So my father used to tape sports stuff frequently on vhs. I’m talking Super Bowls, NBA Finals, World Series, All-star games, etc. Games that we hold as classics from the 90’s my father recorded, and he eventually gave all those vhs tapes to me (I still have them—I actually just finished digitizing them recently).
So one day, when I was about 7-8 years old, he visits me with another box of vhs tapes of games he recorded. By this point, I’ve already burned through all those early MJ nba finals games, so I’m super excited to get more games to watch. Now, the box that he brought over, he couldn’t remember what was on the tapes because he forgot to label some of them, so we’re just sitting back going through vhs tapes trying to label the tapes for posterity.
I’ll never forget the next sequence of events, they are ingrained in my head.
I grab the next tape out of the box, a black scotch vhs tape, and proceed to put it in the vcr. Now the vcr was an outdated model from the 80’s (this is all happening circa 98-2000), so you know it takes the vcr about 10 seconds to load up.
So I popped the tape in, and sit back down in my seat while my father’s on sitting on the couch. I’m closer to the tv and vcr than he is.
The picture comes on, and all I see is a vhs dubbed grainy clip of what looks like women at a beach in bikinis, with text scrolling at the bottom…
My father smoothly, but quickly, hops off the couch and hits the eject button.
There‘s like a five second awkward beat of silence except for the sound of the vcr ejecting what I believed then as a 7-8 year old, and now as a man, to be the beginning of a white porno.
All my father says while he’s putting the tape back in the box is, “That‘s bad stuff I used watch a long time ago.”
I simply said nothing, and put the next vhs tape in, and we kept it moving like nothing ever happened.
