Well, that’s quite the eye-grabbing headline, now, isn’t it?

The reality is somewhat more sedate and less bang!/pow! than I may have led you to believe, though. Because, after all, what is senior shot-putting but the solo, semi-leisurely tossing of cannonballs, accompanied by grunting and howling, among grown (often overgrown) men and women? The NBA finals, it’s not. The Olympics? Hardly. On the Spectator Excitement Scale, senior shot-putting is just this side of snail-racing. Except, perhaps, for the competitors’ loved ones, a few dozen of whom gathered last Sunday in the shade of a huge oak tree at the Santa Rosa High School shot-put area in Santa Rosa, California – my home town – to cheer on their elders.

Case in point: Elisabeth Face-Timed our kids and her mom so they could watch my performance live. By the second round of throws, everybody had hung up, with not terribly convincing requests that she send them a video if I won.

I can’t say I blame them. Or Elisabeth, for that matter, for not arm-twisting them into staying on the phone. My poor spouse…there were 22 other guys throwing in the men’s shot put. I was in the second flight, which means she had to sit, wilting devotedly in the heat, through the entire first flight – 15 aged, beefy guys, 90 throws in all – before I ever entered the ring. (“It was bonkers,” she confided later, after driving home with the AC kicked up to “polar vortex.”) She tells me I owe her big for this, and who am I to disagree?

But, hey, I won.

Okay, truth be told, I didn’t whup all 22 of the others. We were spread over a half-dozen age groupings (the youngest competitor was 50; the oldest, 84), putting shots of different weights (the older you get, the lighter the shot – one of the rarely mentioned benefits of living long enough to watch your body crumble). My group (70-74 years old) consisted of me and two other fellow-graymen: a friendly former coach wearing Velcro braces on his trunk, both knees, and both elbows, and a short-ish man with very long, well-muscled arms and huge, powerful hands. He had clearly not spent the last 40 years trying to coax kids into letting him stick a flashlight into their ears with promises of Hello Kitty stickers.

But I knew I had it won by my third throw, not because I heaved it out of the park, but because one of my competitors – the former coach – had already withdrawn, citing aggravation of an unspecified-but-probably-already-splinted injury. Meanwhile, the man with the big hands was visibly drained by the heat, his distances steadily decreasing with each round. He spent the time between throws in a camp chair with ice packs on both knees and the back of his neck.

And me? Well, my Parkinson’s was on its best behavior that morning. I felt energetic and relatively spry for a change. My balance was okay, but not so much that I dared to attempt a glide – that backward sliding motion that was standard shot-putting technique back in the day. To avoid an unsightly tumble, I just stood there and chucked the thing.

To my surprise, I later learned that I’m currently ranked 24th in the U.S. in my age group, and 5th in California. This sounds pretty impressive until you realize there are only 37 guys ranked nationally in my age group so far this season, which means I’m pulling a C-minus if we’re grading on the curve. (Whatever. I’ll take it.)

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that I’m #1 in my age group for People with Parkinson’s. Maybe we should have our own Olympics.