The Top-10 Imaginary Sports We Want To Play!

From what I understand, there was some sort of worldwide sporting event last moth involving teams from San Francisco and Texas or something. As I am, like you, a huge geek who pays closer attention to movies than to any sort of televised sporting event (the Olympic Games notwithstanding), I couldn’t tell you the details of this event, nor who won it. Ask me about the films of Akira Kurosawa, and I have you covered. Ask me about the Super Bowl, and you may as well be speaking in Sanskrit.

The sports that have stayed with me more are the imaginary ones; the ones you see your favorite characters from various films and TV playing. The games that some hardworking screenwriter invented in a fit of creative pique, and that some actors and directors had to actually play on a set somewhere. These games, for their novelty, for their creativity, and for their magic, are just itching to be played. How many of us, for instance, have wished we could play mid-air rugby on flying broomsticks? A certain brand of geek may sit to play a role-playing board game versions of these sports, be we all know what’s really involved: we wish would could play along for real.

In that spirit, I have compiled a list of ten of the greatest imaginary sports from pop culture. N.B. I have excluded video games from this list, as an entire list can be filled with ultra-violent and/or wacky games that you can yourself play, albeit in a virtual, digital form. This list is reserved for games that you wish you could play.

10) Mindgame

from “Sliders” (1995-2000)

Quinn Mallory (Jerry O’Connell), the hero of “Sliders,” has invented his own portable quantum-leaping widget that allows him to skip about merrily from dimension to dimension. Quinn was, at least on paper, described as a science nerd who was never appreciated for his intellect. In one of the better episodes of the show, Quinn found himself in an alternate dimension where intellect is prized over “cool,” and brains are nurtured over brawn. Punk rock-types blasted Vivaldi from their boomboxes, and the junkiest form of action fluff available in the local mass media was written by Dumas.

And, most notably, the world’s most popular pastime was a sport called Mindgame. This was a sport played on 6-by-6, light-up grid. There are two alternately colored teams who would have to handle a ball and avoid getting tackled. While they dodged and ducked their opponents, and passed the ball to their teammates, the players would have to answer multi-part trivia questions, such as “Name all of Jupiter’s moons, in order of their proximity to the planet!” or “Carry out pi to fifteen decimal places!” The player to answer the final part of the question claimed a square on the grid. The colored squared were then played like that old boardgame Othello, and they could “flip” their opponent’s colored tiles to their own by surrounding them.

This may sound complicated on the page, but watching it in “Sliders” made it very clear to understand, and made all the viewers want to play. Finally, the geeks would think to themselves, a sport that needs you to be smart.

9) 43-Man Squamish

from MAD Magazine (the June 1965 issue)

Most organized college sports seem too big, too elitist, too well-moneyed, to allow the average Joe to participate. MAD Magazine, with that beautifully chaotic logic they have, invented a new sport for the masses called 43-Man Squamish. A sport so chaotic and convoluted and confusing, that it finally puts everyone at a discordian equal.

Letsee if I can sum it up in a cogent fashion: 43-Man Squamish was played on a five-sided field (called the Flutney). The teams consisted of one right inside Grouch, one right outside Grouch, four Deep Brooders, four Shallow Brooders, five Wicket Men, three Offensive Niblings, four Quarter-Frummets, one Full-Frummet, two Overblats, two Underblats, nine back-up Finks, two Leapers and a Dummy. Players are issued gigantic hooked sticks (Frullips), which they use to prevent opponents from carrying the ball (a small, soft, spongy Pritz stuffed with bluejay feathers, carried in the mouth) into their endzone.

There are, of course, extra rules on how to begin a match, who is a qualified referee, what kind of sticking is and is not permitted, and which players came earn points. There are sudden death rules, and intentional losing permitted under certain circumstances.

This article became so notorious, that several colleges actually formed their own college-backed Squamish teams, and attempted to play some merry bonspiels with one another. While the sport never caught on in any significant way, I wish I had the gumption to start my own organized Squamish team during my college years. Or, at the very least, sneak over to a neighboring college, and watch the Squamish people training for the big match. The fictional sport would have leaked temporarily into reality.

