Woody Harrelson Will Play Me In the Movie

Thanks to this inspired piece of brilliance from Athlists, I was reminded of my own nuclear fail while once attempting to dunk a basketball.

I was at my friend Nathan Sicko's house, probably around 1982. Yes, "Sicko" was his real last name. But he was still a decent kid. And his older sister Christy was cute despite being nominally challenged, so that added to the motivation to hang out with him sometimes.

He had a basketball hoop in his dirt driveway, and while we were outside shooting one day one of us got the brilliant idea to get a stepladder and see if we could dunk.

We put it right next to the hoop to start, and the initial results were quite good. We were rim-rocking like Dr. J himself.

But of course we couldn't just leave it at that. So we gradually moved the ladder farther and farther away so we could get more hang time. And this, too, went well...for a while.

I was the one who finally moved the ladder past its tipping point. Literally. The farther away we got, the more we had to jump forward to reach the hoop as opposed to just jumping up. We'd gotten it about three feet away, and as I pushed off instead of me flying towards the hoop the ladder went flying away from it.

This left me in a fairly vulnerable position, and I came crashing to the ground. I landed face-first and smashed the frame of my glasses. When I got up they were actually hanging from one of my cheeks.

Fortunately the lenses hadn't shattered and the frames weren't embedded too deeply. My pride was more gravely injured than anything else. I mumbled some sort of lame excuse and hastily pedaled back home. Sadly this was well before the current age of cheap and plentiful video recording equipment, so this escapade wasn't captured to be shared with the world like these.

Christy never did express any sort of interest in me either, so I wonder if she had watched the whole incident unfold and decided there was no way she could go out with someone with my obvious lack of both hops and brains.

Maybe I should have tried to impress her with my Dungeons & Dragons prowess instead. I never knew anyone who got a 20-sided die stuck in his face.