Giannis prayed. He prayed to whatever god or gods he thought might be listening. But the way his body protested at him, he was pretty sure that if there was a god, he wasn’t listening.
Eating the ninth out of ten uncooked brats, each bite was a struggle to prevent his stomach from rejecting the incoming meat product, thus ending his participation in “Bradley Center Bratwurst Barbarity”. However, he had overcome many challenges to make it this far in his NBA career, and, for the sake of teammate chemistry, he would overcome this one too.
Zaza was yelling into his megaphone. “Giannis have only one brat left to eat! Rest of you loser better pick up pace!” Meanwhile, Ersan Ilyasova was barking words of “encouragement” like a drill sergeant.
“You call that chewing? My grandma eat faster and she have just one tooth!” he screamed into Johnny O’Bryant’s ear, as the rookie power forward shivered from hypothermia, half of a brat sitting untouched in his mouth. When Johnny didn’t respond, Ersan picked up a hot dog bun off the ground and threw it in Johnny’s face. “You letting teammates down, you dog!”
Giannis ignored all these outside distractions and instead focused his thoughts inward. Just one more brat, and one more bun, and he would start the next phase of the contest. With the little strength that remained in him, Giannis forced down more bites of the sausage, sometimes pausing for minutes at a time to let the waves of nausea subside. Finally, it was all finished, and he let his coldly-sweating body drop to the grass.
“Giannis finish the brat!” Zaza announced. “Now he must run around arena ten time!”
Picking himself up off the cold, unforgiving ground, Giannis swayed on his feet, then broke into a shambling run.