8) Whackbat

from “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009)

Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” was one of the best animated films of 2009 (and, for my money, should have won the coveted Academy Award over Pixar’s “Up,” but I digress). It was warm and, very literally, fuzzy, and managed to make funny and palpable, the ultra-mannered irony of Anderson’s idiom. The dialogue was funny, and the animation was great.

Ash (Jason Schwartzman), the son of the title character, sees himself as an athlete, and longs to match his father’s accomplishments at his school’s sacred game, whackbat. Ash, sadly, is easily shown up by his cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson) after only the briefest of rundowns from the school’s coach (Owen Wilson). Here’s how it works: There’s three grabbers, three taggers, five twig runners, and a player at Whackbat. Center tagger lights a pinecone and chucks it over the basket and the whack-batter tries to hit the cedar stick off the cross rock. Then the twig runners dash back and forth until the pinecone burns out and the umpire calls hotbox. Finally, you count up however many score-downs it adds up to and divide that by nine.

Whackbat is essentially a kid-friendly, woodsy, delightfully confusing version of cricket (which, as most Americans would likely agree, is a pretty confusing game to begin with). That it involves flaming pinecones only works in its favor. I’ve always wanted to attend a proper cricket match. But, since seeing “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” I think I’d like to play whackbat equally fervently.

7) Blurnsball

from “Futurama” (2002)

Baseball, you have to admit, is as boring as mom and apple pie. By the year 3000, according to the whipsmart prognosticators over at “Futurama,” baseball will evolve and change, and be refreshingly doctored up. It’s about time, too.

Blurnsball resembles baseball in that it’s played on a diamond, and a pitcher tries to throw a ball past a batter, but it’s the little changes that make the game worth it. For instance, the blurnsball is now tethered to a long elastic band, and allows the fieldmen several chances to catch it. The runner can now ride a minibike around the bases, and, if they hit the ball into the Diamondvision screen, they can unlock the multiball mode, and hit several balls very rapidly. Then a giant tarantula bursts out of the bullpen onto the field. Robots are not allowed in the game. Nor are women.

If you look at a basketball player, they’re usually trim and athletic. You look at a baseball player, and they’re usually beefy and beergutted; just look at Babe Ruth and compare him to Dr. J. Baseball is an odd game in many ways, and it’s strange that it’s been declared The National Pastime. Thank goodness the people at “Futurama” thought that the game would eventually change into a pinball madhouse of monsters and explosions. I’d be more likely to watch blurnsball.

6) Death Race

from “Death Race 2000” (1975)

I love sci-fi films that feature a new, imaginary sport, game, or TV show that everyone – EVERYONE – is really, really into. The show on “The Running Man” is a good example. According to Paul Bartel’s 1975 classic, the entire world, now jaded by constant war, and desensitized to spectacle violence, will be glued to their TV once a year to watch a several-days-long, cross-country car race called, what else?, Death Race. Death Race is enthusiastically sponsored by several American corporations, odds are given on the air, and bets are openly placed.

The racers are a ragtag bunch of gimmicky luchador types, each with their own specialized vehicle (which, incidentally, were designed by William M. Schmidt, who designed the TV version of the Batmobile, and the Monkeemobile). There is the Death Race reigning champion Frankenstein (David Carradine), Machine Gun Joe Viterbo (Sylvester Stallone), Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), and Nero the Hero (Martin Kove), amongst others. Each driver is assigned an assistant who will aide them in navigation and mechanics, and, should the situation call for it, have sex with them.

And – and here the coup de grâce – points in Death Race are tallied by how many pedestrians you can run down and kill during the course of the race. Able-bodied people are worth more points that children. Old ladies fetch a handsome sum. Pets, if I recall, are not worth anything. And you only get full score if the people are properly dead, and not merely maimed. So many people watch Death Race, and follow the sport so passionately, that some elect to stand in the middle of the road and martyr themselves to the various drivers in order to drive up their score.

