My Kid Can Beat Up Your Honor Student by William Hrdina

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SUMMARY: A brief history of Mcbuys. BTW- You can subscribe to my short story audio podcast at http://whrdina.libsyn.com/ Available on Amazon: Kenny G Must Die- A Satire about music... and zombies.

My Kid Can Beat Up Your Honor Student
A Short Story By William Hrdina


Writing this, I have to admit- things have gotten slightly out of hand. It didn't start out this way. At first, it was just supposed to be fighting. We even had a cute name, "My Kid Can Beat Up Your Honor Student." You know, like the bumper sticker? The core of the idea was simple, I got tired of standing next to parents who wouldn't shut up about the way we raise kids these days. I would listen to them go on and on about how we coddle our children and make them think everything in life is fair and easy. So, one day, I had an idea- why didn't I create a sport for the parents who find football too genteel.
From the minute I conceived of a fighting league- I knew there was a chance it'd be controversial. What I didn't expect, was that my little idea would expand in less than two years into what Time Magazine called, "the fastest growing kid's sport in America."
In an attempt at sarcasm, I used the acronym as the organization's official name. So the children's fighting league is known, in all of the legal paperwork as MKCBUYHS. At some point a reporter started calling the sport Mcbuys, and for some bizarre reason, the name stuck.
In less than 6 months, I knew I needed help, so I gathered many of the more involved parents and formed an LLC which soon transformed into a full fledged corporation. I was happy, thinking this would help guard me from lawsuits. I knew they'd be coming eventually.
Once the corporate infrastructure was in place, we grew like a radioactive weed.
When I think back, I can't even pin down the moment when, at a board meeting, someone suggested creating a version of Mcbuys with weapons- but as soon as the idea was in the aether- we all knew it was just a matter of time before someone did it. In the tradition of Mcbuys- we figured that someone- might as well be us. We were aware of the difficulties in such a concept- these were children after all, between the ages of 9-13, children with mothers who loved them. We didn't need to do any market research to know Mothers generally frowned on children fighting with weapons.
We got around this problem pretty easily- we decided the only kids eligible for The Mcbuys Weapons League were kids with dead mothers. I know, it sounds a little harsh, but we had to be practical or we'd never have gotten the project off the ground. Admittedly, we lost a lot of potential participants in our sport by going with weapons, but what we gained, was the interest of the TV people.
When I say the TV people were interested- that implies they were curious about our little sport. I think a more apt analogy would be the TV people came at us like a school of piranha attacking a wounded cow in a river. They were, literally, throwing money at us. At one point, I had the programming directors of two networks standing next to one another taking turns upping their bid for the television rights to the Mcbuys Weapons League.
I can honestly attest to misgivings when we first announced what we informally call ‘Stick League,' but to be fair to myself, I was certain no parent, even a male parent, would ever go for such a thing.