Only A Certain Type Of Person Is Dumb Enough To Play 'Extreme Games'. By Tom Danehy DURING THOSE RARE lulls down at the gym on Sundays, my friends and I like to engage in some intellectual sparring. A subject is introduced and then one person is forced to take and defend the unpopular, untenable and/or occasionally indefensible position. I, being the McLaughlin of the group, generally reserve the more-fun side of the issue for myself. The other day the subject was "the Bell Curve" and the so-called statistical evidence that is claimed to show that African-Americans score lower on IQ tests. Being forced to defend that side was Pete Fajardo, who has the unique (and completely worthless) ability to quote extensively from every movie he's ever seen. Well, old Pedro started out with a discussion of statistics; he even attempted to deflate the other side's best shots by quoting the Benjamin Disraeli line about lies, damned lies and statistics. I bided my time, knowing that I had the trump card. When it finally became my turn, I burst forth with a discourse on logic and pointed out that if there were a logical argument which set certain parameters, all one needed to do to puncture that logic would be to provide an example outside those parameters. (I was gonna slap Ockham's razor on his butt, but why waste a perfectly good empirical dictum when I already had the big guns lined up and ready to go.) I presented as my first and only argument against African-Americans being somehow less intelligent than their Caucasian counterparts: the Extreme Games, a made-for-ESPN two-week mini-Olympics of white-trash sports the likes of which I had never seen before and pray I'll never see again. My argument was real simple: There ain't a black person in America stupid enough to ride a bicycle down a two-story flight of stairs, risking life and progeny. For sport. Only white people are that stupid, and apparently there are lots of 'em, putting them at the bottom of the Bell Curve and winning the argument for me. Being an inveterate button-pusher on the car radio as well as the TV remote, I cruise through the television wasteland this time of year, dodging reruns and cursing Baseball, looking for something to watch. For the past couple weeks on ESPN 2, my eyes were drawn to the afore-mentioned spectacle as though I were watching a train wreck. In a way I was, except this one had judges giving scores. It's unbelievable what these people would do. They had guys who would jump out of airplanes with boogie boards strapped to their feet and do aerial acrobatics while their partner filmed the whole thing. It was somehow a team sport. You'd get points for doing the most gymnastic-like stuff, more points for seeing how close to the ground you could get before opening the parachute and style points for how well your partner filmed the whole affair. Let's see: That's a 6.9 for style and execution, 7.2 for suicidal tendencies, and 8.4 for film technique, although one judge found it terribly derivative of Truffaut. These guys spin and flip and go all over the place while falling to earth at 140 mph, and then, all of a sudden, like it needed enhancement, they find a way to make smoke come out of their butt. What is that all about? I'd seen stuff like this before on ESPN 2. They have this weekly show hosted by some blonde floozy who always seems to be wearing shorts that are way too. They have her climbing rocks during the intro with the camera managing to find the absolutely most-embarrassing angle. About every other week, they have a highlights show of bloopers and disasters, where white kids with really bad haircuts do skateboard wipeouts, mostly of the crotch-meets-banister variety. Despite the high cringe factor, there is something reassuring in knowing that these guys aren't going to reproduce. Anyway, ESPN 2 brought all these guys together for a two-week-long Mountain Dew commercial. There were guys who would lie down flat on slightly extended skateboards and roll down hills at high rates of speed, hoping to find a hay bale or tourist to crash into. They had wind surfers and hang gliders and guys who water ski on their Fred Flintstone-like feet. They had street lugers and skateboarders and guys who rode special bicycles which allowed them to damage their scrotums in really creative ways. ESPN timed this thing perfectly. With no basketball or football or Olympics to contend with, these trash sports are actually drawing an audience. Heck, they might go year-round on the new Trailer Park Channel. Just ask your cable company. A young woman I know, Becky Notestine, who by the wildest of coincidences happens to be Pete's squeeze, was the medical trainer for the Extreme Games. They flew her to Newport, Rhode Island, put her up in a dorm at Salve Regina College and paid her absolutely zero dollars to look after all the skateboard injuries. She said the best injury of the competition was a cyclist whose custom handlebars came undone and the two downward pegs impaled his thighs. The guy crashed his bike, pulled the pegs out of his legs, then had to be coaxed by friends to see the medical staff before he bled to death. Cool. How long until football season?

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