Sunday, August 19, 2007

Since you asked:

One of the things I love about my new found love, Stand Up Paddleboarding, besides the simplicity – just a board and a paddle - the pureness and dynamic possibilities – you can surf, ride over waves, race, cruise in any direction – is how cool it sounds when you say the word Paddleboard.

The word Paddleboard just bounces off the tongue in a tropical frolic. Just saying the word Paddleboard congers up the smell of the ocean, suntan lotion, grilled shrimp, and the cool taste of a frosty beer after an invigorating and exhausting surf session.

In terms of cool sounding words in sports it is right up there with the five dollar Nassau golf bet and baseball’s suicide squeeze play. In football, quarterback is a cool sounding word. Saying cover two defense makes you sound like you know more about football than you really do but it isn’t really cool sounding.

In track the best sounding words are pole vault. Hockey has cool sounds when it is being played like the way golf has cool sounds. In hockey there is the sound of blades on ice, the boards getting pounded the buzzer going off. Golf has the best sound outside of baseball’s crack of the ball on a wooden bat. Love the clickity clackity sound of golf from the clubs hitting together to the cleats on the cement to a club crisply hitting the ball.

The problem is the sounds and terms of golf make me so hungry that all I can think about is eating a steak with a stiff drink at the 19th hole. First of all, nothing fires up an appetite – besides a session in the ocean, the ocean makes you so hungry you could eat a horse burrito – like being outside for four hours playing golf.

Even the golf announcers on TV make you slobber for a juicy steak when they describe a shot as landing center cut. Doesn’t center cut make you want a steak? And the clickity clack sounds of the cleats and the clubs just seem to go hand in hand with the gentle tinkle of ice in a tumbler full of an adult beverage in the clubhouse bar.

One of these days I am going to make a lot of money so I can afford to hire Sam “Beef, it’s what’s for dinner” Elliot to say:

“Stand Up Paddleboarding, a T-Bone steak and a Vodka Martini on the rocks. Now that’s living, partner.”

It will be worth every penny.