Big Head Mode

The kids in my neighborhood wore Chicago Bulls jerseys even though we lived on Long Island. My sports allegiances were inherited: The Mets (I was born during a winning game against the Atlanta Braves) and The Islanders (an uncle-once-removed worked at Nassau Coliseum); both seemed like underdogs in relation to their respective New York counterparts. Though only a few of us played ice hockey, we all learned about the “flying V” formation. Sometimes he had green hair and sometimes he wore a wedding dress. In the third round of their rematch, Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear. The final boss of the renamed Punch-Out!! is Mr. Dream. One of the games that I rented from Blockbuster was Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings, a platforming game created for the mascot of the 1996 Summer Olympic games taking place in Atlanta, Georgia—an event which I did not watch or nor did I care about. The number 32 was inescapable. Chris Kattan played Kippy Strug, Kerri Strug’s fictional brother during a Weekend Update segment on Saturday Night Live. After an incident at the Winter Olympics, my older brother and I devised a game where he would spin one leg around on the floor, like a Skip-It, and I would have to jump over it to avoid ‘breaking my leg.’ Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battled it out to beat a single-season home run record that had been unbroken since 1961. When they brought Street Fighter II to America, Capcom switched around three of the boss characters’ names, giving the name Balrog to the boxer. I could never figure out what my brother was doing when he was playing any of the Madden games because the playbook notations looked like an ancient language and his ability to understand player statistics to this day still feels like arcane knowledge. If there was a snow level in a game, there was a high chance a character would snowboard. Accused of murdering his wife, a former football star forced his friend (also a former player) at gunpoint to outrun police in his white Ford Bronco. He showed him the money and he had her at ‘Hello.’ For a movie about a pet detective, the Miami Dolphins played a strangely pivotal role. In my brother’s room of our childhood home, my brother had some sports memorabilia on display (including a Dallas Cowboys poster and a signed baseball from an Orioles player, I think), the most important of which was two signed pictures of Islanders players that I would very briefly confuse with my dad every time I saw them—mostly due to the very 70’s-era mustaches. Tony Hawk was the first person in recorded history to have spun around two-and-a-half times in mid-air on a skateboard. There was a movie about the first Jamaican bobsled team. Shattered glass backboards from downtown, basketballs on fire, Bill Clinton, and Big Head mode. He had shoes named after him. There’s no crying in baseball. Because my dad was a coach, I played little league baseball until I was 13; because I didn’t particularly like the sport, nor was I good at it, I played outfield and picked daffodils. The premise of the movie is that literal angels need to help the California Angels baseball team win the championship. They somehow got the puck to glow either red or blue. The full name of the grill is the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. Because Shaquille O'Neal was interested in martial arts, they created a fighting game around him. I understood why my parents had me play soccer for a few years (Go Wildcats!), but I do not understand that one year of basketball at St. Aidan’s, especially since my immediate family’s maximum height has yet to exceed 5’6”. There were no rules that a dog couldn’t play basketball. After appearing in the first King of Fighters (’94) and a non-canonical game (’98), not one of the three American Sports Team members has been playable since. Some of the jams didn’t feel like they were for jocks. For my 8th birthday, my parents surprised me with a birthday party that took place at the local bowling alley (bumpers, of course) and my dad had a friend of his make trophies made for everyone who came. To announce his return to playing basketball, after playing minor league baseball for under a year, he starred in a movie where he plays on a team with Looney Tunes characters in a game against aliens. Most, but not all, of what I cared to learn about sports at the time was best done in front of a screen.

Alex J. Tunney is a writer in New York. His writing has been published in Lambda Literary Review, The Rumpus, Drunk Monkeys, Fauxmoir, Complete Sentence, The Inquisitive Eater, Unwinnable, First Person Scholar and The Billfold. He is an editor for Pine Hills Review.