Champion Blankets The Field

It had all the ingredients of another Clinton administration scandal:

Fast women. Loud music. Double beds.

But don’t lower the blinds and hang the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door.

We’re not talking about hanky-panky here. We’re talking about the thrill of victory and the agony of da-sheets.

We’re talking about the Super 8 Motels Northwest Regional bed-making championships.

You sports fans will be proud to note that for one brief, shining moment Wednesday in a humble banquet hall at the downtown Red Lion hotel, Spokane’s own Donna Groeper had the magic fingers.

The woman moved like a hamster on a hot plate.

She fluffed. She straightened. She folded corners tighter than a neurotic’s psyche.

And when she raised her hands in calf-roper style to call time - 2:39 minutes, to be exact - Groeper had smothered the entire field of 15 of the Northwest’s best chambermaids.

Well, 14 chambermaids. Oregon resident Alex Aguilar was the lone male competing. Hotel and motel housekeeping is, alas, still predominantly a woman’s world.

Groeper’s victory earned her some prizes and qualified her for a free trip to Bloomington, Minn. That’s where the big bed-off finals will be held in May. A win there would get her a new car or a wad of cash.

Also going are runner-up Candy Cooper of Sandpoint and third-place finisher Trina McGown of Boise.

“I was pretty nervous,” says Groeper, a mother of five who tidies up the Super 8 near the airport.

I know, I know. A contest to see who’s quickest at making a bed sounds plumb goofy. It’s not something we’ll ever see on ESPN, unless the Swedish Bikini Team gets involved.

But think about it. We live in a maladjusted world where sweat-stained, fabulously wealthy athletes are adulated like gods or even game show hosts.

Isn’t it time we celebrated those unsung, underpaid heroes who clean up after slobs who trash motel rooms and often baptize it with vomit and other assorted bodily fluids?

“I can’t do that part,” adds Groeper. “I let somebody else handle vomit or they’d have to clean up mine.”

Putting up with the callous check-in/check-out public is often not a pretty picture.

“This is our thank you for a thankless job,” says Terrence Gilligan, a Super 8 executive who has seen plenty of aberrant behavior while laboring in the hotel industry.

He’s not merely talking about his superiors, either. Some guests are pretty darned bizarre, too.

Housekeepers, he says, have found guns, knives and even toddlers left behind in rooms by motel guests. “It’s true,” says Gilligan. “This woman got a mile down the road and realized she’d forgotten her kid.”

At one hotel where he worked, the routine three-month flipping of the mattresses uncovered nearly 100 dirty magazines of every prurient persuasion.

It appears the pages being turned aren’t all found in the Gideon Bibles.

So why not give these lowly housekeepers a little splash of fun?

And what a splash.

The Super 8 people turned their contest into a crazy, chaotic event somewhere on a loudness scale between a Holy Ghost revival and an Amway convention.

To the screams of audience members armed with noisemakers, contestants competed two at a time on a pair of double beds placed in the center of the room. A DJ played driving rock hits to add to the confusion.

There was more yelling and sheet waving than a Klan rally.

And when it was over, the combatants left the arena knowing they may someday meet again, perhaps on a field of flannel.

As Ernest Hemingway’s maid once muttered, “The beds were good.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 color photos