Pillow talk

 One Shining Moment is in the rearview. The Masters lies just ahead. And last night, on a glorious April evening, the Fort Wayne Tincaps celebrated 15 years downtown in Parkview Field, the prettiest minor-league ballpark this side of damn near everywhere.

I guess now we can finally hit pause, then, and take a day to salute America's weird sports.

The Weird Sports you can find on at least one screen during the slow time of the day in your favorite sports bar, and it is a teachable moment if ever there was one. Did you know, for instance, there's such a thing as professional cornhole? Professional axe-throwing (Lizzie Borden remains its Babe Ruth, or so I've heard)? Some bizarro Frankenstein's monster called Table Volleyball, which is essentially beach volleyball played on a ping-pong table?

(No, really. I've seen it. Two-team players ripping a volleyball off a ping-pong table. They even play it on sand, apparently to fool you into thinking it actually is like beach volleyball. It's sillier than kittens on ether.)

So weird, all of it. But one day on the Weird Sports Screen  appeared the mother of all Weird Sports.

Two guys in a boxing ring.

Holding pillows.

Each trying to land, I don't know, a crushing left feather-hook or something.

Yes, that's right, America. There is indeed something called professional pillow fighting.

And it's not a Monty Python skit!

No, sir. The fighters all look like, I don't know, Marvin Hagler or Jerry Quarry or Roberto Duran. The referee looks like legendary boxing ref Mills Lane. I've got no idea how they score  these things, although I assume it has something to do with whacking the other guy in the head, body or spleen with their fiercely soft pillows.

As far as I know, the action is not sponsored by the Crazy MyPillow Guy. Though as Wooderson says in "Dazed and Confused," it would be cooler if it was.

Anyway, the whole deal is just as ridiculous as it sounds, enhanced rather than diminished by the fact everyone involved is obviously serious about it.  And of course ridiculousness is what launches the Blob into  Full Absurdity Mode, which lies pretty close to the surface most of the time anyway.

And so here we go whirling back in time with a bunch of  Absurdity Mode what-ifs ... 

Question: What if boxing had been pillow fighting?

* Would every division be the featherweight division? And would contour pillows be allowed?

* Would Ali-Frazier III have been dubbed the Pilla In Manila?

* Would Ali's famous line have been "Float like a butterfly, sling like a frat boy during pledge week"?

* Would "Raging Bull" have been "Goosedown Bull", and would Robert De Niro have played Jake LaMotta as just a cranky guy in need of his nightly eight hours?

* Could Ivan Drago have actually killed Apollo Creed with a pillow? And if he couldn't, would Rocky have ever gone to Russia, trained in the snow, beaten Drago, and said "If youse can change ... and I can change ... we can all change the sheets!"

* Also, there would go the whole "Creed" franchise, and Michael B. Jordan would be forced to take a series of really bad roles, which is how he'd wind up getting his ass kicked by Pam Grier in the "Foxy Brown" reboot.

* And don't even get me started on "Cinderella Man." Or as it would come to be known: "The Princess And The Pea Man."

OK. I'm done now.