In the News: The Olympics...Sort Of

Every time it's an Olympics year, you hear the same debates: Is ice-skating [or substitute another event] a real sport? If there can be subjectivity in the scoring, some say, it's not a sport. But I say, there's a certain level of subjectivity in all sports. Take football, for example. How many times do you hear people say, "If the ref had called them on X play, this would have happened and my team would have won?" I'm certainly not going to argue that football isn't a sport. It is, as is ice-skating, which involves a ton of physical athletic ability.

Golf, on the other hand, is a skill. HA! Take that, golf-loving people who go around dissing figure-skating!

But really, in my opinion, it's a skill, just like my beloved pool. Swimming in a pool? Sport. Shooting pool? Skill.

Of course if we start eliminating what are really skills from the Olympics - I'm looking at you, archery, even if you are part of the curriculum for gym classes everywhere - we're going to need to fill those slots with new sports so that, you know, there's something to run through 16 days of television. Last night on The Daily Show, correspondent John Hodgeman suggested an excellent new sport to add zip to the occasionally lackluster games: it involved taking a bedazzled skater - as if skaters aren't bedazzled enough already - and shoving that person off an alpine mountain to see how they'd do with flying and landing.

Well, that's the inspiration for my post here today at TFC. I'd like to see folks make up their own sports that aren't real sports - yet - but should be. The more bizarre, the better.

OK, I'll go first. My sport is...

TACKLE BASKETBALL!

Here's how you play. First, you can't play on a regular basketball court. That would be too lame. You need to play on tarmac, preferably tarmac that hasn't been re-paved recently, so it's nice and bumpy and gritty. As a matter of fact, for Olympic play, you need to have some ground glass on the tarmac. Six people play and there's just one basket. After jump ball, with all six jumping, whoever pulls down the ball is on offense, while everyone else is on defense. The person on offense tries to get off a shot before getting tackled. If the person on offense is successful, she gets the ball again. Oh, and no fair tackling *after* the person has taken their shot. (I'm looking at you, Alyson Noel.) But up until the ball leaves her hand? Pile it on! The person who scores the most points in an hour without needing hospitalization wins.

So now it's your turn.

I hereby declare this Make Up Your Own Sport Day.

Let the games begin.

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