The first subject is a great big guy, about 6 foot 3, 300 pounds, who is constantly carrying a 45 lb slam ball -- much like this one --
-- around with him, as he putters around at home, as he socializes, as he shops for groceries -- and also as he mows his small lawn with a non-motorized push mower. He's not always able to carry the ball on one of his shoulders and push the mower at the same time, and he ends up dropping the ball, pushing the mower for a couple of paces, and then retrieving the ball, and repeating the whole process.
While the man walks down a sidewalk with the ball on a shoulder, the interviewer is off screen, but we hear his voice: "Why don't you just leave the ball at home when you do things?"
The big man acts surprised, as if the answer were obvious. He sputters for a while before getting the words out: "If I left it at home,
I'd miss it!" He looks toward the offscreen interviewer, frowning and shaking his head as if the question had been completely bizarre.
Next we see a young woman carrying around a ball like this one --
-- around the office where she works. She's rather small and slender, but has some muscle tone from working with the ball. There's a montage of her carrying the ball around while she struggles to do other things which are more routine in office work. There is a fair amount of grunting, groaning and sweating. One of the woman's co-workers, a man, says that he could see how it would be difficult to carry around an 85 lb ball all day, but was it really
this tough? The offscreen interviewer informs the man that the "85" on this particular ball does not refer to pounds, but to kilograms. This ball, the interviewer tells the man, weighs over 187 pounds. The man is silent. He looks both shocked, and sincerely sorry that he had made any disparaging remarks about how difficult it was to do what his coworker is doing.
Finally, there is a man standing on a large yard in front of a large house. The lawn is dotted with dozens, if not hundreds, of yellows balls like this:
Like the woman in the previous segment, this man is not large, but his muscles have become somewhat defined from working with theses balls. He explains to the offscreen interviewer that each one of these balls weighs 300 lbs.
"It's strange," he says, "but each and every one of these balls was given to me, paid for and shipped to me by someone else, and in each case, the donor has been anonymous. It's strange, because, you know -- I'm a billionaire! These 300-pounders aren't cheap, but I could very easily have afforded to buy all of them for myself."
From offscreen comes the interviewer's voice, asking whether the man has donated any of these balls to gyms or other organization or individuals. The man is plainly shocked and appalled by the question: "Donated?!" he replied. "But -- these balls are
mine, don't you see? I've bought plenty of
other slams balls and given them away, but these ones are
mine!" He stares in horror at the unseen interviewer, and asks, "Would you donate your pets or your children?"
We cut to another scene. The tension from the previous moment appears to have passed. From offscreen the interviewer asks whether the man can actually lift these 300 lb balls off of the ground. The man smiles at the question and exclaims, "I can certainly try!" He rushes over to the nearest ball, squats down next to it in the proper position for lifting something like this, or like an Atlas stone in a strongman competition: ball between his feet, bending with his legs until he can put both hands under the ball, holding his head up high and sticking his butt out to keep his spine braced. After a long moment of strain, during which the camera zooms in very close to the ball, daylight is clearly visible between the ball and the ground. The man splutters, "I got it off of the ground!"
And then suddenly he drops the ball and falls full length face down onto the lawn beside the ball. With his voice muffled because his face is pressed down into the lawn, the man says, "I think I may have injured myself."
