As Olympiads go, the one that just ended wasn’t bad - a solid rivalry between the U.S. and China; closeted mutant Michael Phelps making history by demonstrating that he can do anything with water except walk on it; that heartbreaking hour when American gymnast Alicia Sacramone flubbed both the balance beam and the floor exercise and tried to keep her composure while the Chinese women steamrollered her team; and fierce competition in events I had no idea would interest me enough to even watch, let alone root for anyone. Seriously, if you’d told me in July I’d give a damn about synchronized diving I’d have called you crazy.

It’s this last item that always springs to mind during the Olympics, that makes me wonder what it must be like for athletes who devote their lives to becoming the best in the world at sports that don’t have quite so much marquee value. For every Michael Phelps, blitzed with endorsement deals, or Shaun White grinning like an idiot on the cover of Rolling Stone while that AMEX and Hewlett-Packard cheddar rolls in, there’s a Mary Whipple, who led her team to gold in rowing, or Eatonton’s Vincent Hancock, who topped skeet shooting, for whom the rewards in the larger world won’t be anywhere near as lucrative. And those are just the Americans. Sometimes it’s just got to suck to be the best on the planet at something and have relatively few people on that planet actually care.

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All-Stars of a Different Sort: Danny Montaner knows the feeling. Under his handle “fRoD” he is far and away the best Counterstrike player in the world, a steely competitor with unerring aim, freakishly fast reflexes, and a win percentage Michael Jordan would have killed for. The problem is that Counterstrike is a computer game, a five-on-five combat simulation between two teams of networked players, and while said game requires extensive strategy, teamwork, endurance and nerve, it’s still something you play in your dorm room or your parents’ basement. Videogaming is a hobby, a distraction, not even remotely considered a sport, much less a profession.

At least that was the situation a couple of years ago. Today there is a league of professional videogamers, including franchise Counterstrike teams who compete against each other and teams from around the world, and fRoD is the anchor of the LA CompLexity, getting paid and endorsed to frag virtual opponents with extreme prejudice. Journalist Michael Kane chronicles the advent of this bizarre phenomenon in his book Game Boys: Professional Videogaming’s Rise from the Basement to the Big Time (Penguin, 2008), and although it deals with the fortunes of young people playing computer games in lousy hotel conference rooms, Kane manages remarkably to imbue his story with all the excitement of A Season on the Brink.

Kane follows two teams - CompLexity, coached by Marietta attorney Jason Lake, an ex-jock who bankrolled his team with his family’s savings; and Team 3D, coached by the Machiavellian Craig Levine - as they meet and clash time and again. Levine was one of the first people to realize Counterstrike’s potential as a marketable pseudo-sport and secured professional backing from Intel and other related companies for 3D. Levine’s team are the New York Yankees of videogaming, and he is their Steinbrenner, actively poaching players from other teams and suspected of working to rig matches while negotiating with MTV and other media outlets for wider exposure. Lake’s team, often conspicuously positioned as the Bad News Bears, are 3D’s main competition, a team of talented players struggling to stay in the game as Lake desperately tries to attract corporate interest (and someone else’s, anyone else’s money). As Lake continues to hemorrhage cash, he draws ever closer to the moment he must choose between his team and his family, and so every match and business meeting becomes a white-knuckle affair.

Kane also follows the players, the smack-talking 3D hotshots, CompLexity’s Band of Brothers, the gamer-punks of Dallas’s fifth-rated Mug N Mouse team and Florida’s JaX Money Crew, and an all-female team fighting to dispel the myth that girls can’t game. All the players have their stories - insecurities, hubris, things to prove - and Kane treats every one of them with the same gravitas we afford athletes in the heat of the season. Considering that one of the issues facing these players and coaches is how to translate a video game into a watchable and marketable event, Kane manages the even more incredible feat of making reading about a video game exciting. As the book moves toward its inevitable showdown, with fame and fortunes on the line, one comes to feel the pressures, the triumphs and the defeats almost viscerally. Even if, like me, you don’t know the first thing about gaming or gaming culture, you’ll find Game Boys a helluva story.

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Fight You for It: You can find videogaming on TV now, albeit deep in the hinterlands of digital cable, but in retrospect it surprises me that it took so long for it to arrive. After all, if ESPN can broadcast Texas-hold-’em-wake-me-up-when-bocce-ball-comes-on poker for 12 hours a day, surely people will sit and watch simulated combat with virtual blood and death. Competition is competition, even when it’s utterly stupid and pointless, as the rabid viewers of Unbeatable Banzuke or Shear Genius can tell you. Get two people together and they will inevitably compete over something, if not directly then by proxy, and even if there are no games or sports or sex partners to battle over, there is always the perennial favorite, “Who would win in a fight between…?” When I was a kid it was “Who would win, Batman or Wolverine?” (I was a Marvel kid, but logic dictates that the Bat takes it - sorry), and the Six Million Dollar Man/Bigfoot controversy lingers to this day. These days I’m more about steroid-addled Barry Bonds vs. beer-and-hot-dog-addled Babe Ruth or Obama vs. McCain in a Texas steel-cage match, but I still do it. You do it. Everybody does it.

Jake Kalish wrote a book about it, a very funny book called Santa vs. Satan: The Official Compendium of Imaginary Fights (Three Rivers Press, 2008). Kalish extrapolates our incessant need to know which person (real or fictional) could beat up which other person (real or fictional) in the heat of conflict (real or fictional) into a series of head-to-head columns comparing each combatant’s strengths and weaknesses and rendering a final verdict on each. Moreover, Kalish cast his net wide and solicited expert opinion from a number of different sources, so you get a historian and a world-champion sword-fighter weighing in on whether a samurai could beat a gladiator, and a zen instructor’s view on Donald Duck vs. Daffy Duck.

Many of these contrived fights are serious business - Muhammad Ali vs. Bruce Lee, for instance, or the highly controversial and never-ending Pirate vs. Ninja debate - but others are no less fascinating for being completely nuts. Could Han Solo take Indiana Jones in a fair fight, or would Solo have to shoot first? What would happen in a fight between George Michael and Pee-Wee Herman? Is it better to be lucky or skilled? Drunk or stoned? Michael Corleone or Tony Montana? Constipated or incontinent? These are vital questions, and Kalish and his team of experts answer them for you.

Santa vs. Satan is a featherweight (lightweight, tops) of a book but, Kalish and Company’s finely honed snark aside, like all good humor it elicits a certain amount of truth. To wit, it points out that so much of the conflict we endure and perpetuate - in our homes, our workplaces, the national and global stages - often boils down to mere pissing contests, the need to prove that we have the biggest dick on the block, or at least not the smallest (I’m looking straight at you, Bush and Putin). We need to be reminded as often as possible of our inherently competitive natures and attempt, where we can, to maintain some kind of perspective. I’m not saying we should deny them or try to curb them, both tasks impossible for those of us who aren’t the Dalai Lama, but we are capable of recognizing that some issues are worth putting it back in our pants and working together for a change.

And although my wife will totally disagree, ninjas kick pirate ass.

John G. Nettles