"Gold Medal Goes to Local Word Nerd!"

I generally don't consider myself a big sports nut. However, when the Olympics roll around, whether summer or winter, I am glued to the television set catching every sport the network is willing to air for the general public's viewing pleasure.

Believe it or not, I once considered myself Olympic athlete material.

I swam competitively for the better part of my younger years, or something like that. My best event? The mile. I loved long distance swimming. According to my coach, I even came really close to an Olympic qualifying time in practice one day.

It seems I had the strength and endurance to be the best, as well as the stubbornness and persistance. You know, it takes a special person to swim 66 lengths (30 in a 50 meter pool) as fast and as hard as they can. No matter how fast you are, it takes a good bit of time!

To be the best, though, requires something else -- you also have to WANT to be the best! I was just out there having fun, much to the consternation of both my coach and my father.

Regardless, I still have dreams of becoming an Olympic athlete. I'm creating a petition as we speak to send in to the International Olympic Committee suggesting some new sports events. In fact, these are sporting events which I would very likely be a gold medal contender.

The first would be fishing, or really, post-fishing stories. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I lie about the number of fish that I catch or even their sizes, but I will admit to being a writer. As my mother is fond of saying, I have been known to take some creative liberties. While my father seems to like the term 'exaggerate,' I personally prefer the term 'embellishment' or simply 'creativity.'

Terminology aside, the next event would simply be called Sentence Diagramming. I can diagram some pretty difficult sentences and I've discovered that a large majority of the population has never even heard of a sentence tree, let alone a predicate. I can just see the headline now in my local paper, "Gold Medal Goes to Local Word Nerd!"

According to my family, though, I stand the best chance to win a gold medal in Talking. My son likes to tell me that he knows of no one that could possibly out-talk me. My wife claims that I sometimes babble like a brook. Ludicrous, I say. Sure sometimes I may get on a roll about something, but very seldom do I just rant and rave nonstop. I mean, I really think...