Competitive Suffering

Behind the scenes of the fastest growing sport in the world

ABOVE: Harvey Shank after finishing 1^st Overall at the 2015 Suffering Nationals.

The atmosphere at the Anaheim Honda Arena this past Friday night was tense, the crowd electric with anticipation. All watched silently as the two-time Competitive Suffering World Champion Eleanor Stravinsky rose from her seat, unzipped her warm-up jacket, cracked her knuckles and approached the court.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, preparing herself mentally for the anguish that was about to come.

The timer was set for three minutes.

Nobody in the arena seemed to breath.

Then, suddenly: BANG! The starter pistol was fired and Stravinsky raced to center court, where she stopped, turned to face the judges and began punching herself in the face.

The crowd went wild.

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Competitive Suffering is a unique sport, which Patricia Hurley, Director of the Competitive Suffering Federation, describes as “a thrilling combination of the precision of figure skating, the sweet science of boxing and the senseless horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.”

The rules are simple: each competitor is given three minutes to put themselves through the worst pain they can; at the end of the three minutes, a maximum of ten points are awarded by a panel of judges in three categories: Brutality, Harm and Creativity. Whoever suffers most, wins. But while Competitive Suffering has been around for many years, it only started to grow about twenty years ago.

And the reason for that, says Patricia Hurley, was the Competitive Suffering legend himself, Harvey Shank.

“Harvey changed the game,” Hurley says with awe. “He really is the Michael Jordan of suffering.”

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ABOVE: Competitors at the 2022 Regionals in Dallas anxiously await their scores.

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Stravinsky is a short but powerful woman, and with each punch she landed on herself, the crowd winced. Next she began pulling her own hair, and stomping violently on her own toes. But the judges seemed unimpressed. It was a solid suffering, for sure, but nothing particularly memorable. Then, with less than a minute left on the clock, Stravinsky surprised everyone by limping to the Emergency Exit, pulling open the heavy steel door and slamming her hand in it, right at the buzzer.

“Has anyone ever suffered more than me?” she wailed, and the crowd went wild.

Stravinsky smiled through her pain and raised her mangled, bloody hand overhead. But her joy was short-lived. All fell silent as they noticed Martin Efram, the audacious young upstart who’d been winning Sufferings all across the state, calmly approach the court.

Where Stravinsky was all passion and rage Efram was all calmness and precision. Unlike Stravinsky, he didn’t leap when the starter pistol fired. On the contrary, he casually slung his backpack over his shoulder and strolled rather insouciantly to center court. Stravinsky was all power and pain. Efram was all theater.

As he reached center court, he set his bag down, reached in, and pulled out a cheerful yellow beach towel, which he carefully laid upon the floor.

What is he up to? the crowd wondered and they slid forward to the edge of their seats.

Efram, still in no rush, pulled off his shirt, reached once more into his bag and pulled out a bottle of sunscreen, which he began applying to his chest, face and neck.

Murmurs rumbled through the crowd. What is he doing? Has he lost his mind?The clock was almost down to 1:30, and he hadn’t suffered at all!

Whistling a happy tune, Efram laid down upon the blanket and placed his hands behind his head, the very picture of a man enjoying a peaceful day at the beach, soaking up the warm rays of the sun.

Thirty seconds left. The crowd was on its feet.

Efram snored.

Twenty seconds.

Was he throwing it away? Was he forfeiting?

Fifteen seconds. Ten.

Stravinksy smiled. The win was hers.

And then, with just five seconds left on the clock, Efram reached up, pointed a small remote control at the ceiling of the arena and pressed it, releasing, from thirty feet above, a full-sized Yamaha grand piano, which came crashing down upon him, shattering itself, and Efram, into a thousand broken pieces.

The crowd went wild. They clapped and cheered and wept to see such terrible suffering, suffering they knew was worse than any other suffering they’d ever seen before - “Why?” shouted a fan in her bright yellow Efram jersey, “Why?” - and they continued to applaud as the medics loaded Efram onto a gurney and he gave them all a weak thumbs up.

But just then, the crowd fell silent again. Because there, emerging like a myth from the locker room door, was the Competitive Suffering legend himself:

Harvey Shank.

In near silent reverie, the crowd got to its feet and began to applaud.

It had been in this very arena, thirty years earlier, that a young Harvey Shank first stepped onto a Competitive Suffering court, pulled on a pair of brass knuckles and punched himself in the face, knocking out three teeth and breaking his nose. The crowd had gone wild. It was the first time anyone had ever used what was to become known in the sport as “implements,” which would soon revolutionize the sport. Later that evening, the other sufferers had lodged a formal complaint with the CSF, stating that “suffering aids” were against the spirit of the sport. The committee, after much deliberation, determined that since the rules didn’t specifically forbid implements, they must therefore be allowed.

