Laundryball

The washing machine was invented by a man.

Nah! you surely scoff, if men had any say in it, clothes wouldn’t get washed at all! Or, worse, a woman came up with the washing machine because women were stuck with the drudgery of washing clothes by hand; surely it was an effort to set themselves free of that cumbersome, inefficient task.

But hear me out: my argument is simple, and I would even say unassailable – it's the design of the machine that implicates the male gender in this regard.

I’m a family man, and have raised my share of zygotes, but I’ve had stretches of time when I lived the bachelor life. And here’s what you’ll find, if you’re a fly on the wall and it’s laundry day:

“...ten seconds on the clock and Bird brings it down! Nobody’s open! Johnson breaks loose and Bird hands it off, Johnson can’t get a shot, Bird’s open, Johnson sends it back to Bird, he shoots! He scores!”

A man designed the washing machine because that’s how men do laundry, you see. On laundry day, we all become NBA MVPs.

I myself arrived at this truth in my late 20s, when living in a spacious Old Louisville house that had been divided into apartments, with a communal washing machine in the basement. I go downstairs with my basket of dirty clothes and Randy’s already down there, doing his laundry. Okay, fine, I’ll set my basket down and come back later.

Except...

Randy is taking all his dirty socks and flyping them – folding them into a ball. Okay, I’m not Erma Bombeck, but aren’t you supposed to flype your socks after washing them?

What the hell? I ask him. Without a word, he simply picks up a pair, sets his legs, he shoots – he scores! From 10 feet away!

Without a word, I reach into my basket and pull out a pair of gym socks and flype them into a ball. I’m 15 feet away. He shoots – he scores!

Now it’s on.

We keep shooting till we’re out of socks, at which point we just retrieve them and start over. We play several games of HORSE. In the end, Randy wins.

Variations emerged over the years. There’s the challenge of turning the water on, and taking shots until the water stops. Can you get all the clothes in before then, without missing once?

Then there’s the problem of items that don’t wad up conveniently into round projectiles, or are prone to unfurling in mid-air – blue jeans, bed sheets and so on.

Well, that only adds to the challenge. And the joys of laundryball are not confined to bachelors, oh, no! There’s the single dad, as well: when there’s no lady of the house to police the event, it become a rite of passage, father to son.

It’s this sort of sport that keeps a man both sane and young: age melts away when the buzzer sounds, the Fruit-of-the-Looms swish into the Warm/Cold Normal cycle, and the crowd goes wild...