Woz Challenge Cup: Apple co-founder preps for Segway Polo Championship

“Silicon Valley has long accepted its role as inventor of technology’s Next Big Thing, but with that came a corresponding acceptance of certain shortcomings in the athletic arena,” Bruce Newman reports for The San Jose Mercury News. “Until six years ago, when the pudgy and the pale climbed aboard tech’s nerdiest toy — the Segway personal transportation device — and attempted to create a little geek chic with Segway polo.”

“This silently thundering herd is led by Steve Wozniak, the valley’s Perpetual Big Thing, who has become the sport’s face — and bod — tilting at windmill shots for one of the most successful teams in the newly formed International Segway Polo Association,” Newman reports. “Not for nothing does this group’s initials start with ISP.”

“Woz and his Silicon Valley Aftershocks teammates were practicing last week in Sunnyvale for the sport’s championship tournament — the Woz Challenge Cup — which begins June 10 in Barbados,” Newman reports. “But even as they hurtled up and down the field at a top Segway speed of 12½ miles per hour, they were beating a retreat from the recent rise of Xtreme sports. With a median age just under 50, the ‘Shocks are unlikely contenders at the next X Games — though they could blaze a trail to the first Rascal Scooter Games.”

Newman reports, “Bellied up to the bar that controls his speeding Segway, Wozniak leaned forward and swung his polo mallet, driving a foam rubber ball toward goal posts at the far end of the field. He pitches his body at a rakish tilt over the prow of his rechargeable chariot, in defiance of Newton’s law of gravity, which states that an Apple co-founder leaning that far forward will eventually hit the ground. But he never does.”

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]