Shank won the Suffering Championship that year, and the sport was changed forever. Hordes of fans now came to see him and his terrible suffering. He soon became known for his trademark finish: rolling in a flight of airplane stairs, climbing to the top, then flinging himself down, tumbling into a heap of broken bones at the bottom and crying out, “Why me?” with such terrible sorrow that he could bring the most hardened judge to tears.

Fame followed. TV interviews, books, lucrative endorsement deals from Band-Aid and Ace Bandages.

“It’s not that I like suffering,” Shank explained to Sports Illustrated in 1997, “it’s that I like people knowing I’ve suffered.”

“More than others have,” the journalist added.

“Of course, yes,” Shank replied. “That’s what really matters.”

The following year the other sufferers upped their game. They came with whips, hammers, ice picks. “This is what they did to my grandmother!” one shouted as she beat herself with a stick. Others would drag in their ugly children and high utility bills and complain about making ends meet while hitting their toes with hammers. The great Tamara Washington beat herself with a baseball bat so badly that she was hospitalized; she would have won the Championship if not for a talented amateur from Brooklyn named Frank Bludgeon, who jacked the rear of his Lincoln Town Car up, slid underneath the back wheel and kicked the jack away.

“Have you ever seen such cruelty?” he wailed as the car crushed his ribcage, and the judges awarded him the sport’s first ever perfect score.

Bludgeon defeated everyone that season, and though he never competed or fed himself again, for two years everyone agreed that nobody had suffered more than he had.

“That’s something they can never take away from me,” Bludgeon said to a reporter from ESPN as a nurse changed his bedpan. “Some people have it bad, but I’ve had it worse.”

ABOVE: The great Esther Taub, whose wailing alone could put her in the top three.

Soon the sport was everywhere. Everyone wanted to suffer, and to suffer more than anyone else. I myself was introduced to the sport by my own mother, an amateur sufferer from the late 60’s to the mid-70’s, remembered by fans for the one time she made it to the regionals, where, after two minutes of slapping herself in the face and calling loudly to God to end her suffering, she laid down on the floor, and, without any medication at all, gave birth to me, right there at center court, after which she held me up to the judges and cried “Vey iz meer, another mouth to feed.”

But as every athlete knows, sport eventually moves on; what was incredible one year is commonplace the next. And so by 2009, Competitive Suffering was again getting stale - and once again Shank upped his game. That year at the Northeast Regionals, following a display of horrendous suffering by a brash young newcomer named Eleanor Stravinsky, Shank was struggling. Stravinsky had been awarded a 29.4, and Shank knew he simply couldn’t match her ferocity.

On the verge of losing, he once again came up with something new to the sport: defense. Approaching the judges’ desk, he committed upon himself, one by one, all the sufferings Stravinsky had on herself, only this time, after each one, he shrugged and said, “You call that suffering? You call that pain?”

It was a brilliant tactic, and the judges glared with disapproval at Stravinsky, whom they now realized hadn’t really suffered much at all.

Then, as the final seconds ticked down, Shank pulled out a knife, stabbed himself in the belly and moaned, “Now THAT’S suffering,” before passing out on the floor and getting at 29.9, beating Stravinsky and claiming the title. Minimizing the pain of others is now an integral part of the sport that no sufferer can afford to ignore.

And so, last Friday night, as Harvey Shank rose and stepped to the line, the fans wondered: could he do it again?

Would the suffering legend find one last way to win one last title before retiring forever?

 The timer started, and it seemed at first that the answer would be a resounding “No.”

His slaps across his face were listless and dull.

His defense was sloppy, slamming his hand in the emergency door as Stravinsky had, but failing to minimize her pain in any meaningful way.

And when he rolled in his old airplane stairs, a groan of disappointment could be heard cross the arena: once the highlight of any competition, it was old now and dull. He climbed his way up, and tumbled down, a shadow of his once suffering self.

The silence that filled the arena was deafening.

None could believe this was the legend of their sport, the man who brought Competitive Suffering to the world, and who now seemed unable to suffer at all.

He stood. Thirty seconds remained on the clock, but he turned and left the court. All watched as he pulled his jacket on, slung his bag over his shoulder and made his way to the exit.

There he stopped, and turned and took one last look at the crowd.

And then he smiled.

It was the same smile he had twenty years ago, when he pulled the brass knuckles from his bag.

It was the same smile he had in ‘09 when he walked to the judges table to play the first defense in the history of the game.

The crowd murmured with excitement.

Some got to their feet.

Could it be?

Could the legend still find a way to suffer one last time, to suffer more than any other?

Five seconds left now.

Four.

Three.

And then Henry Shank, the legend, the greatest sufferer ever, reached into his bag, pulled out a gun, and with one second left on the clock, called out, “Why me?”

And then he blew his fucking head off.

The buzzer sounded.

The judges held up their cards:

A perfect score.

And the crowd went wild.

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Yours in the fetal position,

S.

illustrations by Orli Auslander