Sunday, after an exhaustive day of nearly constant battling, David McGill of Omaha emerged as the victor of the first annual USA Rock Paper Scissors Bud Light tournament at the House of Blues in Mandalay Bay of Las Vegas.
As a result, McGill walked away with not only what strikes me as perhaps the lamest set of bragging rights in history, but also - as can be verified on the USA Rock Paper Scissors League's Web site - a check for $50,000.
That's right. According to an ABC news report, about 300 people with nothing better to do showed up to participate in the tournament while hundreds more - with somehow even less to do - showed up to watch.
This is the first of many things I find disconcerting about nationally sanctioning this game. While Rock Paper Scissors might be fun - if you're eight years old - and it holds infinite merit as the default settler of petty disputes among friends - such as who gets the last slice of pizza - it is most certainly not a spectator sport.
This is not to say, however, that I am surprised the game could become nationally sanctioned in this country. I'm sure we can all look back on our childhoods to recapture the sinking feeling of grief upon discovering yet another Saturday morning cartoon session was cancelled prematurely in favor of broadcasting a golf tournament.
I discovered a similar feeling my sophomore year when, much to my dismay, I began to notice a group of close friends was drifting slowly away from me to the lure of habitually watching televised poker.
Now, I'll be the first to admit I'm lazy, but when you make the decision to be a spectator to any of these activities, you are openly admitting you aren't even lazy enough to play a game that requires no effort. Even that level of laziness is above you. You would have to motivate yourself before you could even attain the laziness needed to do almost nothing.
But at the rate this country is going - televising everything from competitive eating to being the fastest lumberjack - we're only about two years away from adding freeze tag and hopscotch to the summer Olympics.
And that brings me to my next point about the Rock Paper Scissors tournament: It's a child's game. When you win $50,000 on a game that can be mastered by a person who can't get into "Ice Age 2" without a parent, a certain level of shame should be involved.
Invariably, however, I'm sure an event of such lavish proportions is naturally going to draw an ever-growing following of morons who will claim varying levels of skill and strategy are involved in the competition - don't be fooled.
You shouldn't be any more impressed with McGill than you would be with anyone else who has ever won a lottery, because essentially that's all he did. If there were a room full of a few hundred people squaring off in tournament-style play to guess which side of a flipped coin would turn up, someone would be right every time. The game decides the winner, not the players.
The only thing I really shudder to think about now - since I've mentioned it - is if a coin-tossing tournament were to become a reality, how many people would show up to watch it?
Write to Lance at lmvaillancou@bsu.edu
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