It's Time for Sports to Stop Making Sense

We have told ourselves for the longest time that engaging in sports instills just the qualities we want to see in our young people.

On the playing fields and in the various arenas, team is pitted against team, individual against individual, coach against coach, and in the process of competition the best characteristics – teamwork, endurance, personal achievement – are brought forth and celebrated.

It’s probably time for all this to stop.

These are different times. The pace of change is accelerating in the economy, and the qualities that were once valued now only hold the individual back.

The young man who feels that if he just moves the ball forward in a straightish manner and gets it over some goal line or other then he has done just about as much as anyone can expect, is a creature of yesterday.

These days, these days right here, my friend, are a time of disruptive technologies, global competition, the upheaval of entire industries. Sports are too straightforward for the complexity of the era we find ourselves in. If the rules of the economic world change, why not the rules of the games we play?

Take the matter of balls. It has been the custom for the longest time that in baseball a baseball is used, in football a football, and so on.

Adhering to such hidebound rules puts the country dangerously behind its competitors in the global economy.

The player on the football field who suddenly has a soccer ball, tennis ball, or even badminton birdie thrust into his hands on third and long, and finds a way to make the best of the situation, will grow to be a person agile enough for the New Economy.

By the same token the tennis player handed a basketball in the middle of a match is challenged to bring her best game forward, even if it is impossible to know exactly what that game is.

Things change rapidly over here in the New Economy, and the participant does well to keep himself on his toes.

Referees, umpires, and line judges? Other leftovers of the Old Economy. They’re yesterday’s news, pal.

It is easy to foresee a time when the two teams on the football field break out of the huddle only to find that the referees have taken over the ball and are running their own plays. 

This sharpens the mind and encourages coaches to plan for a variety of circumstances.

We have concerned ourselves mainly here with the actions of the players, but of course the actual rules of play may have to undergo some changes to keep up with the times.

Where is it written that each team needs to have the same number of players?

Well, come to think of it, it’s likely that this is written all over the place.

But don’t you see? These are exactly the kind of unquestioned rules left over from bygone eras that have gone unexamined for too long.

When your team of five is staring down the opponent’s team of eleven or twenty-two, it is amazing how the attraction of the running game starts to pale and the passing game grows in importance.

The fields of play themselves, these traditions are perhaps the most hidebound of all.

The world has had the technology to build tar pits, trap doors, and secret catapults for decades but you will travel far and wide before you see them incorporated into team sports at either the professional or collegiate level.

It makes you despair of the inventive resources of this country if even these simple innovations have been completely overlooked.

The application of the principals of pinball and miniature golf science would seem to be a natural for enhancing many, many of our sports, from the brisk boinging action that would result when players bounced against certain posts on the field, and the near insane accumulation of points gained through doing who knows what, to the presence of turning windmills, crazily sloping surfaces, and seemingly impossible bank shots standing between you and the goal line.

Elements from other fields of endeavor entirely such as physics and circus technology could find ready application. What school wouldn't be proud to wheel out one of those propulsive cannon devices that shoot human cannonballs far into the air on a fourth and long situation?

This, with a football in your hand, becomes a mix of a running and a passing play, and can easily deposit the running back into the end zone.

You see that kind of innovation that results when we make an even modest relaxation of the rules of play.

It comes to me now that we used to play baseball with lit firecrackers being thrown towards home plate. Isn’t it time to put childish ways behind us and graduate up to actual sticks of dynamite?

While the ski jump competition is daunting enough, even it can be improved to enhance the television viewing experience by placing the athletes in kayaks instead of skis, thereby replicating the motions of going over Niagara Falls in a canoe, surely something to be just as celebrated as a mere ski jump.

We’re on to something here.

As they stand now, sports are simply too straightforward. It is time they reflect the chaotic times that they take place in. They need to be made more confusing, more nonsensical, more arbitrary. They need, in short, to be made weirder.

All except curling. Here is a sport that is perfectly weird enough as is.