing and do something a little more dangerous. They play a one-hole golf tournament from the 7,243-foot top of Mt. Socorro to the thirty-foot hole at the bottom. And I mean
straight
down the mountain. So straight down the mountain that every year somebody has to be carried off the face, unless they come off in a chopper, which has happened a few times. Those are the lucky ones. Others go sliding down the shale, land in cactus, cut themselves on jagged rock, tumble down rock faces, and collapse of heat exhaustion under the pitiless New Mexico sun. Still, it’s more fun than the British Open.
    It’s called the the Elfego Baca Golf Shoot. It’s one hole—over 5,300 yards long—it takes half a day to play it, and by the time you’re done, the thing you will most want to shoot is yourself, for ever agreeing to do the stupid thing.
    Naturally, I signed up.
    Elfego Baca was a nineteen-year-old Socorro sheriff who single-handedly took on a mob of desperadoes back in 1884. He chased them down, got trapped, held himself up in an abandoned adobe house for two days, waited for the mob to fire off all their 4,000 rounds, then came out and arrested them. Four thousand wasted shots? That’s what a golf tournament is, right?
    Driving into town, I couldn’t help but shudder at the steep face of Mt. Socorro. At a BBQ that night, the realization that I was about to do something very, very dumb started to sink in.
    A man so weathered by the sun you could screw his hat on came up and asked me: “You bring tweezers?”
    â€œTweezers?” I said.
    â€œYeah, tweezers. For when you fall in the cactus. There was a cameramanhere once, fell right in a big cactus, and the reporter had to pull like 200 needles out of his butt. Gotta have tweezers.”
    No, no tweezers, I said.
    A woman in a cowboy hat said, “You got new jeans?”
    â€œNew jeans?” I said.
    â€œYeah, ’cause of the horseflies. Some of ’em are so big they’ll bite through your jeans. Hurts.”
    No, no new jeans, I said.
    â€œI did it once,” said a guy named Rich, sucking on a Bud. “By the time I got to the bottom, I couldn’t walk.”
    Oh.
    â€œAlways follow your spotters,” said Mike Stanley, the legend of the Baca, who won it all eighteen times he played it.
    â€œFollow your spotters?” I asked.
    â€œYeah, that way, the snakes’ll bite them first.”
    There was a long argument about whether I’d need to worry about all that since I probably wouldn’t make it down in the first place. They told the story of the German TV guy who had to be carried off the mountain—fireman’s style—by Anita, the 120-pound safety expert. There were reports that he was weeping.
    Mike warned me not to lose a ball (one-stroke penalty) and to “be real quiet after you hit it. Don’t call them on your walkie-talkie right away. Let them listen for the ball.”
    Walkie-talkie?
    I was also warned against (a) contracting the hanta virus (mice), (b) severe dehydration, (c) getting lost, (d) falling into old mine shafts, (e) mountain