Wouldn’t It Be Great If….?

I thought I’d watch a bit of the curling competition in the Winter Olympics last night – well I’m currently having one of my occasional bouts of insomnia and my thinking was that five minutes of watching curling should be enough to send anyone asleep. Is it possible for there to be a more boring sport? Apart from basketball of course.

I’d only been watching a couple of minutes but it was so boring my mind had started wandering before its soporific effect could get a grip of me, and very soon I was playing ‘Wouldn’t it be great if…?’ I’ve imagined a ‘Wouldn’t it be great if…?” for most sports but my favourite one is golf. It goes like this. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if…Tiger Woods stood on the first tee of a 400 yard par four, took out his driver, hit the ball perfectly, but the ball travelled only half as far as he usually hit it?’ If this happened his normal 300 yard drive would only travel 150 yards and he would still be 250 yards from the green. 250 yards is a three wood for Tiger Woods. But this time his ball would travel twice as far as normal, therefore it would never even look at the green and finish 250 yards the other side of it. It would be another three wood back to the green but this time, despite hitting the ball absolutely perfectly again, it would again go only half as far as usual, 125 yards. This would still leave him 125 yards to the flag, a wedge for Tiger. But this time he would hit it twice as far as usual and it would finish up 125 yards through the green. And so on and so on, hitting each alternate shot twice as far as usual and half as far as usual. The poor bugger would never finish a hole. That would wipe the smile off his face and a few billion pounds off his bank account.

I tried a few ‘Wouldn’t it be great ifs…’ for Winter Olympic sports. The best I came up with was the ski jump, which went – ‘Wouldn’t it be great if… a ski jumper, instead of soaring off the runway into the wide blue yonder when reaching the end of the runway, simply dropped off the end of it like a stone?’ Ideally we would be able to view it from two angles: straight on, and from directly overhead, so we could see him drop down like the Wily Coyote plummeting into the canyon in a Road Runner cartoon. I mentioned it to The Trouble and she said I want locking up.