Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [16]
Elaine’s and my unique relationship dynamic was clear the day we played Zimm-Zamm, an inane game involving paddles and a tennis-sized ball attached to a pole with a cord. It’s like tetherball, except one player is trying to get the cord wrapped around the top of the pole while the other is trying to hit it to the bottom.
After playing a couple games, Elaine sat down to take a break, while I kept hitting the ball.
Elaine got annoyed. “Stop hitting it so hard,” she said. “You’re going to hit me.”
Now, I was standing there with a ball on a cord attached to a stake pounded into the ground. There was no chance of that ball going anywhere outside of the arc the cord allowed it to travel.
“Elaine, it’s physically impossible for me to hit you with the ball,” I said with complete certainty. “You’re sitting ten feet away.”
But she insisted I was hitting it too hard.
One of us was wrong, and it wasn’t going to be me. I’d prove it. I tossed the ball up and swung the paddle like I was Pete Sampras at the US Open. Sure enough, I knocked the ball right off the cord and hit Elaine in the throat. A direct hit.
She staggered back, eyes big as saucers, and started gasping for air.
“I’m so sorry!” I told her. I couldn’t say it enough.
When she could finally speak, all she said was, “You did that on purpose.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever fully convinced her I didn’t.
To this day, when my stubbornness clouds my judgment and I think it’s no way but my way, my wife has to utter only two syllables: “Zimm-Zamm.”
Elaine and I became inseparable. We went to parties and the movies together, I took her to her junior and senior proms, and I got to know her family.
Elaine’s mother’s side of the family had come from money. Elaine’s grandfather had run Farmers Insurance, a nationwide operation with millions of customers. I wouldn’t say Elaine’s family was rich, but she lived in a middle-class neighborhood and got most everything she wanted.
Elaine’s mom, Lynn, was always working. She was a computer wiz at a time when one computer system would fill an entire room. Lynn was a little savant who could write super complex computer programs, but nobody knew how she did it.
Elaine’s father, Ted, was a smart man and had graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He’d even worked on the rockets that allowed the Lunar Excursion Module to land on the moon, but from the day I met him, Ted never had a job, and I never figured out why.
I usually have a hard time respecting someone who doesn’t work, but I always seemed to get along with Ted. I also would not have normally associated with someone like him. Not only was he an intellectual, but he belonged to clubs that had table tennis and pellet pistol shooting and was always trying to figure out what activities he could beat me in. These clubs definitely weren’t the types of places you’d find me in on my own, but it made him happy, so I went along.
I always thought Ted should have been a politician. The man loves to talk and meet people. If it’s a homeless guy on the street, Ted will strike up a conversation like that guy’s the most interesting person in the world.
Ted’s gift for the gab got us all into some sticky situations, and sometimes I had to jump in and get us out of them. One time, Elaine and I went on vacation with Ted and Lynn to Cabo San Lucas. Ted struck up a conversation with a little Norwegian man sitting at a nearby table during breakfast, and before we knew it, we were all on a boat with this perfect stranger heading off for a day of diving.
The boat driver dropped us off on a shore about twenty-five feet long and ten feet deep. While the Norwegian and Ted prepped the diving equipment, Elaine and I swam. Then I noticed a boat hauling ass in our direction. Once it got close enough, I could see the Federales symbol on its side. I left Elaine in the water and started swimming for shore.
It