Two Nights in the Brooklyn Arm-Wrestling Scene
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Lizzie: Despite not being very good at most things, I’m really competitive. I’m not talking about professional sports, because those have nothing to do with me. I’m talking about real-people athletics like mini golf, or Monopoly, or betting someone $10 that the guy from The Princess Diaries is also in Brink!. If I’m playing a yard game, the stakes couldn’t be higher. If I’m doing a scratch-off, it’s pointless unless I get at least $500. Even in hypothetical scenarios, I’m playing to win: If the Academy Awards decided to randomly select one civilian to win an Oscar, I’d be pissed if I didn’t get it. This competitive side flared again last week because Kaitlyn and I decided to attend two back-to-back arm-wrestling events in Brooklyn.
The first, at the pop-up restaurant and wine bar Kit in Prospect Heights, was a very casual “tournament” by a very strong visiting winemaker. It was more of a warm-up for the main event: crashing a weekly practice of dedicated amateur, semiprofessional, and all-the-way professional arm wrestlers at a garage in Greenpoint. Kit’s tournament was what I thought arm wrestling was; by the time we were three minutes into the practice in Greenpoint, I realized that everything I thought I knew about arm wrestling