Underdog How One Guy Ignored Common Sense And Conquered Mankind's Most Outlandish Competitions

Chapter 1 TEAM USA Grip up!" the ref shouts at me. I am about to face Rabadanov Rebadana.k.a. the Russian Ripperat the World Armwrestling Federation World Championship in Gdynia, Poland. Rebadan is a dark-eyed, hulking torso with emaciated legs. He is one of Russia's best lightweight armwrestlers and has a reputation for ferocity. Rumor on the floor of this cavernous, Soviet-style gym has it that the Ripper has broken more arms than any other wrestler, and his coacha gold-toothed man with a blunt, broken noseis frantically encouraging more such violence. Rebadan snaps his head to the side. I hear his neck crack despite the roar from the thirteen hundred people in the crowd and the jostling of a half dozen photographers. My plan is working. I can tell Rebadan is worried. Or at least confused. His eyes crisscross my body, looking for weak points. He frowns. All he sees are weak points. I've got bony arms, glasses, and strange, spiky rust-red hair that I point menacingly in his direction. It doesn't make any sense to him. He's never heard of me. Nobody has. I'm a five-foot-nine-inch, 129-pound data entry clerk from San Francisco named Joshua Davis. The Ripper slaps himself across the face, willing himself to focus on me. He's wondering what he's missing. He blinks. Most of the faces in the crowd also scrutinize me and seem to be asking the same question: "How the hell did this guy get here?" Well, I earned it. Sort of. To most people, the Mojave Desert looks dry and desolate. For me, it's full of memories. It reminds me of cigarettes, the piss jar, and hours of wordless mind-melding with a Scottish terrier named Ernest. We'd usually head out of L.A. in the afternoon. It was the late seventies and my mom and her best friend, Carole, acted like they were already famous. They were beautiful, on the cusp of being discovered, and with their billowing scarves and oversized shades, they looked like stars, at least to me. I was just the kid so I got jammed into the Mercedes's luggage space with Ernest, unseen to the world. The car was a flashy two-seater convertibleMom and Carole looked great in it but it didn't leave me and the dog a lot of room. Ernest coped by sleeping a lot, though periodically he got carsick and vomited on me. I focused on the future. It didn't smell like dog vomit and Mom's cigarettes. In the future, Mom was the movie star she wanted to be, Carole found a man who wouldn't be mean to her, and we drove a much bigger car. In the present, though, nobody was smiling. A trip to Vegas wasn't about gambling for us. Grandma and Grandpa lived in a trailer behind the Tropicana Hotel. Carole grew up on the outskirts of town. This was a trip home and it was always tense. Carole didn't get along with her parents and Grandpa never seemed happy to see us. Grandma was excited, but she had learned to mute her feelings around her husband. She came from a blue-blooded East Coast family and majored in French at Middlebury College in the thirties. Her attention was focused on Europe until she met Grandpa, a gardener in New York who had big plans. There was a new town in the western desert, he explained, and it was going to be big. He was handsome and self-assured. He wanted to turn the desert green. She had just read Candide and took the closing advice to heart: "Il faut cultiver notre jardin." She fell in love and they ran off to start a nursery in Vegas just after World War II. Mom dreamed big, too. It wasn't hard for her. She was the oldest of sixDavis, Joshua is the author of 'Underdog How One Guy Ignored Common Sense And Conquered Mankind's Most Outlandish Competitions', published 0000 under ISBN 9780345476586 and ISBN 0345476581.