Audio By Carbonatix
The world’s largest rubber band ball stands six feet seven inches
tall and has a circumference of 25 feet. It took five years for Joel Waul of Lauderhill to create, weighs more than 9,400 pounds, and contains approximately 720,000
rubber bands. The outer layers consist of multicolored industrial-size bands that weigh several pounds each.
This afternoon, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! will cart it
away. Eventually, it might end up in
“Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I can’t even believe
this is in my driveway,” says the skinny man dwarfed by his own creation. “It’s
like, ‘What the heck, man? What did I do?'”
Joel has
always been a strange kid. He was born in Jamaica
in 1981, the younger of two sons to schoolteacher Maureen and well-known reggae
keyboardist Franklin Waul, who now plays with Ziggy Marley.
He earned
decent grades at Plantation High
School, excelling in art and science classes. But
after graduating, he was more interested in getting a job and playing videogames than enrolling in college.
He works nights at the Sawgrass Mills Gap, organizing stock,
and lives rent-free in a house that belongs to his aunt. Reserved in person, he’s
a daredevil on the Internet, where online buddies would ask him to do very strange
things for their entertainment. He attached 76 clothespins to his face in a
“beard of pain.” He also pierced his face with more than 800 acupuncture needles,
which he contends “isn’t that painful but is just time-consuming.”
One evening
in April 2004, over a fast-food dinner with his brother Toby, Joel watched an
episode of the now-defunct Ripley’s Believe It or Not! TV show that would
change his life. In it, a one-ton rubber band ball was dropped from a plane
into the Mojave Desert to see if it would bounce. It
exploded instead, but Joel was hooked: “My first thought was, I could build a rubber band ball like that. I
could build one bigger than that.”
That night,
he found a shopping bag full of stray rubber bands and got to work. He named
his fledgling creation after the McDonald’s chicken item he had just eaten:
Nugget. From that first night, he aimed to eclipse the Guinness-verified world
record, which then stood at 3,120 pounds.
Joel began
pilfering rubber bands from work and buying 50-pound bags of them from Office
Depot. After a month, Nugget was up to Joel’s knees and weighed 300 pounds. By
July 2004, the ball reached his waist and weighed twice that.
As Nugget’s
weight topped four digits, rubber bands became a huge expense. Joel raided his
savings for more than $2,000 to spend on bands from a Pennsylvania
wholesale manufacturer. “We probably get a hundred letters a year from people
claiming they’re building the world’s biggest rubber band ball,” says Lou
McKibber of the Dykema Rubber Band Company.
In January,
2006, Oregon home-insulator Steve
Milton began building his own. Milton
had the aid of his wife and three kids and a much larger bankroll. Only 11 months after beginning, Milton
smashed the record. The Oregonian’s ball eventually reached 4,600 pounds. In a
publicity grab, OfficeMax bought the new record-breaker for $50,000, Milton
says, and toured it around the country.
Joel burned
for revenge. In 2007, he got a sponsorship of his own: Physical therapy
specialist Stretchwell.com agreed to send him more than 5,000 pounds of its industrial-size elastic loops.
Even as his
ball supassed Milton’s, Joel kept
building. At 5,000 pounds, it outgrew his back yard, so he smashed it through
his fence to plant it in his driveway. He decided that Nugget was too “soft” a
name, redubbing it “Megaton.” Joel and his brother had the ball transported by
crane and truck to a car show in Orlando,
where they sold silicone wrist bands reading “Rubba Ban Man.”
In August 2008, Guinness officials lifted Megaton onto a truck scale and determined it weighed 8,200 pounds, earning Joel entry into the book. Since then, he’s
added 1,200 pounds for good measure. “Nobody’s going to touch that for a
while,” he declares.
Joel has had
the last laugh. This summer, he accepted Ripley’s offer to buy Megaton for an
undisclosed amount. It will grace a collection that already included the
world’s largest balls of string and barbed wire.
He plans on spending the sale money on tuition to the International Stunt School
in Seattle, where students are set
on fire upon graduation. He’s hoping to set the record for longest time spent
as a human fireball.
