The Transgames

I’ve been avoiding the sports posts because I know there is a strong anti-sports contingent on EP (sorry, it’s an anti watching sports contingent), and the Internet is plenty full of sports opinion/no one cares about the woes of my fantasy teams.  But if we put aside these very reasonable objections, then I’d like to purpose a framework for deciding what is the best sport to watch.  Say for a second that we agree that the joy of sports watching comes from the purity of power, skill, and competition, and that watching athletics on the world’s highest levels evokes something so essential about the human animal that it allows us to transcend out animal nature.  Animals know struggle, but not glory.  Nor, as far as I know, can animals gamble.

That said, then the best sports must be the sports that have the most skillful and powerful athletes.  You could find the most powerful athletes by making them run little races and lift weights, but how would you know who was the most skillful?  A soccer player can’t be expected to compete against a baseball player in baseball, but does that mean baseball players are better athletes than soccer players?  I think, that after a team distinguishes itself as the best, then that team should compete against other elite teams from different games in third neutral sports.

Imagine if after the Dream Team or even the Redeem Team won the basketball gold metal, they just started entering themselves in other Olympic competitions.  Imagine Shaq, Kobe, LeBron, and Melow playing volleyball.  Bill Simmons (in another context) said you could explain the rules of volleyball to the Redeem Team on the way to the game, and they’d clean the volleyballers clocks.  But what if the Brazilian soccer team emerged to play the Redeem Team in volleyball, then that would be a game.  Maybe it’s just my Patriotism showing through, but I’d put my money on the basketball players against the soccer player in volleyball.  When the Redeem team has to change courts they should all just jump over the net a la Andre the Giant entering the ring.

What about an NFL Probowl team against an NBA Allstar team in soccer?  I think back in the day, it goes to the NFL, but now the NBAers win.  Steve Nash and Kobe are supposedly pretty good soccer players.  Baseball players would have cricket, but could also do surprisingly well in things like handball.  What about soccer players against basketball players in American football?  Again, I have to give the edge to the NBA.  If you disagree examine this picture of Dwight Howard.  Soccer would have the edge against the NBA in polo–let’s be honest you could convince most of the NBA that horses have a conical bone coming out of their foreheads.  Soccer players probably would dominate most of the winter Olympic sports, but Kobe and Shaq would make a charming bobsled team.

We could call the trounment  the Transgames, and the cheerleaders could be drawn from the hottest trannies in each country (again, advantage Brazilian soccer team–don’t ask how I know that).

Posted by steve on Dec 14th, 2009 and is filed under Bluefish Canoe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • steve
    I don't know... A lot of people say that you only need to watch the last 2 min of a basketball game, and most games are essentially over at that point. I think there are just as many basketball games that come down to the final second as football games. Football is the only game where teams routinely don't even bother playing the final minutes. In baseball, anything can happen at any time, but it's lengthy and so random that it can be annoying.

    I think basketball could be improved by the addition of a 20 pointer. It would be cool if you could change the entire balance of a game by hitting a shot from some small circle on the other side of the court. That would of course be very gimicky but I like it.
  • Allan
    I'm not sure whether I'm qualified to comment, but I think you missed one of the most important component of what makes a sport good to watch: narrative. The excitement level should go up and down over time, with something going on to keep you occupied, but with the tension occasionally building to a fever pitch.

    Basketball fails totally for this reason. For the first three quarters, every time you see a basket, you think "how exciting! I haven't seen one of those for nearly 20 seconds! I wonder if there'll be another one before I have time to swallow this Dorito I'm chewing!" Then towards the end it becomes a game of stopping the clock, which is just annoying.

    Baseball has better narrative. The tension builds when you get a runner on base, then when you get somebody on 2nd or 3rd, men on several bases, etc. Also scoring is rare enough that each score is a treat. The problem is that baseball is two damn slow. Not an original observation, but highly true.

    Football I think is the perfect sport to watch of the main ones in the US. There's always something happening (time between plays is pretty brief), and a beautiful play could erupt at any moment. But at the same time, multiple rhythms affect the excitement level: what down they're on, what yard the goal is on, what the score is. The multiple ways to score take things up another notch.

    Looking beyond those three, I think soccer is fun to watch, except the only problem is that scores are too low. I think that FIFA should just widen all the goals by three feet or so, so the goalie's job will be tougher, and there will be more scoring.
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