Sports Briefs: Trash Talk

Wadded up electric bills, apple cores and suppository wrappers are my playthings. And if Oscar the Grouch can ever convince Bruno to carry him over to my house, I'm waiting. Or, we could just be pen pals and talk trash . . . I'm open for whatever.

"Get that garbage out of here!" has a new and literal meaning when it comes to sports in my home. Having owned of a plastic basketball goal that fits nicely on my trashcan since I was in junior high, I've become known as the Father of Wasketball.

Chores such as throwing away one's excess are no longer mundane. Instead, I've harnessed the abnormal ability to create imaginary and fun-filled afternoons of trying to shoot my garbage through a net.

Wasketball follows the same rules as basketball, except there is no dribbling, double-dribbling, walking, jump balls or talcum powder to clap up into the air at a scorer's table. In fact, wasketball is much more comparable to lacrosse, only not involving masks, sticks or Duke students.

Rather than trying to perform a killer crossover to create some space in front of an imaginary Bruce Bowen, I conceptualize a team of janitors trying to prevent me from taking it to the can.

In fact, that is a form of wasketball being played by Michael Jordan and Kevin Bacon in their underwear commercial that won the award for Most Likely to Make the Audience Feel Uncomfortable. One can only hope these two don't star in the next TAG Body Spray commercial.

Naturally, there are variations of wasketball, including laundryball, though the latter never caught on in my household, due to the inclination of laundry to become un-ball-like when thrown.

Wasketball provided unbridled ecstasy from throwing away garbage that I had not experienced since disposing of my 12th grade chemistry papers.

Seeing as how the goal stands no more than two feet off the ground, it is flabbergasting that I somehow managed to crack the backboard. This leads me to believe that if a white Darryl Dawkins is ever spawned, I will be the father.

No one can destroy basketball goals like me. Orange rims, white rims, red rims, gold rims. If it can be dunked on, I'll have it broken by the end of the second day. Of course, the rims must be no wider than nine inches, no taller than a doorway and made of plastic, but those may be referred to as "insignificant" periodically, as in right now.

As my wasketball goal became waste itself, it hoped to avoid any comparisons to a black hole. It did, however, end the ravishment of throwing trash away, causing a temporary expansion of my waste line.