ESPN Zone Couch Potato Competition Heats Up

And then there were three. The “Couch Potato” publicity stunt going on over at ESPN Zone – the favorite restaurant of Yo La Tengo’s James McNew – took a dramatic turn when one of the four contestants abruptly dropped out of the butt-numbing competition. The quitter was Rutgers student Lindsay Wagenblast, the only female participant, who had “emerged as the favorite” in the contest, which started New Year's Day and involves sitting in a recliner in front of twelve 42-inch high-definition plasma televisions and a couple of 14-foot HD projection TVs broadcasting sports nonstop.

Like the documentary Hands on a Hard Body, in which participants competed to be the last person to keep one hand touching a Nissan Hardbody truck, the person who sits the longest will walk away with a high-definition TV and the recliner. It’s part of a bid to beat the Guinness World Record for watching televised sports, which stands at 69 hours and 48 minutes straight. Contestants can order unlimited food and drink from ESPN Zone’s delectable menu, but are permitted just one bathroom break every eight hours. (Diapers, anyone?)

Wagenblast told WNBC she dropped out after 15 hours because she “stopped having fun.” So today’s youth now lacks the attention span to sit and watch television? The three men still sitting include a computer technician from Rego Park and a stockbroker from Bay Ridge. Let’s just hope the contest doesn’t end the way it did at the 2005 Hands on a Hardbody competition, with one participant walking to Kmart during a break and committing suicide with a shotgun. Of course, with no Kmart in Times Square (yet), the most self-destructive move would probably be to just order a bottle of vodka at Arena and refuse to pay.