Democrat and Chronicle from Rochester, New York • Page 38

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Yorkshire hunters of keeping their ferrets warm and dry in their trousers on drizzly days. Others believe it is the outgrowth of a medieval British law that banned working-class people from own 473-8687 1-800-374-2014 www. koningdaytoura.com Toronto Express Ft. Erie Race Track Tuesday, The Long Weekend The Glassblowers Opera Mets -vs- Bluejays Chautauqua House Tour Blair Outlet Shopping Saturday, June 10 $37 June 20 or Monday. July 10 $45 Saturday, July 8 $59 Sunday, July 16 $135 Sunday, July 16 $48 Tuesday, July 18 $80 Friday, July 28 $46 Call tor our current brochure or visit our website lor additional information on over 50 exciting lours! scene of Britain.

"Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly," wrote Bill Bryson in Notes from a Small Island. This goes doubly for sport. In the Cotswolds market town of Chipping Campden, for example, they engage in the sport of "shin kicking." A featured attraction of the Dover Games in early June, it was banned from 1852 to 1952. But, as one guidebook put it, "it has been enthusiastically revived by the town's orthopedic surgeons." According to The Customs and Ceremonies of Britain, the following sports were once regularly practiced at British festivals and celebrations: "Grinning for the cake," "Jumping in the bag" and "Chattering for a bladder of snuff by old women." Alas, the book is cruelly silent about the details of these pastimes. None of these practices, though, is as perversely odd and cringe-producing as the Yorkshire sport of ferret-legging.

Here is how Donald Katz described the sport in a 1983 article in Outside magazine: "Basically, ferret-legging involves the tying of a competitor's trousers at the ankles and the insertion into those trousers of a couple of peculiarly vicious fur-coated, foot-long carnivores called ferrets. The brave contestant's belt is then pulled tight, and he proceeds to stand there in front of the judges as long as he can, while animals with claws like hypodermic needles and teeth like number 16 carpet tacks try their damnedest to vi ii nit hi 4' ii Center or Skyline Foxhead Brock Plaa Hotel Hotel I "RealM. 616 SAN l-RANCISCO EXAMINER JOHN FLINN On the last Monday in May each year, the semi-besotted young men of Gloucestershire, England, will gather atop treacherously steep Cooper's Hill to renew one of the strangest traditions in the history of sport. A local dignitary will let loose an 8-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese, and the young men will hurl their bodies down the hill in pursuit. In theory, whoever catches the bouncing, bounding wheel gets to keep it; in practice, no one ever does.

Whoever gets to the bottom of the hill first is awarded the cheese. Dating back to Roman times and perhaps earlier, it's a brutal, full-contact sport. Bodies cartwheel down the hill, fanny-over-tea kettle. Limbs and ankles twist and snap. Contestants and wayward cheese wheels hurtle into the gallery.

Ambulances line the bottom of the hill, and each year they're kept busy carting bloodied contestants and spectators off to the hospital. In 1995, J8 out of 20 entrants were injured. The following year there were 33 casualties, the year after that 27. As the carnage mounted, the event was canceled in 1998 while the organizers decided on safety measures. They added new crash barriers and a rescue team and, most importantly, moved the race fromH6 p.m.

to noon. "It stops people having too much to drink before they come," explains Richard Jeffries, one of the organizers. It appears to have worked: only one contestant was hospitalized last year. Ever since my wife, Jeri, and I hiked past Cooper's Hill on the Cotswold Way 10 years ago, I've been morbidly fascinated with the bizarre and peculiar sporting 611-12 79-10 813-14 917-18 1015-16 1119-20 CHARTERS OVERNIGHT TOURS $159 ppdo Welcome Reception Buffet Free For Qualified Player VANGUARD ARLAES v1rww.flyvan9uard.com All flyvan3uard.c0m bookings in all fare classes! 1-800-VANGUARD MYRTLE BEACH! tUX AIR, 7 MIGHTS ACCOMMODATIONS. HKt SVtitO TO CHANGE.

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Don't pay travel agent pay travel agent mmiAfiwr 442-8989 I Pav tfi LOWEST PRICES ATLANTA $59.00 I CHICAGO $78.00 I DALLAS $94.00 DKINvlK FT. LAUDERDALE $80.00 ing animals that were so effective at poaching rabbits from the game reserves of the nobility. Poachers apparently stuffed their ferrets down their pants to conceal them from gamekeepers. Katz's story profiled 72-year-old Reg Mellor, the "king of ferret legging," who at the time held the world's record, a scarcely believable five hours, 26 minutes. (He could have gone longer, he said, but all the spectators went home and workmen began to dismantle the stage.) The article has achieved a curiously enduring cult following; people almost always men fax old copies to friends of friends.

It's been reprinted in both anthologies Outside magazine has issued. The second, Best of Outside: The First 20 Years, is still in print. Sadly, Mellor took his life a couple of years after the article appeared. Some of his neighbors in the town of Barnsley thought the sudden onslaught of publicity unhinged him; others said he had to have been mentally unbalanced to participate in the sport in the first place. Whatever the reason, ferret-legging in Yorkshire pretty much died out with Mellor.

However, I have heard rumors that it survives in a remote corner of County Kil-dare in Ireland. Thankfully, cheese-rolling shows no sign of fading away. "They say they'll keep doing it every year, no matter what," Rosemary Hellerman, owner of the nearby Haven Tea House, told me when I passed through. "I doubt you could ever have anything like that in America, not with all those lawyers." ITAIV 1 I n-L Aug. 28-Sept.

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