Joel Waul, 28, climbs on top of his rubber band ball on the driveway of his home in Lauderhill, Fla., Friday, Oct. 23, 2009.
LAUDERHILL, Fla. (AP) — Look, over there. Under that blue tarp in a suburban driveway. That thing that’s the size of a Smart car?
It’s Joel Waul’s rubber band ball.
Waul has spent the last six years carefully wrapping and linking and stretching rubber bands of various sizes into the ball shape. The Guinness Book of World Records declared it the world’s largest rubber band ball in 2008.
On Thursday, Waul will say goodbye to his creation. A team from Ripley’s Believe it or Not will come to his driveway with a crane and haul the 6-foot, 7-inch tall, 9,032-pound behemoth away. The ball will eventually be displayed in a far-off museum yet to be determined, so folks can marvel at Waul’s obsession.
Waul got the idea six years ago, when he saw a Ripley’s television special that showed the then-largest rubber band ball being dropped into the desert from an airplane.
“I just thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen,” said Waul, a 28-year-old who works nights restocking a Gap clothing store.
The idea of setting a world record always appealed to Waul; he recalls that as a 7-year-old in Jamaica he pored over his father’s Guinness Book of World Records. (Read more.)
B.S. Report–There’s no harm in having a hobby…but this is a little on the obsessive side. I think the fact that the Guinness people will take the ball away from him, housing it in a museum, is the best thing to happen for this guy so he can focus his time and energies on something a little more productive than stretching rubber bands. Not that there’s anything wrong with stretching rubber bands…
Dogs are famous for having obsessions…I had a friend whose dog would do nothing else but play with a tennis ball, until finally he took it away from the dog. It was good for the dog and I think it will be good for Mr. Waul as well.
