A five-foot-nine, 129-lb weakling with a long history of not measuring up, Davis set off in search of unlikely venues in which to discover his athletic gifts, whatever they might be. He entered the U.S. arm-wrestling championship, took up bull-fighting in Spain, squared off against Sumo wrestlers four times his size and nearly scalded himself to death in an extreme sauna competition in Finland. He continued to fail, often spectacularly, but along the way he gained a new appreciation for his wife's eye-rolling devotion and the maturity to master his qualms about fatherhood. Most important for his bourgeoning journalism career, he found a trove of offbeat characters striving for self-respect through bizarre or inappropriate sports, including an Indian backward-running ultra-marathoner whose Guinness Book exploits lifted him from low-caste Untouchability to wealth and status. With an eye for tacky detail and absurdist humor, Davis recounts his hilarious misadventures among these colorful subcultures, but he takes the struggles and triumphs seriously. The result is a funny, beguiling quest that proves that losing is more enlightening-and entertaining-than winning. Photos.
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From Booklist
Davis was once the fourth-ranked lightweight arm wrestler in the U.S. Of course, there were only three other competitors in his weight class, but still. He won a trophy, and he didn't get a broken arm. Davis, a data-entry clerk in San Francisco, hit upon the arm-wrestling scheme as a way to win enough money to buy his wife a new bathtub, but it launched an obsession with finding and then competing in steadily more demanding and outrageous contests. A short list: he participates in a backward-running race in Italy; he sumo-wrestles a 500-pound man in Japan; he hunkers down for the Sauna World Championships (How much steam can you take?). This is a decidedly weird book, but weird in a way that tells us all sorts of things about what drives people to compete against each other. Ultimately, Davis contends that the nature of the competition doesn't matter; it's the act of competing, the comparing of strengths and weaknesses, that gives us what we crave: the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. David Pitt
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