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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Why Can’t We Recreate In Private?

First came Bloomsday, the world’s largest timed road race.

That begat Hoopfest, the world’s largest three-on-three street basketball tournament.

Now Spokane is bracing itself for Slapshot - so far only the state’s largest three-on-three street hockey fest.

Slapshot starts next weekend in the Spokane Arena parking lot. Last year’s maiden event saw 75 teams of in-line skaters whacking at each other like Billy Bob Thornton with a sling blade. Slapshot coordinator Guy Thomas hopes for perhaps double the number of teams this year.

In other words, if Slapshot follows the ebola-like spreading pattern of Bloomsday and Hoopfest, downtown will soon be choked by hordes of sweat-soaked hockey goons.

Well, I have two words for Spokane’s bizarre addiction to wretched excess: Knock it off!

Can’t we recreate any more unless we’re surrounded by a boisterous mob?

What happened to rugged individualism? What happened to the lonely runner?

Will nobody go read a book unless it’s for a competition? Bookfest - the world’s largest timed street reading of “War and Peace.”

Spokane turned even the dignified act of dining into Pig Out in the Park, the aptly named open-air gluttonfest of stomach-churning proportions.

I went last year and nearly got trampled by a sauce-stained fatso who - I swear - was gnawing on a turkey leg the size of a PresTo-log.

I don’t mean to get my Nikes in a knot.

I’ve never cared much for the smug aura that hangs over Bloomsday along with the body odor. But Hoopfest is Kool and the Gang. It’s as much fun for non-jocks as it is for the players.

I did have a special Hoopfest interest this year thanks to some young adults who named their team Doug Clarks A Moron.

The name was intended as an insult. But I bought the guys custom T-shirts and we became swell chums. The Morons, by the way, placed fourth in their division with a 3-2 record.

Hoopfest aside, a limit should be set on the number of epic productions before some idiot comes up with something really stupid. I can see it now: Wicketfest - the world’s largest three-on-three street croquet tournament.

Maybe taxpayers would put up with more Slapshots and Hoopfests if we got something in return.

City streets, if you haven’t noticed, are more pitted than a can of fancy olives. Yet, we have no money to repair our urban moonscape.

Spokane City Manager Bill Pupo announced recently that we may have to borrow $6.2 million to fix just 13 of our worst streets.

Of course we can’t fix the potholes. We’re too busy handing bags of settlement loot to cigar-chomping Jimmy Marks.

Have you ever wondered why, with all our shabby streets, the asphalt for Bloomsday and Hoopfest is always as smooth as Pupo’s head? A snitch tells me it’s so no litigious athlete stumbles into a pothole and decides to gouge the city deeper than the Marks’ clan.

That gave me an idea.

I say we move the Bloomsday and Hoopfest course each year. That way we’d at least get 10 or 12 new miles of pockmarked streets patched.

And if paved streets were the payoff, well, I’d be willing to put up with all the swollen events we can muster.

We could pave West First with Hypefest, the world’s largest timed needle exchange.

East Sprague would be like glass after Hookerfest, the world’s largest timed three-on-three.

How about Slugfest? We could get Mike “The Bite” Tyson to come to Spokane and endorse the world’s largest street brawl on Monroe.

Tyson may have a lot of time on his hands after the Nevada Boxing Commission nails him for attempting to hold his own pigout on Evander Holyfield.

You know how it is with the fight game - ear today, gone tomorrow.

, DataTimes