If there’s one thing K&K enjoys more than stories about weird sports injuries, it’s stories about weird sports hallucinations. According to an online wire story from United Press International, Canadian tennis player Frank Dancevic had an unusually tough time coping with the heat during a match against France’s Benoit Paire at the Australian Open earlier this week.
With temperatures in Melbourne rising above 40 degrees Celsius, Dancevic passed out during the match and was unconscious for about a minute. However, the most fascinating part of the story is what he saw just before conking out.
“I was dizzy from the middle of the first set and then I saw Snoopy and I thought, wow Snoopy, that’s weird,” Dancevic said. “I couldn’t keep my balance anymore and I leaned over the fence and when I woke up people were all around me.”
Needless to say, Dancevic went on to lose the match, followed, presumably, by the plaintive jazz piano of Vince Guaraldi as the defeated athlete walked head down out of the stadium.
All of which begs the question, why Snoopy? Why not Charlie Brown, Woodstock or some other Peanuts character? Moreover, why not a more psychedelic kids show such as The Banana Splits Adventure Hour or H.R. Pufnstuf? Heck, The Smurfs would have made more sense.
This, of course, raises another concern. How can we expect our elite Canadian athletes to succeed on the international stage if their predilection is to hallucinate wimpy, non-lethal dogs that hang out with birds and can’t speak? What if Sidney Crosby passed out during a surprisingly intense game against Latvia and started hallucinating that he was eating spaghetti in that scene from Disney’s Lady and the Tramp only to discover he was really kissing teammate Chris Kunitz (not that there’s anything wrong with that)? Or what if the Canadian Olympic luge team gets food poisoning in Sochi and starts to hallucinate Strawberry Short Cake or My Little Pony?
Those kinds of images do not exactly instill confidence or strike fear in opponents.
Which is why we’d like to suggest that Canadian athletes do some self-exploration, test the doors of perception, expand their minds, ride the snake. This way, they’ll know what to expect if they ever pass out during competition and hopefully learn to train their minds to hallucinate in a more high performance manner.
There was a time in university when K&K was tripping balls during an intense game of hacky sack, and for a few minutes we believed we were Odin, the one-eyed Norse god, flanked by a wolf and raven, and balancing earth on our sandaled foot one moment and kicking it in the air the next.
We’ve never hacky sacked so well in our entire lives. Just saying...
