The Olympics have a storied history. The Greeks (and Romans) held them virtually unbroken for a thousand years until they were banned in the fourth century in the interests of Christianity. They came back in the late 1800s and have stuck around until present day, no longer connoting paganism, but now presenting a worldwide competition, complete with advertising, paparazzi, and terrorist attacks (sometimes). We marvel at the figure skaters and gymnasts, we cheer at the runners, swimmers, and skiers. We wince at the inevitable slips and tumbles.

Some of us tune in, though, just to see the stranger sports showcased, such as biathlon (you ski, and then you shoot stuff!), bicycle sprint (you try very hard to go slower than the other person for as long as possible before the finish line, when you speed up and go for the win), and curling (I … uh … truth be told, I have no idea what’s going on in curling). What we strange-sports enthusiasts need is more! More weird stuff, the weirder the better.

“But Jim,” you ask, “where are you going to get weirder sports than those?”

Have no fear, dear reader. There’s gold in them thar hills.

Caber toss

The Scottish “heavy” sport of throwing logs around. From the Gaelic word for “pole,” a caber is a long, wooden beam, 19-and-a-half feet tall (about 4 people), that weighs around 75 pounds. The sport is probably only a few hundred years old, and it’s believed that the first caber tossers practiced their craft in order to construct impromptu bridges during wartime, perhaps as part of sieges or invasions of contested territory near rivers and marshlands. They’d throw a tree trunk so their fellows could scramble across quickly and catch the enemy in an unguarded flank.

The caber is lifted up vertical, so the top of it is directly above the tosser’s head. The tosser lets the caber fall forward, running after it, until it hits a precise angle. Then the bottom of the caber is lifted up. The top (now the new bottom) plants into the ground and the bottom (now the new top) flips up and over, hopefully, landing on the other side. The object is not to get the most distance, but rather to have the straightest possible line. If the caber does not flip entirely over, the tosser loses major points.

Would this sport be a good addition to the Olympics, or a great addition to the Olympics? I, for one, would absolutely tune in to see this in the Summer Games, especially if it were jumbled together with some other sport, like biking or distance running. Run a mile, then toss a caber, run another mile (or more if your toss doesn’t make it over). Great fun!

Pankration

Greek παγκράτιον (pan: “all”; kra-tee-on: “strength”) is essentially the mixed-martial arts of the original Olympic Games. A sort of crossbreed between wrestling and boxing, the only rules were no biting and no eye-gouging. Everything else was fair and square (though excessive overuse of kicking was not considered very manly). The one who tapped out (or passed out, or died) first was the loser.

In one of the games, a man named Arrhichion managed to kick his opponent in the toe, breaking it, while trapped in a chokehold. The other man forfeited from the pain, thus granting victory to A-Dog, but by the time the ref called the match, Arrhichion was dead from the choke. They named him winner, put a crown of laurels on his head, and marched him back home as a champion, though.

Theseus was supposed to have used this fighting style against the minotaur, and Hercules against the lion in his first labor. Indeed, the grappling and choking techniques of pankration were used by the Grecian and Macedonian armies, including the Spartan hoplites. (“This is madness! This is pankration!“)

Should pankration be part of the games? It was an original Olympic sport, after all. But probably not. There’s a reason Ultimate Fighting Championship-style, “anything goes” combat tournaments are not shown on daytime television. People get hurt. People die. Granted, there have been seven athlete deaths during modern Olympic games, from 1912 through 2010 (mostly in practice), and hundreds of injuries, but we don’t go seeking them out, either.

Pankration is more of a blood sport than fits well into a competition designed to bring people and cultures together. When Pierre de Coubertin sought to revive the Olympic Games in 1896, the archbishop of Lyon told him, “We accept all, except pankration.” Yeah, but what about chariot racing?

Mesoamerican ball game

It has a more fun name than that. The Mayans called it Pok-Ta-Pok. Probably onomatopoeia. The ball game was serious business! Even more so than football! It was deeply entrenched in the religious rituals and myths of the Mesoamerican people. Games were sometimes held to represent historic battles, where one team were the “losers,” so they would lose the game, then be sacrificed to the gods.

The Mayan hero twins, Hunahpu (“Who?” “Nah, Pooh”) and Xbalanque (“Chi ball on, ‘kay?”), played against One and Seven Death. (Mayans named their kids after the day they were born, and Death was not a great day to be born on.) Mssrs. Death were the rulers of Xibalba, which is sort of like Hell, a little. It’s where the dead go. After overcoming seven trials, the heroes won the ball game! Then got thrown into a fire. Then they came back and disguised themselves as magicians for a while, until One and Seven Death invited the twins to perform, and the Xibalbans were like “Ooh! Ooh! Saw me in half now!” so Hunahpu and Xbalanque did. Anyway, the ball game was super important.

