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Motel Room Olympics ~1975

The best thing about being on the Wichita Swim Club was going to out-of-town swim meets.

Well, OK, the best thing about being on the Wichita Swim Club was getting to spend several hours every day in a swimming pool with fabulously fit and attractive young girls in their tight Speedos. Nothing else came close. But out-of-town swim meets were pretty fun, too.

I could tell stories of the awesome and epic competitive aquatic battles waged in various exotic pool locations (Topeka, Wellington, Bartlesville, etc.), but they were witnessed by hundreds of spectators. You can ask them for a description. Heck, you can see stuff like those swim meets on ESPN.

No, the really interesting competitions were not open to the general public. They took place in dimly lit private rooms tucked away at the ends of the long hallways of various Ramada and Holiday Inns. I’m talking about the Bedroom Olympics.

No, not that kind of Bedroom Olympics…get your mind out of the gutter! Remember, my friends and I were all certified nerds, and in most cases were still years away from holding hands with a girl, much less (gasp!) kissing one. But we were intensely competitive, and when the day’s swimming races were done, there were still challenges issued among the restless young athletes.

It usually started with a warm-up competition in “bed bouncing”. This is where you simply jump up and down on the motel room bed, trying to get as much altitude as possible. The ultimate goal would be to control your bounce with such precision that your hair would lightly touch the ceiling. High enough to touch the ceiling, but not so high that you suffered a bloody concussion while knocking ceiling plaster onto the sheets you were planning to sleep on later.

(Yes, there was occasionally blood. But most of the time, our heads stayed well under the noggin-bump threshold.)

The “bed bounce” competition naturally discriminated against those kids who were, shall we say... less gifted in the verticality department. One such individual was Danny Robinson; shorter than most of his teammates, but ferociously competitive. An extremely talented and intense swimmer, “Rosbo” clearly felt that a rule change was needed to even up the playing field. Thus, the sport of “ceiling toe touch” was invented.

It started the same as bed bouncing, but the ultimate goal was to kick your feet upwards in much the same manner that a pole vaulter changes his bodily direction. If you timed it right, and if you had a high enough bounce, you could touch your feet on the ceiling.

What a feeling of accomplishment! To slip the surly bonds of gravity and for that one shining moment reach the highest altitude allowed by motel architects…and then to feel the warm enveloping feeling of being gently cradled back to earth by the soft and luxurious bedcoverings of one of the country’s finest discount travel accommodation chains.

Well, OK, at some of the cheaper motels, the descent back from the ceiling was more like plummeting onto a sandpaper-covered hunk of plywood, but you get the idea.

To the best of my knowledge, though, we never had any serious injuries. Oh yeah, the bed springs probably suffered some fatigue damage, and the sheets were probably burned after each of our visits, but it’s probably a miracle that we never had to call room service for a body bag pickup.

Rosbo, though the shortest in the group, was undoubtedly the champ. I didn’t perform too badly, myself, considering that my competitors were all much finer athletes than I was. In the pool, I was always last among this group, but when it came to doing weird crap like jumping on hotel beds, well, I wasn’t half bad.

But the all-time award for most memorable bed-jump had to go to my best friend, Mickey Canaday. Though Mickey was a very talented athlete, he didn’t possess the same ultra-lean physique that most of the boys on the team had – his nickname was “The Fat Man”. At this point in his life, he was not really fat (and not really a man, either, but we won’t go there) – yet he did have a certain “smoothness” that set him apart visually from his teammates.

Anyway, Mickey enjoyed competing in the bed bouncing events, but was not satisfied with such a simple challenge. Always innovative, “The Fat Man” came up with a method for increasing the degree of difficulty; style points for the landing.

For most of us, simple survival was enough. As we came down from the ceiling, we figured that avoiding paralysis was complex enough. But not for Mickey.

I honestly don’t remember how many different types of maneuvers he attempted as he explored ways to expand the competition. There are no photographic records of his creativity in this limited arena. But no one will ever forget his finest moment in bed bouncing – the Cannonball Landing.

The idea was to see how high your second bounce would take you, if you jumped really high, then curled up into a tight ball before the primary impact. With years of diving board cannonballs under his belt, Mickey felt that he might as well “go for it” on his first attempt.

It was beautiful. He leapt high. He curled up. He bounced.

Wrapped up as a tight aerodynamic human sphere, Mickey sprang off the bed with fearsome velocity. He held form throughout most of his bounce, until the moment he realized that he’d failed to think about his post-bounce trajectory. And by then it was too late.

With arms still wrapped around himself, our intrepid human cannonball shot out over the edge of the bed, and landed directly on top of the little round-topped table that crappy motel rooms always place between the bed and the ineffective heater unit. There was a loud “POP”, followed by an even louder moan as the table fragmented and the bouncing fatman smacked the floor.

The witnesses each held their breath for that one second that you always do when you’ve witness a bloody and potentially deadly accident. But then, even before we were sure Mickey was still alive, the laughter started. Amid gasps of laughter, we did manage to pull ourselves together enough to check on our buddy’s survival. No obvious blood, and no apparent broken bones; it was OK to laugh. Which we did... for quite some time.

The table was in pieces. After moving the still aching Mickey onto the bed to recover, the rest of us tried to assess the damage to the room, and predict the punishments we’d receive when the smashed furniture was discovered. Several possible cover stories were hastily developed (it was broken when we got here, the maid did it, it was Odle’s fault, etc.).

But the story has a happy ending. Mickey’s injuries were not significant, but that wasn’t the happy part – none of the rest of us really cared how badly he was hurt. Besides, any injuries received in the process of delivering belly laughs to your buddies are worth whatever pain they cause. No, the happy ending to the story was that we were able to (sort of) put the pieces of the table back together before checking out of the motel. It was a very shaky repair job – if an anorexic cockroach walked across it, it would again fly apart into splinters – but chances were good that we would be long gone from this town before the damage was discovered. With any luck, the housekeeping staff would believe that the destruction was caused by an errant vacuum cleaner or something.

We may have been young, but we learned from this potentially disastrous incident. At the next hotel, we moved all the peripheral furniture out of the way before we started the bouncing competition. Hey, we weren’t stupid.

Were we?