Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
You don't get to grapple with the bottom end of a cow unless you've got the goods. Know what I mean?
It's a rough and tumble world on the competitive cow milking circuit. No place for flaccid fingers, delicate sensibilities or sensitive noses.
I'm not going to lie to you, it's not pretty. People get hurt out there. They risk everything on the tug of the teat, and in 60 seconds of milking mayhem they can lose it all.
With the Pasco County Fair's annual Celebrity Milk-Off looming last week, I got serious. I went into training.
Could this be the year we actually milk a celebrity?
Oh, sure. Like most people, I've dabbled in cow milk-offs in the past. I've touched the magic glands with trembling hands and tried to coax warm, white gold from bovine underbellies.
But that was just kid stuff. I was a visitor, an impostor, a never-made-it-out-of-the-first-round, couldn't-feed-a-kitten, tenderfoot, citified bum.
That's right. A bum.
Well, no more.
Up at the crack of dawn a week before the big day, I donned my best farmer togs. I pulled on rubber boots ... well, I laced up rubber half-boots. Okay, they're sort of like shoes with thick rubber soles.
And I went to Lacoochee, America's Dairyland.
Mike Clark helps run the C & A Dairy up there. It's a serious operation, 300 head of cattle (that's cowpoke speak) hankerin' for a milkin' twice a day.
Forget those silly songs about "Eight Maids a Milking," because these cows get hitched up to stainless steel sucking equipment that drains those bulging udders in minutes.
The dairymen are swift, with the cold eyes of hardened pros. They wash each udder - calloused hands with a velvet touch - and hook up the milk-sucking machine.
Clark, 36, left an udder for me, and nodded "It is time."
Like Yoda instructing a young Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back - which, for my money, was the best of the original three Star Wars movies - he began teaching me the techniques I would need for battle. I learned to caress and tug and cajole, how to keep my head clear of certain ends of the cow, and how to employ the full-hand ripple-squeeze and the wet-finger slide.
I asked wise old dairy owner Tony Abraham about the controversial new "Be The Calf" technique I was considering - you know, suck and spit.
"I don't believe I'd do that," he said.
He is wise.
As the sun rose higher in the morning sky and my hands flew across udder after udder, I could almost hear it in the background - the theme from Rocky III, by underappreciated '80s rock band Survivor:
Risin' up, back on the street. Did my time, took my chances. Went the distance now I'm back on my feet, Just a man and his will to survive.
That's me, man. Eye of the Tiger.
The big day, the crowd roars, the announcer summons competitors, and we eye each other warily. I whisk through the first round in a dream.
Then it's up against a man who rides horses and totes a pistol: Sheriff Bob White.
Say goodnight, Gracie. No challenge.
I am an unstoppable, white wave of frothing heavy cream. I can't possibly be beat.
Suddenly, the terminator: Ruth Ann Stubbs. A physical therapist representing Marketplace Messengers Outreach. A buzzsaw on the milking circuit.
She is Milk Money, Fists of Fury and the Udder Thunder Down Under: full bore, heck on wheels when it comes to milking a cow. She cuts through me on her way to the championship.
I taste bitter defeat. Again.
And again, I think of Rocky III, when a dejected Rocky is ready to give up, a beaten man, and he tells Adrian, "A man ain't nuffin' if he don't believe in himself."
Oh, I'll be back, next year, at the Pasco County Fair. Count on it.
To quote underappreciated '80s rock band Survivor: Risin' up, straight to the top. Had the guts, got the glory. Went the distance, now I'm not gonna stop, Just a man and his will to survive.
Eye of the Tiger.