The Greatest New Game/Gladiatorial Combat of the Year

What were you doing Labor Day weekend? Grilling? Sitting in the sun? Watching television? Well, if you were Joel Abrahamson, you were doing all of that and more, because you went to the Lake of the Ozarks with David “Red” Shoemaker and friends. But you’re not Joel Abrahamson; I am. So I have to tell you this story.

This is actually something of a tradition for me, in that this year was the third in a row that I participated in this retreat for only the manliest of men. Generally, the weekend involves testing our prowess at jet-skiing, boating, tubing, and Chuck Norris movie watching. (Have you ever seen Invasion USA? It’s ridiculous. See also: pretty much any episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. Which reminds me: that’s one of my newer nicknames for W. *chuckle*) Those on the retreat also generally spend some time wrestling over large floating blocks of Styrofoam that have broken off of older docks and drift around the lake. (Have you ever seen the Lake of the Ozarks? There’s a lot of trash in it. The water is also exceedingly sketchy-- on a previous trip, Steve went swimming with some superglue on his hands, and the lake actually dissolved it.)

Maybe enough people finally upgraded their docks to the newer, floating barrel/tub models; for some reason, the Styrofoam blocks were nowhere to be found this year. While this was good, ecologically speaking, it meant that we could not play King of the Foam Block. Maybe that was why a long-germinating idea finally saw the light of day that weekend: TUBE WARS!!

Tube Wars works like this: you tow TWO tubes behind a boat moving at reasonably high speeds. On each tube is a person (or possibly two, if we are talking about Tag Team Tube Wars). Each person steers their tube around and generally tries to knock the other off. Hand-to-hand grappling is highly encouraged, and outright wrestling matches did develop at times. Cool moves include jumping your tube over your opponent’s tube, overturning your opponent’s tube while he is flying over you, ditching your tube and hanging on to your opponent while dragging half of your body in the water, and tilting your tube to drag the aforesaid opponent even more in the water. Sadly, no photographic evidence exists of the first series of Tube Wars matches. I guess we’ll just have to do it again.