BANANAS & MILKDUDS
Below is an article written by Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated on flying
in a F-14 Tomcat… If you aren’t laughing out loud by the time you get to ‘Milk Duds’, your sense of humor is seriously broken.
This message is for America 's most famous athletes: Someday you may be invited to fly in the back-seat of one of your country’s most powerful fighter jets. Many of you already have. John Elway, John Stockton, Tiger Woods to name a few. If you get this opportunity, let me urge you, with the greatest sincerity… Move to Guam.
Change your name.
Fake your own death!
Whatever you do.
Do Not Go!!!
I know.
The U.S. Navy invited me to try it. I was thrilled. I was pumped. I was toast! I should’ve known when they told me my pilot would Be Chip (Biff) King of Fighter Squadron 213 at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach.
Whatever you’re thinking a Top Gun named Chip (Biff) King looks like, triple it. He’s about six-foot, tan, ice-blue eyes, wavy surfer hair, finger-crippling handshake – the kind of man who wrestles dyspeptic alligators in his leisure time. If you see this man, run the other way. Fast.
Biff King was born to fly. His father, Jack King, was for years the voice of NASA missions. (‘T-minus 15 seconds and counting’. Remember?) Chip would charge neighborhood kids a quarter each to hear his dad. Jack would wake up from naps surrounded by nine-year-olds waiting for him to say, ‘We have lift off’.
Biff was to fly me in an F- 14D Tomcat, a ridiculously powerful $60 million Weapon with nearly as much thrust as weight, not unlike Colin Montgomerie. I was worried about getting airsick, so the night before the flight I asked Biff if there was something I should eat the next morning.
‘Bananas,’ he said.
‘For the potassium?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Biff said, ‘because they taste about the same coming up as they do going down.’
The next morning, out on the tarmac, I had on my flight suit with my name sewn over the left breast. (No call sign – li