After Draining All The Writers, Try The Pool

I watched the bronze-medal water-polo match between Italy and Hungary, and I found it to be almost terrifyingly violent, with enraged, screaming men pounding on each other with terrifying force.

I’m referring here to the Italian sportswriters.

American sportswriters tend to be subdued. They sit quietly in the press box, tapping away diligently on their laptop computers, writing stories from the statistics sheets that are brought to them every few minutes. They’re so busy writing their stories that, after a while, they pretty much stop watching the competition. The athletes could all sneak off to a bar, and as long as the American sportswriters kept receiving their statistics sheets, they’d never know.

In fact, an excellent prank to play on American sportswriters would be to slip them fictional statistics, which I guarantee would wind up in the newspaper. (“It was a night of glory for Carl Lewis, whose long jump of 11 miles, 6 inches broke all existing … “)

For the Italian sportswriters, on the other hand, the highest priority appears to be rooting for Italian athletes and screaming what I assume are non-complimentary remarks at the referees. There were times, at the water-polo match, where I thought they were going to hurl their computers into the pool.

I frankly did not find the match to be so exciting. If I had to identify, in one word, the problem with water polo, that word would be “water.” It is a known fact that water slows everything way down; this is precisely why - to cite just one example - auto races are not held underwater. And to make matters worse, the water polo players wear World-War-I-pilot-style helmets that they apparently purchase at Bob’s House Of Goofy Headgear.

So what you, the spectator, see is this mass of comical helmets chasing a ball up and down the pool at the speed of, oh, an escalator.

Fortunately, the Italians won the bronze medal, thereby averting mass Italian-sportswriter suicide in the press box. Next came the gold-medal match between Croatia and Spain. I was eager to see this, because Spain has a player known as “The Michael Jordan Of Water Polo.”

That’s one thing I’ve noticed here at the Olympics: Every sport has somebody who is compared, by the sport’s promoters, to Michael Jordan, as in: “He’s considered the Michael Jordan of flatwater canoeing.” The other thing I’ve noticed is that, in every sport, they tell you how impressively fast some object travels, as in: “These volleyball jump-servers hit the ball at 80 miles per hour.”

Anyway, I was looking forward to seeing the Michael Jordan of water polo, because Michael Jordan - really - cannot swim. So I figured there’d be one Spanish player who’d spend the entire match lying on the bottom of the pool.

But nothing that exciting happened. The helmets thrashed up and down the pool, and I never did figure out which one was Michael Jordan. The Croatians, despite strong play by Ognjen Krzic, Renato Vrbicic and Zdeslav Vrdoljak, were unable to overcome a serious vowel shortage, and Spain won the gold. The victorious players jumped up and down at speeds approaching 30 miles per hour. It was fun to watch, and I’ll definitely go back. If they drain the pool.