4 Serious Sports (That Sound Like They Were Invented As A Joke)

4Slamball

If you or the other kids in your neighborhood growing up had access to both a trampoline and a basketball goal, there’s a solid chance you created your own first draft of what eventually became Slamball. But in 1999, a man named Mason Gordon, who was a writer for the Nickelodeon shows Kenan & Kel and Cousin Skeeter, pitched the idea of “basketball on trampolines” to his producer, and soon found himself with something all of those neighborhood kids lacked: financing.

After figuring out game rules and the custom equipment in an East L.A. warehouse for six months, Slamball was ready. In a nutshell, the sport is full-court 3-on-3 basketball with four trampolines around each net. It’s much more fast-paced than your standard pro basketball game, with four five-minute quarters, a ten-minute halftime, and only one time-out per team. 

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There’s also much more leeway in the rules regarding personal fouls because that’s just how physics works when trampolines are involved. Sure, the game had to sacrifice some of the fundamentals of traditional basketball, but it more than makes up for it with the increased chance of a player shattering their ankles like a sleeve of crackers or accidentally double-bouncing another player into the lower stratosphere. Slamball is essentially some lighter fluid and a match away from being the closest thing we’ll ever have to a live-action NBA Jam arcade game.

Slamball made its television debut in 2002 on The National Network (later Spike TV, now Paramount Network), and lasted for two seasons before Mason Gordon had a falling out with network execs. The league was dissolved, but the sport returned to TV with the POWERADE SlamBall Challenge event at the 2007 NCAA Final Four on CSTV (Now CBS Sports Network). In 2008, Slamball held its first real season of games in five years and was aired as a “Game of the Week” on the Versus network (later NBCSN). It doesn’t speak well for Slamball’s ratings since every network that’s covered it has had to rebrand soon afterward.

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While the sport’s popularity in the U.S. is stuck in limbo, Slamball has become increasingly popular in China. Slamball has local college teams, and the Shanghai University of Sport has a full program already in place. Who knows? As Slamball’s popularity increases in Asia, hopefully it’ll pick up in the U.S. as well, because America’s diplomatic relations with some of those nations are fraught enough without knowing that they’re developing rock solid core muscles and calves of steel from playing Slamball all the time.

3Lightsaber Fencing

Perhaps no prop in the history of film has captured children’s imaginations quite like the lightsaber. It was so simple. Anything long and narrow could be a lightsaber if you believed hard enough: a branch, a broomstick, a poster tube, a fluorescent bulb (for about three seconds before Mom had to take you to urgent care), etc. If you grew up in the era of the original Star Wars trilogy as I did, you no doubt remember the unbridled joy of finally getting your hands on one of the officially licensed lightsaber toys … followed almost immediately by the heartbreak of putting a permanent kink in that cheap plastic piece of crap the first time you hit something with it. 

Walt Disney Pictures

Shoddy Neimoidian garbage. 

4 Serious Sports (That Sound Like They Were Invented As A Joke)
Source: Pinoy Daily News