Posted by Os Davis in 21st century sports, baseball, Battlestar Galactica, cricket, Doctor Who, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | 1 Comment
The top 10 science-fiction sports of all-time
All right, so BuckBokai tries to come off the disabled list today – yes, it seemed like a career-ending injury for a while there, thanks to Father Time (who, as Charles Barkley once so philosophically stated, is undefeated). But fingers crossed that this time BuckBokai once again plays at his steady level.
So to (re)start things off, let’s get back to the basics with a look at the Top 10 Science-Fiction Sports ever devised.
10. Brockian Ultra-Cricket, Life, the Universe and Everything. Thanks to this writer serving as editor on the newly-launched Live Cricket Direct, BuckBokai has earned a great appreciation and fondness for the oh-so-British game. How awesome, then, is Brockian Ultra-Cricket? Well, commissioner Douglas Adams published a list within the third book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and boils this galaxy-spanning obsession down to just six rules – an incredible improvement over even the marvelous simplicity of the first soccer rulebook and much simpler than terrestrial cricket.
Incidentally, this entry might have been even higher had Adams’ plans for a Doctor Who script on the sport actually seen the screen…
9. Kosho, “The Prisoner”. Those in-the-know recall how awesome the Kafkaesque, genre-bending series The Prisoner was – and how fly-by-the-seat-of-pants its sets and stages often look. BuckBokai can easily imagine Patrick McGoohan crafting this bizarre martial-arts riff for the episode “It’s Your Funeral”: “Let’s see, what have we got? Trampolines are great and these big sticks. Might be problems with insurance … ah, screw the insurance. We’ll wear helmets…”
8. Rollerball, “A Rollerball Murder”, two Rollerball films. Does anyone else realize that this bitchin’ sport based on the 1970s fad is just six years away? With roller derby now reportedly the fastest-growing sport in America and big-name sponsorships of professional clubs slowly becoming reality, we may yet see this sweet bloodsport-with-motorcycles yet come into existence.
7. Thunderdome, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. BuckBokai doesn’t know if the Aussies (and Tina Tuner) of the apocalyptic future actually call the event “Thunderdome,” but it is the arena, a nice dystopic take on Roman bloodsports. And using sports to settle questions of judgment? Lemme tell ya, BuckBokai would love to see more mundane court cases determined with a home-run derby or frolf.
6. Baseketball, Baseketball. Though not exactly science-fiction, BuckBokai’s putting this one into the “alternate universe” category to include it in the list. Like the best sci-fi and satire, Baseketball delivers comment on the present day within the trappings of a mythological world – one that doesn’t seem so far from the reality of professional sports: “The games themselves became subordinate to the quest for money. Stadiums and arenas became nothing more than giant billboards for commercial products. Players sold their services to the highest bidder,” etc.
Plus, has there ever been a better team name than the Milwaukee Bears?
Plus, there’s the following dialogue from Bob Costas and Al Michaels.
Costas: You know, it’s hard to believe that five years ago, this was just a sport being played in
backyards.
Michaels (watching the cheerleaders): It’s hard to believe that five years ago, some of these girls
were in grade school…
Plus, Parker and Stone are geniuses.
5. German Batball, The Sirens of Titan. In his Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut was eerily prescient on the evolution of American football in the future – although in 1952, the college game was much more popular and thus Vonnegut’s vision was centered therein. Seven years later, the master expanded scope further to take on boring old baseball in Sirens.
It sounds pretty cool, too, especially on Mars. From Wikibin:
“German Batball is a fictional sport from the Kurt Vonnegut novel The Sirens of Titan. It is the favorite game of Winston Niles Rumfoord…
“The rules of the game are very similar to that of baseball. Like baseball, there are two teams, one of which must hit a ball and run bases to accumulate points. However, in German batball, the ball is played with a ‘flabby ball the size of a big honeydew melon. The ball is no more lively than a ten-gallon hat filled with rain water.’ Also, unlike baseball, there are only three bases, instead of four. In German batball, the offensive player is not pitched to, but he places the ball on one fist, and strikes the ball with his other fist. After the ball is struck, the offensive players attempt to round the bases. The defensive players attempt to peg the runner with the ball in between the bases.
“German batball is the only sport played on Vonnegut’s version of a human-colonized Mars. This is because Winston Niles Rumfoord, an avid fan of the game, set up this colony on Mars, and established all of its rules. He is quoted as saying ‘I am at a loss to understand why German batball is not an event, possibly a key event, in the Olympic Games.’ In Martian schools, students spend the vast majority of the time playing German batball, instead of studying. Chrono, the son of Malachi Constant, the main character of The Sirens of Titan, is the best German batball player on Mars…”
4. Pyramid/Triad, “Battlestar Galactica”
Far be it for BuckBokai to compliment anything from the first goofy, later execrable “Battlestar Galactica” series – not to mention giving props to anything resembling handball, the worst ball sport ever invented – but you gotta love a fast-looking, truly-futuristic looking sport that fans actually made reality. Unfortunately, the Colonial Triad League may have gone defunct after 2011…
3. Blernsball, “A Leela of Her Own,” Futurama
Baseball 2.0 with mandatory steroids? Cool!
2. Quidditch, the Harry Potter series.
Has there ever been a fictional sport with a volume of its fictional history
And naturally, with the insane popularity of the series, the “muggles” of our Earth have organized leagues and even a Quidditch World Cup. Though BuckBokai’s gotta say that without the flying bails and broomsticks, well, there’s something to be desired…
1. “The Game”, Blood of Heroes
So. Basically all major non-American ball sports enjoyed today are the product of organization and/or invention by bored royalty-types in Britain and France in the 19th century and earlier: Cricket, rugby, tennis, soccer, hockey, golf … the list goes on. When America rose to international prominence in the 20th century, its games – baseball, basketball, volleyball – spread like Britain’s.
Other cultures have invented sport that captured the imagination of thousands to millions: Greece’s contests of the Olympiad, Turkey’s oil-wrestling, Rome’s arena-based bloodsports, the ball games of Mesoamerica. And, like the European/American examples above are simply a product of leisure classes.
So now that organized sport is entrenched in the lives of the majority of the world’s population – blue-collars, freed slaves (in the case of early cricket in the West Indies), gobs of free time or no – what happens when the organization degenerates? And when manufacturing is dead enough not to be producing billions of rubber balls and equipment? It’s not as though history is culturally forgotten, after all.
That’s the premise of Blood of Heroes, a film set in the time after some Earth-shattering apocalyptic event(s) unspecified in the reels. (Though BuckBokai figures it’s probably the same one that befell Mad Max’s world; after all, this one’s in sports-mad Australia as well.)
“The Game” itself is a lot like a minimalist version of rugby, except only one player – the “quick” – apparently has the right to progress the ball forward. The protagonists, led by the immortal Rutger Hauer, are barnstorming “juggers” working the country for provisions as they whup the local side’s asses in The Game. A straightup professional league of juggers is run by the society’s elite and, as in decadent sports both real-life (cf. Rome) and fictional (cf. Rollerball), the game is deadly. As for the ball, who needs one when a dog skull will do? And who said it ever had to be a ball, anyway, especially if there’s no passing…
Honorable mentions also go to Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game in Magister Ludi and The Game of Piers Anthony’s “Apprentice Adept” novel series. The latter was not included because essentially the competition is comprised of all other existent sports and games, with no original creations included. As for the Glass Bead Game, perhaps a third rereading will finally make clear just what the hell this contest *is* exactly and BuckBokai’ll adapt this list accordingly…
Also, Calvinball, the ultimate anarchist’s game!
