Living on the Leading Edge in Northampton
Blast from the past: the first (of many, if you're polite) Boomerang Tournament Reports from the 1990s.
Maybe next time I'll work on those broken links at the bottom. Stay tuned.
Boomerang Tournament Report
Vol. 1 No. 1
Northhampton Airport, Northhampton, Mass.
June 6, 1992
Who needs skiing? The Bovinator and I are hydroplaining down the
hills of southern Vermont on one of those bucolic backroads that the
locals in these parts also call Interstate 91. Bruce Springsteen is
on the radio, live from sunnier parts, singing something about going
down to lucky town. I figure if we can avoid getting smacked by a
semi in this rain we'll be lucky to get into any town tonight.
The hometown papers said there'd be rain tonight and tomorrow covering
the Northeast. The Bovinator did one better and called the
Massachusetts weather office and found the forecast wasn't so bad.
The rain would be localized to southern Vermont and central
Massachusetts. We're in southern Vermont now. We're planning to
stand around outside all today tomorrow in central Massachusetts. I
knew it all and chose to go anyway. Because there's a boomerang
tournament on tomorrow, and you don't call one of those off because of
a little precipitation.
This looks like it's going to be a good one, too. Boom tournaments
are usually even more obscure than juggling conventions. The press
and public is rarely informed because no one wants a bunch of gorbies
wandering onto the field when there are booms airborne. But, over
breakfast in Amherst, I pick up the local weekly paper and see that
this is no ordinary boom tournament we're heading to. Right there on
the back of the paper, a full page ad for the big event of the year:
Hot Food Hot Jazz '92. All kinds of things to look forward to: A
Chili Cook-Off, cajun food, jalapeno corn bread, fresh squeezed juice.
Music by acts I recognize, and, even better, acts that I don't.
They're promising hot air balloons and a national skydiving record
attempt. And, getting bottom billing, is the U.S. Boomerang
Association New England Regional Championships.
The weather's clearing up, my throwing arm feels fine, my catching
hand feels covered with honey, and I'm ready for anything. How can it
go wrong: there'll be 10 to 15,000 people out at the airport eating
some of the best food central Massachusetts can dish up, listening to
the Rude Girls, and maybe, possibly, learning a thing or two about
boomerangs.
But we arrive at the spot, the local airport, and all we see is a
weather-beaten piece of plywood over which someone's spray painted
"BOOMS" in day-glo orange. The tents are to the right, but the arrow
under the sign is pointing to the left, and I sense the same kind of
twinge you get at a juggling convention when you think the cafeteria
folks are pulling a fast one. We park in the mud, say hello to fellow
throwers, and get the bad news fast. The Hot Food people exiled us
from a nicely groomed field with plenty of space to this gopher-hole,
weed ridden patch sandwiched between the Interstate, a working runway,
and a couple of airplane hangars. They figured they'd need the better
space to park those 10,000 cars they were expecting. Man, this is the
most enlightened area I know of east of Boulder. People will bicycle
in for something like this.
Then the news gets worse: the organizers looked at the sky and decided
to postpone the event until Sunday.
I recall sitting in constant downpours at almost every Vancouver Folk
Festival I've attended and wonder what kind of wimps are running this
thing. The Chili must be a front.
We throwers take a vote whether to postpone as well, but none of us is
afraid of a little drizzle. Then there's another vote to change the
schedule, switching the Juggling and Maximum Time Aloft (MTA) events
because, as the organizer says, juggling's expendable. If the heavy
rains come, we can just go for beer and forget about juggling.
This isn't news to anyone who's experienced first hand how expendable
our craft/art/sport is: how many birthday party gigs have you lost
because the kid's parents decided to go with the puppet guy instead?
But boom juggling is something I've been working on. It sounds easy
in practice. All you have to do is maintain control over two
boomerangs, always keeping at least one in the air, and never
dropping. I feel obligated to be a decent boom juggler--if I can
juggle five balls and pass seven clubs, how hard can two boomerangs
be? I've even made five or six catches in practice. Seeing how the
experts do it here can only help.
So juggling loses to MTA and I wonder if I'll even be given a chance
to justify my existence at this tournament. It's like showing up at
the devil stick competition and someone hands you one of those
Japanese toys that were hot in Saint Louis.
The morning turns to afternoon and the weather turns just fine for
booming. The drizzle has stopped, the heavy clouds are blocking off
the sun, and it's a perfect 65 degrees with a steady light breeze. It
doesn't particularly help me, choking as usual now that people are
watching and there are painted lines on the ground telling you exactly
how far you threw (not very) and how close the boom returned to you
(not very). The Bovinator has never been to a tournament before, but
is having a good time. And we both witness some brilliant
performances. Booms are propelled out 60 meters and return on the
money. Guys are making five catches in well under 20 seconds in the
Fast Catch event. Girls, well, none turned out for this tournament
except to watch.
