Bartholomew Buttercup was a man of simple pleasures. He enjoyed the smell of old books, the quiet dignity of cardigans, and the precise categorization of medieval manuscripts. His life was a monument to beige. That is, until last Tuesday, when he accidentally fat-fingered his entire retirement fund into an eight-leg parlay on the Uzbekistan Under-19 Girls' Badminton National Championship.
He thought he was buying a rare, first-edition copy of “The History of Wicker.” Instead, thanks to a series of unfortunate pop-up ads and a misplaced decimal point, he now had $87,450 riding on a 17-year-old named Gulnara “The Hammer” Yusupova to not only win, but to do so with fewer than three shuttlecock stomps and a post-match handshake that lasted longer than 2.5 seconds.
Panic doesn’t begin to describe the noise that escaped Bartholomew’s throat. It was a sound usually reserved for discovering a raccoon has been living in your colon. He spent the next three hours frantically trying to find a working stream, finally landing on a grainy, pixelated feed that looked like it was being broadcast from a potato in a war zone. The commentary was entirely in Russian, occasionally interrupted by a man screaming about discount tractor parts.
For the next 90 minutes, Bartholomew Buttercup experienced a full-blown spiritual colonoscopy. He learned the rules of badminton through pure, uncut rectal clenching. He was screaming at his laptop. “WATCH THE DROP SHOT, SVETLANA, YOU COWARD!” he shrieked, as his cat stared at him, convinced its owner was having a stroke. The match was a seesaw of mediocrity, but leg by leg, the impossible parlay began to hit.
It all came down to the final leg: the handshake. Gulnara won. She approached the net, her face a mask of teenage indifference. Bartholomew was on his knees, sweating through his cardigan, whispering “Please, just hold on… just a little longer…” The handshake began. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. At 2.4 seconds, Svetlana tried to pull away, but Gulnara held on, perhaps noticing a piece of lint on her opponent’s uniform. At 2.8 seconds, they finally let go. Bartholomew had won $2.1 million. He didn’t celebrate. He just quietly vomited into his wastepaper basket, a changed man. He no longer cared about wicker. He was already researching the betting odds for the Kyrgyzstani Youth Archery Qualifiers. He was one of us now.