New 'sports' alter meaning of 'athlete'

Still, as mom always said, anything’s possible if you put your heart to it. You just have to be willing to accept a slightly lower profile and a slightly smaller paycheck. And you have to be willing to forego showering for five or six days — a skill that college, particularly midterms week, has surely helped you hone.

I’m referring, of course, to the endurance athletes who compete for spots in the Guinness Book of World Records. Two weeks ago, Sri Lankan Suresh Joachim and German Claudia Wavra set the record for longest movie marathon at 123 hours. SportsCenter didn’t compile a highlight of the Top 10 Plays, but I’m pretty sure I saw the youtube.com video where Joachim’s head inadvertently dipped as the siren song of sleep deprivation brought him treacherously close to falling out of the competition. Like the clutch watcher he is, however, Joachim snapped back just in time to see Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne use a newspaper and his bare hands to own a fool.

Alright, so I made that up. But the Netflix-sponsored competition was no joke — well, not one of my invention, at any rate. Wavra and Joachim watched 57 movies without sleeping or even averting their eyes from the screen while the films were playing. They were, however, allowed a 10-minute break between each film. The prize? A lifetime subscription to Netflix, a trophy and $10,000 cash. I’m not sure how useful that first prize will be: Every time Wavra and Joachim see an opening credit crawl, they probably have a Pavlovian urge to crash-sleep for the next 20 hours.

Joachim also possesses a Bo Jackson-esque ability to excel at multiple sports. Not only does he have the record for movie watching, he also holds records for marathon bowling and dancing.

If watching movies for five straight days doesn’t appeal to you, there are other options that have the potential to be even more lucrative. You could, for instance, become a professional poker player. Phil Hellmuth, one of the more famous pros, declared it “the greatest sport in the world” at this year’s World Series of Poker. This proclamation came shortly after the brash Hellmuth doubled up on his chip stack, and it was followed by his humorously claiming that Jordan has nothing on him.

If people want to graduate from frat boy to full-blown geekdom, however, they need to look no further than the pro gamer. If I were picking a paragon from this group, I’d have to go with Lim Yo-Hwan, better known as SlayerS_`BoxeR. Lim, a Starcraft gosu hailing from South Korea who pulls down $300,000 a year and has a rabid fan base that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. If you don’t believe me, drop his name into YouTube and see how many hits his videos get. His larger matches attract live crowds that hunker down in make-shift stadium seating to witness his prodigious talent for making video games look like an exercise in secretarial typing. Even ESPN now airs a show centered on video games in Madden Nation, a contest between the United States’ top virtual gridiron giants.

The moral of the story? With a little bit of luck, a lot of hard work and a reckless disregard for social suicide, you too can be a pro at something other than consulting.