Bet you can blame it on the macho gene

I don't know about you, but I think there's a gene in men that renders them predestined to making some of the most bizarre, if not stupid bets with each other.

Take this American guy John Grant, for example. A fan of the Chicago Bears football team, one day he sat with his wife, a Green Bay Packers supporter, drinking beer and watching the game at a bar one night.

Then they made a bet: the person who supports the losing team would get shocked with a Taser (a type of stun gun).

The wife's team lost the game. So she had to live up to the terms of the bet. The couple got out of the bar, into an alley. There, Grant tasered his wife. She fell on the ground. When she got up, he tasered her again. When she recovered from her third fall, she called the police. Her husband was arrested for carrying a Taser without a licence. Crazy.

Another creepy bet: Brian Zembeck, a Canadian chap, was challenged by a fellow poker player to get breast implants and keep them for a year. If he agreed to go under the knife, he would receive $100000.

Zembeck agreed and found a surgeon who was also a gambler. He bet the doctor in a game of backgammon and won the $4500 it cost for the breast implant procedure. Eighteen years later, Zembeck still has his 38C breasts and earns over $10000 a year to keep them.

Crazy as this bet sounds, at least it has made Zembeck relatively rich.

Personally, I am a veteran of bets that were never meant to make me rich - but they were, in hindsight, equally stupid.

As teenage boys, we used to chill outside the local kwaMagaba supermarket, acting all streetwise and dangerous. We would make catcalls at girls as they were passing by.

We soon realised that the girls were smart enough to simply ignore the remarks we were making about how we would buy them airplanes if they could spare us a minute so we could talk to them.

Then we started making bets among ourselves: whoever is going to approach a passing girl and elicit her address details from her would be owed by all of us a kota (a quarter loaf of bread, with the soft part gouged out, to be replaced by a mishmash that included fried chips, polony, margarine and tomatoes).

The gang would buy a kota for the winning fellow every week, for the whole month.

If, on the other hand, the guy failed to arrest the girl's attention and get her address from her, he would be the one doing the buying every week. Money was not much of a problem because all of us worked in white people's gardens over the weekend to earn some pocket money.

Easy-peasy said I, as I took up the bet. The boys were flummoxed because with my mild stutter and squeaky voice I was nobody's Casanova.

When the next girl appeared, I hurried towards her, a stupid grin plastered on my face. When I reached her, I started making small talk with her. I could sense the boys holding their breath from a distance, shocked at what they were seeing as I held her hand and started caressing her arm.

At a leisurely pace, still holding her hand, I walked her down the road.

Then I rejoined the boys at the front of the shop. That day I was Bruce Lee and Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris rolled into one. In a word, I was a star. I gorged myself on a kota because I had won the bet.

What my friends didn't know was that, when I reached the girl, all I said was: "You know, my sister, those boys over there say you have a wooden arm. Prove to me it's not artificial. Let me touch it."

In the rage of growing up, the bets became more outrageous. One day, when we'd started experimenting with alcohol this friend of mine said he could eat two fat jalapeno peppers and proceed to finish three beers - all in five minutes.

If he failed, he would owe us a case of beer. If he won, we would buy him a case of beer and he could do as he pleased with it. The condition was he should chew the peppers before swallowing them.

We counted one, two three and Sizwe got going. He finished the peppers in impressive time. Then he started attacking the three beers. "Drink up, drink up, drink up!" we urged him.

Then his eyes started going wide. Foam came out of his nostrils. He dropped the bottle of beer and started spluttering all over the place. The peppers, half chewed, came jumping out of his mouth. Then he collapsed.

It was some passer-by who nursed our friend back to life as we watched from a safe distance.

As the weekend is now upon us, be sure to stay away from bets that might land you in hospital or in even worse trouble.

lComments: fredkhumalo@post.harvard.edu or twitter @FredKhumalo