The film eventually goes into tut-tutting mode, but we all have to admit, I think, that “Death Race 2000” is na exciting film, a funny film, and a great premise.

5) Pyramid / Triad

from “Battlestar Galactica” (1978, 2004)

In the 1978 series, the sport was called triad. In the 2004 series, a similar – indeed nearly identical sport – was called pyramid. Either way, this looks like something I would have tried out for in high school, as it seems to combine elements from three or four different sports.

The rules to triad and pyramid are never explicitly explained at any point in either series, but we do see it being played from time to time, and we can intuit the rules as best we can. There are two teams who must, like in basketball, throw a ball through the opposing team’s goal (which is a small hole in the wall). They are allowed to tackle one another, and they wrestle a lot. They wear padding and helmets, and cavort about on a small, triangular field. Why is it that in real life, all playing fields are square, but in fiction, all playing fields are much more interesting shapes?

This one gets a nod because it is associated with the geek spasm that is BSG, but also because it closely resembles a game that some peers of mine made up in elementary school called Killer Rugby. Any game that you can make up as a child, and also participate in while flying about aboard a future spaceship is a good sport.

4) Kosho

from “The Prisoner” (1967)

“The Prisoner” is an excellent sci-fi TV series that bares no comparison to anything that came before it. Perhaps “The Twilight Zone.” It was about an unnamed ex-spy (series creator Patick McGoohan) who has been drugged and kidnapped, and placed in a bizarro, candy-colored Village somewhere in the world, where he is openly spied upon by a friendly cadre of shadowy figures who are tying to ascertain exactly why he quit his job. No one has names in The Village, and our hero is known only as Number 6.

The Village is a friendly place where you can relax on the beach, participate in local elections, and eat your favorite foods (Only very occasionally are you drugged or brainwashed or suffocated by the rubbery security rovers that drift about the place like spooky giant balloons). The Village offers a gym where you can go work out and, here’s the kicker, engage an opponent in a kosho match,

Kosho, featured in a few episodes of “The Prisoner,” is an actual martial art that Patrick McGoohan invented specially for the show. Somewhere in the world are written rules are a scoring system for this strange, strange sport. Kosho is played on two trampolines that the two players bounce on like children leaping from one bed to another in a hotel room. In between the two trampolines is a small pool of water. Knocking your opponent into the water seems to be the way to win. You are allowed to push, but not to grab, and you can dangle from a high-flung chainlink fence that surrounds the court, if you like.

This bouncy, high-flying sport seems implausible and difficult to work and, as a consequence, really, really fun to play. It also looks like it would be a decent workout, as you’re constantly bouncing. Ironically, kosho did not catch on the same way Squamish did, even though McGoohan did indeed, from what I understand, intend it to catch on as a real event. Perhaps someday…

3) Ender’s Game

from Ender’s Game (1985)

Orson Scott Card’s seminal, Nebula-Award winning 1985 novel contains an ironic, ultra-violent sport that all readers of the book would either happily watch in large groups, or merely play themselves. No longer restrained to the dull rules of Earth-bound physics, Ender’s game is a series of training simulators that involve fighting techniques and learning to operate in zero gravity. The rules and specifics of these games are a little too complex to describe here, so I will merely encourage you to reads the book (or the entire series of books) yourself.

It has been recently revealed that Card is himself a homophobe, and a vocal advocate of the National Organization for Marriage, a right-wing political group that seeks to halt gay marriage in the United States. It’s disappointing to learn that his politics are so anti-human after he wrote a book that is so compassionate to the wartime actions and sins of a duped recruit.

All of this merely eschews the fact that he wrote a very good sci-fi book, aand that the games featured in it are undeniably cool.

2) Quidditch

from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)

Rugby is an exciting game in itself. It’s like American football, but without padding, muddier, and far more brutal. It’s like combining a game with a good, healthy punch-up. I’ve seen some televised rugby matches, and the player seem to hate each other with a mortal passion. At the end of the day, though, the players, no slightly more bruised, tend to make up and get a pint together. Despite the violence of the game, there aren’t as many fan riots as, say, English football.

