You don't challenge one of the world's top professional video-game players to a one-on-one death match - or a seat-belt race - and come out with your dignity intact.
EVER WONDERED what it would be like to take on Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one? Or perhaps man the goal as Wayne Gretzky smacks a 90-mph slap shot toward the bridge of your nose? Or maybe even step up to the plate to stare down a near-100-mph fastball from the baseball monstrosity that is Randy Johnson? Well, this was worse. Much worse. Taking on the world's most renowned and feared video gamer (don't let his baby face fool you) in a one-on-one death match of Quake 4 at the 2005 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was nothing short of an annihilation of the nuclear kind.

I would have had a fleeting chance against Jordan, Gretzky, or Johnson - I've played a little ball in my day, I can stand up on a pair of skates and pray, and I've been known to make contact with a fastball here and there. But under no circumstances could I even fathom what hit me when 25-year-old Johnathan Wendel - a professional video gamer from Kansas City, Missouri, known as Fatal1ty - pummeled me into a shamed and hapless mess at CES in front of a whole lot of people who, unlike me, already knew that anyone who stepped up to the keyboard against Fatal1ty would be handed such a humiliating defeat as to never want to play a video game again.

My only saving grace was that I didn't kill myself - though that's probably due more to the fact that I was so clueless, I didn't even know enough about the game to manage that. Final score: 24-0. Which means that during the course of the four-minute Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty shoot-out challenge, Fatal1ty killed me 24 times and I killed him a whopping total of zero times. I'm not sure I ever even hit him with my Marine-issued energy blaster. In fact, I'm not sure I ever even saw him.