Certain 'Sports' Should Be Put on Ice

By Chris Erskine

Feb. 20, 2002 12 AM PT

The kids are getting a little older now, and we all behave more and more like the cast of “Friends”--thrown together on some overstuffed couch, draping our legs over the ends of the furniture and poking fingers into each other’s midriffs, checking for pregnancies and poor nutrition. There’s my wife, Jennifer Aniston. Me, an aging Matthew Perry. But shorter. Less smirky. Together, we watch these Olympic Games.

“You pregnant, Dad?” some kid asks after poking me in the stomach.

“Don’t even suggest it,” her mother says.

“Your mother doesn’t think pregnancy is funny,” I tell them.

Nothing good has ever come of pregnancy, except of course for you and me and a few of our choicest friends. Otherwise, pregnancy brings only heartbreak and hardship, poverty and long, achy nights on the couch. Eventually, childbirth.

On the positive side, pregnancy offers you children, two of whom are on the couch with us now, also behaving like the cast of “Friends,” the pampered children of the 21st century.

“He is so gifted in the air,” Scott Hamilton is saying of some figure skater.

“Gifted?” asks the boy.

“Yep, I think he said gifted,” I say.

The TV, on long winter nights, is like an extra fireplace. We warm our hands by it. We warm our thoughts by it. With the Olympics in full stride, we gather around this flickering fire and watch the world.

“Everyone looks like the Americans now,” I say.

“They do?” the little girl asks.

“Look, Tom Cruise,” I say.

On TV, there’s this Russian figure skater with Tom Cruise hair. Used to be, you could tell the Eastern Bloc athletes by their severe, soldierly haircuts. No more. Now the Eastern Europeans have Hollywood hair, the flowing tresses of cocker spaniels.

“Yes!” says Scott Hamilton as the skater nails a quadruple jump.

I like figure skating the way I like toy poodles and Sheena Easton songs, which is to say I struggle to quell the violent spasms they trigger in me. As a pampered parent of the 21st century, it’s up to me to set a good example.

“You’re grinding your teeth,” my wife says.

“Look at that shirt,” I say.

“It’s pretty, that shirt,” my wife says.

“It’s a blouse,” I say.

“Isn’t the Laker game on?” asks the boy.

“The Laker game’s over,” my wife says.

Skating. You really think this is what the Greeks had in mind? Outdoors, other Olympic competitors are skiing through forests and shooting guns. On mountainsides, the ski jumpers are gliding off the edges of the Earth.

Inside, Hansel and Gretel are twirling on ice, then crying when things go wrong. Talk about your pampered children.

“And if they found malfeasance on the part of judges, what then?” asks the ever-earnest Bob Costas, our commissioner of television.

What then? I want to shout, “THE WORLD WILL END, THE WORLD WILL END!” But I don’t. This is more serious than that.

You may have heard about this skating fuss. What happened, I think, is that Hansel and Gretel, a pair of skaters from some snowbound nation to the north, were robbed of Olympic gold, creating the biggest international incident since, probably, the Crusades.

Eventually, they receive their own gold medals. And the world is right again.

“Everyone should get gold medals,” I say.

There is no escaping these Winter Games. You leave the couch, go off to work, and a TV is crackling in the corner of the newsroom with three people surrounding it, practicing their wisecracks.

“He’s got his mojo working today!” a TV commentator says after a dazzling snowboard run.

“My mojo’s in the shop,” one of my co-workers says.

“I never could work my mojo,” I say.

“Picabo Street?” asks another colleague. “Did she name herself?”

My co-workers and I watch the biathlon, the sport you keep expecting Leslie Nielsen to show up in. And something called curling, a sort of bar game played with brooms and a giant tea pot. In Switzerland, it’s more popular than sex.

“I think I found my Olympic event,” I say as two guys chase a curling stone with brooms and maybe some Windex.

In fact, the Winter Olympics are lovable mostly for the charming assortment of arcade games that pass for sports.

In the biathlon, you ski, then stop to shoot stuff. In curling, you slide a tea kettle across an icy surface.

They are like games you made up as a kid on long rainy weekends when your parents made the mistake of leaving you home alone with your wilder friends.

“Yes!” an announcer says when the curling stone nudges the bull’s-eye.

“Yes!” I say when a biathlon competitor hits three of her targets.

On the way for coffee, another colleague passes, pauses, then tilts her head to listen to the TV.

“What’s that noise? Sports?” she asks.

That’s music, actually, two announcers breathlessly describing the end of the women’s cross-country race, where a beautiful Russian finishes with a little bit of frozen spittle frosting her lovely chin.

“Noise?” I say.

No way.

Next week: Snowboarding, sport of kings.

Chris Erskine’s column is published on Wednesdays. His e-mail address is [email protected].