The Underdog: How I Survived the World's Most Outlandish Competitions
by Joshua Davis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joshua DavisEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-09-06
ISBN: 0345476581
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Villard
Book Reviews of The Underdog: How I Survived the World's Most Outlandish Competitions
Book Review: "Have No Fear, Underdog is Here!"
Summary: 5 Stars
Underdog was the name of a 1960s floppy-eared cartoon dog who morphed into a superhero every episode, announcing in a squeaky voice, "Have no fear, Underdog is here!" Wally Cox, the voice of Underdog, was a short, thin actor who specialized in 98-pound weakling roles.
Aspiring journalist Joshua Davis, a 129-pound ectomorph, is in his twenties and may not even be aware of his cartoon namesake. His book is about a strange kind of spree in which he competitively armwrestles, sumo wrestles, fights bulls, runs backwards, and tries to stay in a sauna for a record-breaking length of time.
Bored by his job as a data-entry clerk, Davis searches for a challenge. His wife, Tara, earns enough money as a teacher to support them, but she has some plans for the future that require Josh to earn more than his temp jobs have been paying. Competing at bizarre sports doesn't seem like a very efficient way of bringing home the bacon, though.
Davis's mother, with whom he has a tense relationship, was a beauty contest runner-up as a young woman. His father made up bedtime stories for him about an adventurer/spy/superhero who could do anything he set his mind to. We never find out what happened to his father, who was replaced by a stepfather who embarked on one far-fetched and unsuccessful business venture after another. Davis believes these parental units are responsible, or perhaps to blame, for his competitive streak. He thinks his fathers taught him that he could do anything, however improbable, and he thinks his mother still wants to win that beauty contest after all these years, through her son.
Even as the underdog, Davis does pretty well at many of the sports. For instance, he turns out to have natural talent as a bullfighter. Not surprisingly, he cannot overcome his physical limitations when it comes to sumo. His stories are fun to read and he has a light style that is perfect for the magazine writing he does full time now.
I like stories about competition, especially if they are unusual competitions (for example: Cookoff, Crossworld, and Countdown, books about competitive cooking, crosswords, and math, respectively). Davis believes there's something inherently American about competing at outlandish sports and in believing that we can do anything we set out to do. The authors of some of the other competition-related books I've read recently also believe this. But the more I read, the less I think competing compulsively is peculiarly American.
For most of his off-the-wall competitions, Davis travels overseas, where the sports originated: Sumo in Japan, sauna in Finland, and bullfighting in Mexico and Spain; or where the locals have embraced the off-the-wall sport wholeheartedly: backward running in Italy and armwrestling in Poland. He travels to India to get advice from the premier backward runner. These people weren't raised in the land of the American Dream. Maybe a love of competition isn't so much an American trait as it is a human trait.
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