And some spectators have turned out to watch as well. Seeing how the
music, the food, and the sky stuff was all cancelled, but the weather
is clearing up, we are Hot Food Hot Jazz '92. People are driving
by, pulling off the road onto the field, getting out their lawn chairs
and actually watching. I'm wondering what they could be thinking of.
Most people, when they hear I throw, ask, have to ask, "Gee, do they
really come back?" (The B world equivalent of "I can do two!").
The Endurance event is going on, where the better throwers are
averaging 10 catches a minute with their three-bladed buzzsaws. Blink
and you'll miss a throw. I'm wondering if these spectators can say to
their buddies, "Wow they really do come back" at the same pace. I'm
wondering how many will drive away from the airport today believing
that boomerangs really work. Maybe they're thinking that we're using
some kind of trick boomerangs. Maybe they ignore my own performance
and think that boomeranging requires an awesome amount of skill,
comparable to that involved in, say, juggling three torches. Apart
from yelling at people to get off the field, my contact with the
public is limited to a woman who wants to know where she can buy a
boomerang for her son. He looks at me, asks if they really come back,
I pause for a minute before answering this very astute question, and I
tell them to see me after the tournament ends. At least I can foist
my orbiter off on them.
The predicted thunderstorms never arrive. At the end of the day we
get a bright sun, that same steady breeze, and it's juggling time. I
am psyched. During practice I spend more time looking for the boom
that got away than actually throwing. The key to juggling balls, we
all have learned at one time, is to avoid watching the prop when you
catch it. Keep your eye on its trajectory.
This is hard to do in boomerang juggling. Most of the time, you can't
watch the boom at the peak of its trajectory because you're receiving
an incoming one. The challenge is magnified when you find yourself
staring at the sun much of the time. Other times you're trying to
locate the incoming boomerang and you can't distinguish it from the
birds checking out the strange avian.
Today's first throwers have it harder. Much as the sight of two
boomerangs being juggled can impress, they're nothing compared to what
we're being treated to. Thirty hot air balloons lift off from the
other side of the hangar. The first people to juggle are constantly
yelling out, "Where is it?!", because they can't see anything but a
rising curtain of mylar. World-class boomerang jugglers end up
posting their worst scores in years because of the balloons.
It turns out that these balloons aren't going far. Part of the fair
features these $5 balloon rides which just take people from the field
(where we were supposed to be) over the hangar to the runway (where
they stuck us).
Most of the balloons manage to get all the way across to the runway.
The only one that has trouble is the one that has the "Dare to Keep
Your Kids off Drugs" slogan painted on it. They land smack in the
middle of the bullseye. I wonder it the driver of the balloon was on
something other than the ground.
Finally it's my turn, my chance to show how a real juggler can juggle
boomerangs. I'm off to one of my best starts ever. The first throw
comes right back to me, has plenty of time to hover overhead, and I
make a perfect second throw. Catch the first one, find the second
over to my left, and toss that first one out for throw number 3. I
make the second catch, and once again find its partner coming back to
me, happily hovering right over me. So I reach back, and with all the
time in the world, throw the boom into the ground. I make that
anti-climactic third catch, but can only think about what might have
been.
What might have been is going on down the field. Paul David has been
keeping two tri-bladers going for a while now, and is well past the
100-catch mark. Much later, he fumbles at 238, and the crowd goes
wild. The crowd of throwers, that is. There are plenty of onlookers
around, looking to be entertained now that the balloon rides are over,
but they don't seem to be aware that they've seen a World Record
broken before their eyes. In fact, many of them have tried to walk
across the boom-strewn field to get back to their cars more quickly,
naively assuming that every boomerang is flying under perfect control.
I look for the kid and wonder what price I should ask his mother to
shell out for the orbiter, but I can't find them.
There's a certain sense of satisfaction I have at the end of a
tournament. I find out I actually finished in the top half of the
group in one of the eight events (one more catch in juggling and I
would have placed in two events, which gives you an idea of how
phenomenal 238 catches is). Even the Bovinator, who's only been
throwing for a year, has had a good day. He made a catch in every
event he entered, and even came close to placing in one of them.
We say goodbye to everyone who has to leave, ignore the public and the
media (they're ignoring us), and head off to party in Northampton.
The next morning its hot and humid, lousy for throwing booms, but the
sort of weather you'd expect to find 10 to 15,000 people milling
around an airport tarmac, getting sunburned. We can get in free. All
I have to do is wave a boom out the car window, mutter something about
giving a demo, park back near the hangar, and check out that corn
bread.
But I take a look at the line of cars snaking along Route 9 in the
heat. I think of all the hot tarmacs I've been on for air shows, and
those were out on the West Coast, where they rarely get the kind of
heat the Connecticut Valley can come up with. We pass on the airport
and head back home via those cool Vermont hills.
Administration
Copyright (C) 1992 by Eric Promislow. (C) renewed 2020. Reproducible by permission only.
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