The Big Throwdown

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The ladies of RPS, including former Playmate of the Year Brande 'Rock' Roderick, saunter provocatively along the stage to let everyone get one last look at them before the climactic match gets under way. The host, comedian Dave Attell, makes a few wisecracks to lighten the mood. He refers to RPS as the second-best drinking sport, behind cockfighting. Most of the audience is exhausted, and there's an almost eerie silence in the room. Is it anticipation? Or does everyone just want to go home and take a nap?

The final features Robert 'Fast-Twitch' Twitchell versus Dave 'The Drill' McGill. On the surface, both these Midwestern white guys look like prototypical rock tossers. St. Louis?bred Twitchell works in construction and is built like a beanpole, his blond crew cut and fidgety attitude calling to mind a young Vanilla Ice. He stands out among the field for his textbook form and propensity for throwing scissors when he's backed into a corner. McGill is a compact, wholesome-looking 30-year-old college sophomore from Omaha who likes to lift weights. He leaned on rock in earlier rounds, but his sly smile betrays a devious nature: Like Twitchell, he won his previous match wielding scissors.

I find it interesting that among all the over-the-top costumed characters and pseudosavant Mensa members, these two regular Joes are the last ones standing. Talking with both, I don't get the impression they thought much about RPS until that fateful night a few months ago when a cute Bud Light girl tapped each on the shoulder at their respective local watering holes and asked, 'Hey, you wanna play rock paper scissors?' These guys aren't intimidating. Hell, after having spent some time with Master Rosh, I feel like, on a good day, I could take either one.

Unlike the computer nerds who try to program victory or the satiric Zen Buddhists who are making careers out of RPS, they are both real-life Cinderella stories, and watching them eyeball each other here in a mini?boxing ring--each thinking he knows something the other doesn't, each feeling there is a legitimate reason that he just won seven matches in a row--makes me believe more than ever that, yes, RPS is a sport, and a glorious one at that. Whether the game is poker or water polo, winning breeds confidence. And these two warriors have it in spades.

Finally, the moment everyone's been waiting for. It's go time. Ready, set, 'engage.'

McGill's in charge early with a first-set victory. Twitchell digs deep and takes the second set with a commanding rock. We're all tied up. Interestingly, Twitchell avoided rock the entire previous round, but due either to fatigue or to a mental shift back to his true tendency, he favors it when the match is on the line. In a brilliant move, McGill goes against type in the defining third set and wins the tournament and $50,000 with the ultimate in passive-aggressive play: a gambit known as 'the bureaucrat' (paper-paper-paper). McGill's final throw of paper beats Twitchell's rock to take the crown.

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