- A Dadda
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I hope people realize that winning that auction is a legally binding contract. It would be so foul to back out of it.
Here is a true story. My son, when he was six, was in a 'kick-a-thon' charity at his Taekwondo school. He had been doing martial arts since he was four. You take pledges based on how many times you can kick a pad at waist height in three or five minutes. My brother, who is a competitive bicycle racer, wanted to pledge, and threw a few kicks to estimate how many the boy would do. He figured about thirty a minute, then his nephew would get distracted, tired, whatever. So he said, "Well, I can afford about $100, so lets say a buck a kick."
By the night of the event Johnathan had close to $10 riding on each kick. I was in for a buck each too, and the rest were all a dime, twenty-five cents. So they start off by asking which kids wanted to do three and which five. Johnathan thought a second and said, "Five minutes."
Now, Johnathan does not only do martial arts. At this time, we had a small trampoline in his playroom and a big one in the yard. Daily, he and his baby brother spent maybe an hour jumping on trampolines. You go out and jump on a trampoline for an hour. He has quads like a frog.
They lined up opposite an advanced student holding a pad. Johnathan was looking at his pad like he wanted to melt it with laser vision. The Grandmaster shouted "GO!"
Read this aloud, almost fast enough that you start stumbling at the end: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. That was the rhythm of Johnathan's kicks. It was like a click track for an Industrial Metal song, where they put the BPM on the CD liner. And it did not slow down. And he did not get distracted. Tired? He could have done it for a half hour, besides, he got a leisurely three second break when they switched legs every fifty kicks.
In five minutes, he reeled off 318 kicks. That is approximately $38,000 per hour, not bad for a six year old. My brother had a rictus frozen on his face, and all I could do was shake my head at him and mouth, "I had no idea." Most of the kids got in the area of 100-200 kicks, some others also cracked 300. There were a lot of stunned parents wondering how they were going to ask their neighbors and colleagues to cough up not $20 or $30, but maybe $70 or $100 when they went to collect.
Grand Master was signing off all the count sheets with a big, s--- eating grin. He does this every couple of years, and no one ever expects what the little kids can do. I think they earned well over $25,000.