School of Soft Knocks

OPINION — For those of you who may have been unaware, because you have jobs and whatnot, there are some Olympic games going on right now. These games are evidently occurring in Japan, which is not in Texas, so they can’t be all that important. Still, an interesting thing happened during the finals of the karate competition, which is where people try to smite one another bodily. It’s like boxing, but in karate they also kick and bow and stuff. Very strange.

Anyway, the karate is divided into weight classes, like boxing and horse racing, so the little people don’t get smited bodily by the big people, which is fair. The problem is that, since these Olympic games are not being held in Texas, the weights used are in kilowatts, or something, instead of pounds. So there’s really no telling how much the fighters weigh, and you just have to guess. It’s no way to run a railroad if you ask me, but nobody did.

In the men’s over-75 kilowatt kumite (kumite must mean ‘fight,’ or something), a fellow named Sajad Ganjzadeh of Iran was up against Tareg Hamedi of Saudi Arabia for the gold medal. Please don’t try to pronounce these names at home. I’m a professional humor columnist, and I just fake it.

So the match was going along pretty normally, with the fighters bouncing around and taking stabs at one another once in a while, when Sajad tried to poke Tareg in the noodle, but ol’ Tareg wasn’t having any of it. He upped and kicked Sajad in the noggin and knocked him flat on his back. Sajad lay there looking up at the ceiling, with his mouth hanging open, blinking his eyes, but I don’t think they were really working. It was a classic KO. Game over. Saudi for the win.

But wait. The judges put their heads together and had a conflab, and decided Tareg had committed a grievous breach of etiquette. They allowed the kick was too hard, and Tareg was disqualified on account of this being Olympic karate, instead of the regular kind. Or something.

So Tareg ended up with the silver medal, and when they finally managed to wake Sajad up back in the locker room, they gave him the gold one. Congratulations, you got your backside handed to you. Any by the way, you won.

It seems to me this is the dumbest thing ever to happen in the history of fighting, of any kind, ever. These two fellows with unpronounceable names are there to pummel one another, and the idea is for the best hitter to win. But the one that got knocked out won, and the one that did the knocking out lost. It’s insane.

Wokeness has gone entirely too far, and this karate match is a good example of how things have gotten turned around. We’ve already got men claiming to be women so they can play against the girls, and it’s obvious to anyone with the IQ of butter that shouldn’t be allowed. Men are not women, and it’s impossible to switch from one gender to the other, and if you disagree with that you really shouldn’t be reading this column. And now the losers are winning, and it’s tough maters for the ones who played the best.

No one competes in karate expecting it not to hurt. If you hop into a ring to fight someone, it’s a pretty good bet you’re going to take a punch or two, even if you run away and duck a lot, like I would. It makes no sense to hold a karate match between two men who are representing their respective countries and ask them to pull their punches. ‘Oh, you should try to win, sure, but you’re not allowed to actually hurt the other guy. Win gently, or we’ll call foul and give you a time out.’ What baloney.

Some things are dangerous, and karate is about three of them. Rock climbing is another one. If you decide to climb on rocks, you’re explicitly accepting the possibility you might get hurt. If you don’t want to get hurt, you should not enter a karate match, and you definitely should not climb on rocks. Jim Croce wrote a song about that stuff once. Tugging on Superman’s cape, and all that.

Last week I wrote about doing the Via Ferrata in Ouray, Colorado, which is like rock climbing, but with a safety harness, so the risks are minimal. I’m no rock climber, but you don’t have to be to stay alive on the Via Ferrata, as long as you keep your harness attached to the cable at all times. Remember Hee Haw, when the guy would raise his arm up and down, and tell the doctor, ‘Doc, it hurts when I do this.’ And the doc would say, ‘Well, don’t do that.’ Same thing with unhooking your harness from the cable.

But about a week after I did the Via Ferrata, a woman fell over 200 feet from that same route, and didn’t survive the fall. The only way she could’ve fallen was if she knowingly and deliberately disconnected BOTH of her harness straps from the cable at the same time, which she was told specifically not to do. It’s a tragedy that she died, but it was entirely and easily preventable.

Life is not some pansy karate match in the Olympics, where you get penalized for doing what you’re supposed to do. Real life is dirty and dangerous and risky. And when you break the rules, you can lose a lot more than a round metal object.

Tareg won. Sajad lost. The judges were wrong. Men should stop claiming to be women. People need to grow up and quit being wimps. For goodness sake.

As John Wayne once supposedly said, ‘Life is hard. It’s harder if you’re stupid . . . ”