If no one minds if I work out at the lectern here, I’d like to say a few words about Darren Morton, a.k.a. D-Mo Swoll.
D-Mo died doing what he loved: deadlifting air conditioners and carrying them back and forth across the freeway during rush hour.
When I went to identify the body, I couldn’t help but marvel one last time at his legendary lats, even in their mangled state. I told the coroner I could hardly tell the difference between D-Mo and the rock-hard slab he was lying on.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “A family member IDed the body yesterday.”
“Traps need a little work,” I said. “Not that they’ll get it.”
“You have to stop coming in here and critiquing the stiffs,” he said.
I told him I thought it was pretty unprofessional for him to call them that.
“The deceased,” he said.
I pressed a pamphlet into the coroner’s hand and asked if he’d welcomed Seth Rollins into his life. That’s around the time he threw me out.
D-Mo had made a lot of gains over the past year, but he still had so many gains ahead of him. I guess that’s what makes this so difficult.
You’re making gains up in Heaven now, dude! Argh!
(Tearfully kicks a tree in half.)
Would D-Mo be alive right now if he’d never joined Crossfit? Oh, most definitely. But I know for a fact that he would rather be a mega-shredded corpse than a walking, breathing cheat day.
I know this because he told me one morning as we mixed coconut oil and human growth hormone into bowls of raw turkey. “Man, if my body fat ever creeps above four percent,” he said, “just run me over with several cars and one Mack Truck.”
It never did, and I never did, but that is still a thing that happened.
D-Mo was one of the most active and generous members of Crossfit SoBro’s Big Bro program, in which ultra-jacked adults mentor under-jacked youths. He taught a lot of fun-sized ‘fitters how to check their ego at the door—and how to retrieve it on their way out after it’s grown to ten times its normal size. Such is the Crossfit way.
Bros and lady-bros, please pour out some p-ro for our dearly departed D-Mo.
(A hundred BlenderBottles snap shut and rattle as the attendees shake up their protein mixes and pour some out onto the grass.)
Not that much. Guys! Tomorrow is a recovery day—physically and emotionally.
You all may have noticed that I have a large truck tire chained to my back. This tire was the last thing to see D-Mo alive. It represents the ludicrous grief I now carry with me at all times and occasionally drop into open graves.
I guess I’m still getting a handle on the grief.
Though D-Mo’s parents nixed my idea of cremating his remains and packing them inside a medicine ball, they did tacitly agree, I’m pretty sure, that the other pallbearers and I could hoist and lower D-Mo’s casket in the manner he would have wanted.
Bros and lady-bros?
(Five Crossfitters step forward. The six of them take turns raising Darren’s closed casket above their heads, flipping it, bench-pressing it, tossing it back and forth, etc., while quietly sobbing. Eventually, they lower the battered casket into the ground.)