Page 85 - MN

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So there you have it. Every now and then I still have a nightmare where I walk out on a piece of ice with a microphone stand, set it down, and get electrocuted. I bet I would've gotten a standing ovation.
P.S. It took me three weeks, but I just remembered Dick's last name. Foster. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Why do Lousy Athletes Love Sports?
John R. Tunis wrote sports books and they were always about some skinny kid with glasses who discovered a rare talent and became a big league star. One was about a kid who spent hours hitting a baseball up on a roof and then hitting it up there again when it came down. He could always make contact no matter where the ball came from. He got to the big leagues because he would just foul off pitches until the pitcher finally walked him. His on base percentage was a thousand. As a skinny kid with glasses, I devoured those books and I knew that someday I would discover a secret talent and become one of the greatest sports stars of all time.
As I grew older I realized I couldn't run fast, couldn't jump, and hated physical contact. Other than than, I was a great athlete.
Luckily, my parents had lots of books and I also found Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and other humorous authors I will remember tonight about 4 a.m. Benchley wrote stuff like "The Sex Life of a Newt" which I thought was very funny because I was a young boy and the title had "Sex" in it.
Because of these great authors I tried to inject humor into all the school essays I wrote and in the back of my mind I like to think teachers and professors thanked me for breaking the monotony.
It's a good thing I studied and worked at humor because I wasn't headed for sports stardom. Ah, but I could play ping pong. We had a ping pong table in the basement and one of my fondest memories is of playing hours with my dad. We never bothered to keep score and I like to think it was like black guys playing basketball, where the quality of the shots was much more important than numbers. I loved those nights.
In the dorms at the University of Washington there was a Korean student down the hall and we had great nights playing ping pong on the tables on the ground floor.