But imagine, if you will, playing rugby, complete with tackling and body checking, while soaring through the air on a broomstick. Quidditch. What an exciting game. You have to throw a ball (the Quaffle), past a goalie, through one of three suspended goals. Each goal is worth ten points. The opposing team had to either intercept the ball, or merely knock you off of your flying broomstick. Awesome already. And then, to trip you up further, there are a pair of evil, cursed balls (called Bludgers) which soar about under their own magic, trying to tackle every player.

Further still, there’s an X-factor in the game in the form of the Golden Snitch, which is a flying magical ball about the size of a handball. If a player manages to catch this difficult-to-see flying ball, that team is awarded 150 points, effectively ending the game.

There was some worry in 2001 that special effects had not advanced enough to properly envision Quidditch on the screen in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” Luckily, they were good enough, and watching the Quiddich match in the 2001 movie only made fans want to play the game all the more. Any game where you’re allowed to fly is a good game in my book.

1) Calvinball

from “Calvin and Hobbes” (1985 -1995)

In Bill Watterson’s famed comic strip, his hero Calvin was a bitter, imaginative 6-year-old boy named after the philosopher John Calvin (1509-1564), who taught a Christian philosophy of complete self-denial and divine predetermination. Hobbes was Calvin’s stuffed tiger toy that could speak to Calvin and play when others we’re looking, and was named after essayist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who was an early pioneer of social conctract-ism, and felt that life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Neither of the characters lived to their namesakes’ philosophies.

Watterson was a bitter man who started his comic strip with an air of playfulness, but quickly pushed it into a darker territory, where Calvin, a 6-year-old, mind you, would begin ranting about how life was unfair, and how the only person who understood him was his imaginary friend, Hobbes, who would even be outraged and horrified at the little boy’s actions; Calvin would frequently rail against his public school, his uptight parents, political minutiae, and the sorry state of the environment, and only be met with vitriol and hated; he was an unhappy little boy and the strip was frequently dour. It’s also one of the better comic strips that has ever been published, pioneering new levels of thought in the funnies, and all kinds of organic Windsor McKay-inspired visuals that are all but absent from most strips in the funnypapers.

Occasionally, though Watterson would fondly remember that his hero was indeed a 6-year-old, and would write accordingly, most notably when he openly and wonderfully when he invented Calvinball, Calvin’s favorite sport. It is played in teams of one, and black masks must be worn. There are all manner of balls, flags and bases involved. The score can change at a moment’s notice. The rules are invented as you go along. The only concrete rule of Calvinball is that no rule can be used twice, making for a constant barrage of creativity from the players. If you step in the secret spot, you have to sacrifice your flag and sing the “I’m Very Sorry Song.” If you hit someone with the blommer, you have to go back to the penalty box until the score shifts laterally to the inverse goalzone, and you get a free pass back to the tree.

This is the sport that every six-year-old played and every six-year-old wanted to play. It is a freewheeling, inventive childhood anarchy that manages to boil gameplay down to its very essence. Reading about Calvinball only invokes every single game you played as a child, and makes you hungry for the halcyon days of childhood play. Calvinball is one for the ages.

Honorable mentions:

Creebage from “The Monkees”

Mornington Crescent from “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t Got a Clue”

Foodon battles from “Fighting Foodons”

Perrises Squares from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”

Baseketball from “Baseketball”

Moopsballs from “Orbit”

Rollerball from “Rollerball”

Whatever that giant robot battle was in “Robot Jox.”

Alien fistfights in “Arena”

Witney Seibold is a hardworking non-athlete living in Los Angeles, a city with no organized football team. In non-Olympic years, he spends his months writing articles for Geekscape, and very occasionally posting film reviews on his website, Three Cheers for Darkened Years!, which has about 700 articles that he has collected over years of film writing. You can visit his site here: http://witneyman.wordpress.com/