ESPN’s Mat Hoffman profile dredges up my vomit soaked nightmares

What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever witnessed in person? For me, it was the time in college when my sober ass was driving my drunken roommate’s ass home after a night in which he’d done about ten keg stands too many.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had to haul his drunk ass to the apartment, so at first it really wasn’t that big of a deal. The distance home? Four miles, a piece of cake.

As we were approaching the first intersection on our way back, though, things got ugly in a hurry. In one fluid motion he said, “I’m gonna puke,” opened the car door, leaned out and vomited. Just like that. I didn’t really have a chance to decelerate.

While I was glancing over trying to figure out how much of his upchuck had gotten on my upholstery, he put his hand in his mouth. After a few seconds, a look of horror came across his face. Before I could ask what was wrong, he uttered eight words that haunt me to this day: “I think I puked out my fake tooth.”

I am still ignorant regarding the dynamics of how fake teeth stay in place because I’m lucky enough to still have all of my originals. But what I do know is that the torrent of projectile vomit coming out of his throat had sufficient force to dislodge something that shouldn’t, in my mind, be that easy to dislodge.

I turned the car around, parked it at the gas station at the intersection and then walked across the street with him to help search for his missing tooth. As I read back over that I swear it sounds like the setup to the most elaborate redneck joke that Jeff Foxworthy could dream up. But it wasn’t a joke…I lived it.

Normally, a search like that would be pretty difficult because (A) it’s the middle of the night and (B) it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where a fake tooth dropping out of a moving car may have landed. But luck was on our side because we could focus our search grid on the puddles of vomit on the asphalt.

Amazingly, we weren’t more than a minute into it when he spotted his tooth and picked it up. Of course, it was covered in vomit, so he did what any drunk person would do…he wiped it on his shirt and put it in his pocket.

The smells wafting up from that road combined with the sight of him using his own shirt to wipe vomit off of his fake tooth made me want to add to the puddles of puke already on the ground. Yup, that was an interesting night.

The reason I just put those horrible images in your head is that something helped revive them in mine: ESPN’s 30 for 30 profile of BMX star Mat Hoffman entitled “The Birth of Big Air.” Huh?

Let me explain. You see, Mat Hoffman crashed and injured himself so many times in pursuit of BMX greatness that he started carrying around a surgical kit that he used to STITCH HIS OWN WOUNDS UP (see below).

I vaguely recall John Rambo doing the same in “First Blood,” but that was the movies, you know?  There couldn’t possibly be people that badassed walking around in real life, could there?

No, actually, Mat Hoffman is that badassed. The film contains footage of him sewing up a massive gash on his own ankle. Oh yeah, I was completely grossed out, that image was as cringe inducing as any morning pee I’ve ever taken in my life. EVER.

In my car this morning I was thinking about Hoffman and his self suture kit and I wondered, “Had I ever seen anything that gross in person?” It took a few seconds and then, “WHAM!,” an image of a vomit covered fake tooth came back to me. Thanks, Mat Hoffman, thanks a bunch.

Overall, I’ve been fairly impressed with the 30 for 30 offerings. They’ve run the gamut from the truly compelling (”The Two Escobars” is excellent) to the truly snooze inducing (Peter Berg’s take on the Gretzky trade is pure Lunesta). If you come across “The Birth of Big Air,” though, consider yourself warned…it could pull your grossest memories out of the deepest recesses of your mind.