Chimp-Pong

I don’t get people who get bullfighting.

Hemingway saw bullfighting as "the only art in which the artist is in danger of death." He spoke of "the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet draped on a stick. When the stick pierces the animal's body, and the red blood runs into the sand or grass, the aesthetic process deepens; the blood is beauty and the beauty is blood.”

I still don’t get it.

What’s so brave about fighting an animal that is so dumb it doesn’t know the difference between a piece of cloth and a human being? Whose reflexes are only duller than its intelligence? It’s not a fair fight to me.

I’m inventing a new sport. It’s called Chimp-Pong. It’s where man shows his supremacy over a monkey at ping-pong. Look at me! Look how I can beat this sucker. And I’m playing with my left hand! Hurrah! Hurrah for me! I’m so agile. I’m so nimble. I am such a super-hero because I can defeat an animal with half my brain and half my dexterity.

The brutality is an altogether different aspect.

A bullfight proceeds in three stages, or tercios, designed to weaken, torture, torment and kill the bull. In the tercio de varas, the matador's assistants chase the bull with capes in order to provoke and tire him. Once the bull is sufficiently exhausted, two picadores ride in on horseback and plunge lances into the bull's upper body. The tercio de banderillas begins when three banderilleros individually chase the bull in order to spear him in the neck with two banderillas (colorfully decorated wooden harpoons). Finally, when six banderillas are lodged in the bull's neck, blood pouring down his back and spewing out of his nose and mouth, the tercio de muleta commences and the brave matador enters for the "ballet of death." With his sword and red cape, he makes several stylized passes at the bull before he attempts to deliver the estocade, the death blow designed to plunge the sword through the bull's neck or into his heart. The matador has ten minutes to kill the bull, but quite often, he fails to make a clean kill and has to stab the bull repeatedly. A team member then severs the bull's spinal cord as he lies paralyzed and dying.*

Talk about a fair fight.

I need to revise the Chimp-Pong rules.

First I get to drug the chimp. Then I get four of my mates to burn patches of its skin at regular intervals and then I make it wear Gore-tex boots and tie its shoelaces. Then I take its ping-pong racket away. Watch and gape in wonder as I stylishly produce beautiful spin-serves that completely destroys the chimp’s game. The grace, the supreme finesse of it all. I win. I rule. I own your ass, monkey.

Now if only I could do it wearing fairy pants and a big billowing cape, I could develop it into a major sport in Latin countries.