Wide world of weird sports

I have always considered myself to be an athlete, an eager but not that dedicated or talented athlete that played all the usual sports. Hockey and baseball were my favorites; I was an average weekend warrior but I was always on the lookout for a new or unusual sport to be average at.

As a young man in my early twenties, I read a newspaper article about this new sport, Frisbee or disc golf. I discovered that, with some imagination, trees or fence posts and some DayGlo surveyor's tape, a very good-looking average athlete could design his own disc golf course. Simply tape off about two feet of target on trees or posts and throw a Frisbee from about 100 yards, count your score, and have a beer. What a great sport! But there are other wacky ways to get your sport on.

Most of us can swim and most of us swimmers can snorkel…in water, but in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales they invented the sport of bog snorkeling. This sport requires the athlete to snorkel 60 feet through a muddy water filled channel cut in a peat bog…twice. The current “world” record is a time of 1 minute 18 seconds. The catch is that the athlete must wear flippers and a snorkel but cannot use conventional swim strokes. Now if this sport sounds like it was conceived in the local Llanwrtyd pub over a few beers, it was. Sometimes all it takes for greatness is great inspiration.

 

If snorkeling is your thing but you would rather avoid the bogs, how about underwater hockey? Basically, there are the same rules as hockey only with different equipment consisting of a mask, fins, snorkel, gloves, and helmet. Teams of six must use a 12-inch-long hockey stick to push the puck along the pool bottom.

The secret to success in this sport is true team work. An average player can stay underwater for about 20 seconds before returning to the surface to breathe, so it is a case of timing with your teammates to avoid surfacing for air all at the same time. I am not sure where the penalty box is, but I would hope it is not underwater.

When I quit smoking tobacco a few years ago, my lung power returned, and I heard about a sport that only requires lung power for success. Every April, the University of Purdue in Lafayette, Indiana hosts its annual cricket spitting tournament. Even though it sounds like the sport was imagined over a few beers — it was — it does take skill to spit crickets. This is not a quantity contest, but rather a distance contest.  

The aerodynamics of crickets are not conducive to flying great distances, so when the world record holder spit his cricket 32 feet it was a big deal. The rules state that a dead cricket must be spat (spitted?) and land intact with wings, legs, antennae and its head to be considered a fair spit. There are thousands of university students who enter each year. I am sure that beer consumption is an important part of the tournament including the conception, training, competing and, of course, the celebrating…the fact that they had a dead cricket in their mouth and did not spit it out until the ref said to.

All of our mothers have said, “Fun is only fun until you lose an eye. Then it becomes sport” … or maybe it was our naughty uncles? I am sure it was meant as a warning, but maybe it was meant to be inspiration for a great new sport…with some help from a few beers.

Cheers!