I Didn’t Know Donkeys Could Laugh

Recently, I saw a post on Facebook asking, “What’s one thing you’ve done that you’ll never do again?”

Without hesitation, I said, “Play in a donkey basketball game.”

To this day, the memory of it makes me shudder and wince in pain.

If you’re not familiar with donkey basketball, let me explain. Donkeys are fitted with rubber shoes and are ridden by players up and down a basketball court with the intent of scoring a basket.

I know. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Makes me wonder how it ever came about in the first place. My guess is it was started by somebody who lived in a rural area south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Back in the day, all basketball courts were made of wood and a new coat of varnish was applied every summer. High school basketball coaches protected those floors like the ark of the covenant.

If you walked on any part of it wearing anything other than tennis shoes, they’d yell, “Get off the floor in your street shoes!”

I’m guessing a coach was particularly exasperated by students walking on his floor one day and he yelled, “I don’t care if a donkey walks on this floor as long as he’s wearing rubber-sole shoes!”

Yep, that’s all it took. That night, an enterprising student used a pocketknife to cut up the sidewalls of a bald tire and tied them on his donkey’s feet.

Imagine that coach’s surprise the next morning when he discovered a donkey standing idly on his gym floor wearing rubber-sole shoes and braying loudly.

(It’s my understanding donkey basketball has recently undergone a change to make it safer for all the sissy Gen Xers and Gen Zers and whoever else is afraid of risking life and limb for the sake of entertainment. To all of them I say, “Ha!”)

I’d heard of donkey basketball games but never seen one, so when I was asked to participate in a game as part of a fundraiser for a worthwhile cause (this was way before GoFundMe was a thing), I easily agreed.

“It’ll be fun,” I said to myself.

You know, I’ve learned the most traumatic events are the ones you don’t see coming.

You don’t see coming.

The night arrived for the game. The gym was jam-packed. And I sat in a locker room with the other victims…er, participants…much like the gladiators of old. We thought we were the gladiators, but in truth we were the Christians about to be thrown to the lions, who in this case were donkeys.

We joked and laughed at how much fun we were going to have.

As things turned out, it wasn’t a proverbial last laugh, it was literally our last laugh.

A tiny warning bell went off in my head when they issued football helmets to us. That tiny bell turned into a clanging alarm when they gave us forms to sign that said we wouldn’t sue the organizers if there was “injury, loss of limb, or death.”

Our bravado disappeared and nervous laughter took its place.

To bolster my courage, I told myself I’d had plenty of experience riding horses. What could be so hard about riding a tiny burro?

As we walked single file into the boisterous coliseum, the blood-thirsty crowd roared.

The next thing I know, I’m handed the reins to the donkey assigned to me. No tiny burro this donkey—he was as big as a Clydesdale, ten times bigger than any donkey on the court.

Reaching up, I gently stroked his nose and in a trembling voice asked, “Are you going to be a good boy?”

Everything about him appeared relaxed, from his half-closed eyes to his rear leg cocked in a resting position, to his floppy ears hanging down. I completely misinterpreted those signs to mean he was docile. What they really meant was, like the lions and tigers, he’d done this before and knew what the outcome was going to be. The only thing missing was a toothpick out the side of his mouth.

Six or seven men in striped referee shirts were scattered around the floor I assumed to call fouls. I learned better. They were there to drag the dead bodies off the court.

One of them blew a whistle, which was our cue to mount the donkeys.

Did I mention there were no saddles on these animals? This was the bareback-bronc-riding event of a rodeo.

While several of the men were so tall and their donkeys so short they could straddle them while still standing, that wasn’t the case for me.

Grabbing a handful of my donkey’s mane, I pulled and jumped at the same time, landing perfectly astride my steed.

Little did I know my donkey had descended from a long line of donkeys that had inspired the invention of the catapult. A soon as my posterior barely touched the hairs on his back, he bucked and sent me sailing over his head like a boulder meant to crush a castle wall.

It’s funny how moments that only take a second can seem to move in slow motion. As I flipped head over heels, I saw the Roman hoards pointing at me, laughing and cheering with hellish glee. The first Christian to go down.

The only thing that kept me from sailing into the crowd was the fact I held onto the reins. It would have been better if I hadn’t.

Suddenly, the reins jerked taut, and my body slammed against the wooden floor. Even though x-rays would prove otherwise, I promise you every bone in my body was fractured, except for my head that rattled inside the loose-fitting football helmet.

As I lay there, the only thought I had was, “David, you’ve made a serious error in judgment.”

With great effort I staggered to my feet and turned to face the beast that’d dislodged me, expecting to see his nostrils flared and his eyes ablaze. Instead, he looked as calm as he had before I tried mounting him.

My second error in judgment was thinking, “Maybe I caught him off guard and scared him. Maybe he didn’t mean to buck me off.”

Stroking his nose and neck, I told him, “Easy does it, boy. I’m just going to climb on board. No need to —”

As I said those last three words, I swung onto his back. I never finished the sentence.

Once again, with seemingly effortless ease, he threw me over his head. This time I let go of the reins, hit the floor, and slid like a hockey puck into the bleachers.

Several nameless Romans hoisted me onto my feet and pushed me back onto the court. “Come on, David! You can do it!” they lied.

Looking around to see how the other players were faring, I saw an ambulance crew rushing to a man lying crumpled on the court. They rolled him onto a canvas stretcher and headed for the exit.

You know how crowds nowadays get really quiet when a football player gets injured during a game? Yeah, well, the murderous crowd that night showed no signs of sympathy.

At that point, I got angry at my donkey. (My third error in judgment.) He wasn’t going to best me. I made up my mind I was going to ride him if it was the last thing I did.

Remember that phrase: “the last thing I did.”

Grabbing a handful of mane, I sprung onto his back, squeezed my legs against his side, leaned forward, and threw my arms around his neck. I didn’t care if it wasn’t a good look for a bronc rider. I just wanted to stay on board.

He bucked, but I held on. Internally, I cheered my success. But evidently my donkey viewed my staying on as an insult.

Of course, I couldn’t see it from my vantage point, but I’m certain he jumped straight into the air, all four feet clearing the floor. The jar of his landing nearly dislodged me, but I squeezed tighter. So, he went into his version of a tilt-a-whirl, spinning first one direction then another. I was a test tube in a centrifuge.

I lost my grip and flew across the floor directly into the path of a couple of burros who did the Mexican Hat Dance on me.

I rolled onto my all-fours and stared at my donkey who looked back at me.

I didn’t know donkeys could laugh.

With the taste of blood in my mouth and my pride in shambles, I stood up.

My dad grew up the son of a sharecropper during the Great Depression. Oftentimes he would regale us with life on the farm and his experiences with mules. I’m aware our memories of stories can get a little fuzzy when it comes to details, but I distinctly remembered him telling about gripping a mule’s ear in his teeth to make him stand still.

…Yes, I did.

I marched up to my donkey, grabbed one of his long ears, stuck it in my mouth, and bit down as hard as I could.

He didn’t move.

The challenge, that I hadn’t thought about, was keeping his ear between my teeth while I swung onto his back. Thankfully, my donkey’s ears were long enough to tie into a bow.

So, with my mouth full of donkey ear, I jumped onto his back.

Let me say here, I’m thankful I didn’t have false teeth back then, for if I had, they would have jerked out of my mouth, because that donkey bucked with such force I would have landed in the basketball goal if we’d been closer to it.

The score that night? Our team had one broken collar bone, one dislocated shoulder, a broken wrist, and two concussions. The donkeys won.

* Taken from The Wit and Wisdom of David Johnson, Volume 1: I Didn’t Know Donkeys Could Laugh.