While some of the aspects of the original game are lost, we still know a lot about it. The ball was solid rubber, heavy and tough, about a foot in diameter. Players bopped the ball back and forth with their hips, and wore thick leather girdles to prevent bones breaking and such. If a ball hit you in the head, hard and fast, you could very easily die. You scored points by knocking the ball into the other team’s wall. Eventually, they started putting vertical hoops about six meters (20ish feet) up the wall on either side of the court, barely large enough to fit the ball into — think Quidditch. If you got the ball through one, you won the game, though trying for it and missing cost you points.

Should the ball game make an Olympic comeback? Heck yeah! With ergonomic and safe equipment, athletes could be throwing their hips around like Elvis impersonators at a bar mitzvah in no time. I mean, cut the bit about human sacrifice, anyway, and it’s all gravy.

What do you all think? Are weird sports your tea and biscuits? Any others I haven’t mentioned? Let us know!

Ah, American football. The roar of the crowds. The crunching of bones. The instinctual dopamine rush of identifying with an in-group against a common “enemy.” The blinding splatter of advertisements on everything in sight. Oh, and there’s also the skill and athleticism of professional sportsmen on display, which I guess is appealing.

It’s no wonder that you can’t spit without hitting a football fan in this country and that nothing else on television can compete in the ratings. But we didn’t always have football. The National Football League has only been around since 1920. And in fact, if you pay careful attention to the weird letters that come after the word “Super Bowl,” you’ll notice there have only been 48 of them so far. This isn’t news for the elders among us, but come along with me and let’s explore where this crazy game came from.

First, let’s go to China. What? I’m serious. It’s likely that the ancient Greeks and Romans played games involving the kicking around of balls as well, but there are actual records of rules (well, instructions anyway) in a Chinese military manual from around the second century BC. The Chinese called the “game” cuju, Chinese for “kick ball,” and it consisted of kicking leather balls through silk hoops placed 9 meters off the ground.

Cuju may not have a national tournament these days, but the Japanese offshoot, called kemari (means the same thing, “kick ball”) still gets played today at Shinto festivals. Kemari is a cooperative sport that looks more like Hacky Sack than anything, where you kick the ball around a circle of players, trying to keep it in the air without using your hands.

Different ball games were played all across the world, from Mesoamerica (we’ll get to the Mayans next week) to Greenland to Australia, but our version’s most distant traceable ancestor comes from England in the ninth century. Back then, whole villages would compete with each other, throwing around balls made of inflated animal bladders, including pig’s bladders (hence the phrase “pigskin”), trying to get them to some landmark or other, like a church or a well. No limits to the number of people playing, and you could use hands, feet, sticks, whatever to get the ball around. They usually played during festivals.

(Some towns still do play on Mardi Gras, called Shrove Tuesday across the pond. The County of Derbyshire holds such matches).

Because every now and again somebody got knifed in the back, say, or perhaps on account of the drunken and disorderly conduct surrounding these outings, several attempts were made to outlaw the sport of football in its early years, though these efforts never seemed to stick. Typically, the penalty for breaking the law would be a fine. I expect if someone tried to ban football today, the NFL could afford to continue playing while paying the fine each week. Heck, that would be a great new source of government revenue! (Note: The author of this article does not advocate or endorse the banning of football in this country, mostly because he does not want to be stabbed with a knife.)

Fast-forward to a school in the town of Rugby (“Rook Fort,” whether referring to the bird or a man’s name) in Warwickshire, England, in 1823. By this time, the game of football had evolved into something a little more organized, with loosely defined rules and a set number of players on the field at a time. Inflated pig bladders were still used, though. The game resembled soccer (itself abbreviated from “association football“), with each side trying to kick the ball into the opponents’ goal. At the Rugby School, a boy named William Webb Ellis was alleged to have received a kick, catching it. The normal response would have been to back up into controlled territory, drop the ball, and try to kick it further downfield. Instead, Ellis said (to himself, I’m sure — and I’m guessing here), “F- this,” and ran forward, ball in hand, thus inventing the game of rugby.

If you’ve ever seen the game of rugby played, it is frantic and violent. I mean, so is American football. But in rugby, each play starts out with the ball in neither team’s control as the opposing teams huddle around it. When the whistle blows, they try to hook the ball with their legs to get possession, and end up creating a terrible mess of potential injury in the process. They call this a “scrum,” short for “scrummage,” which is a form of the word “skirmish,” a military term, which itself derives from an old French word meaning “defend.” More military analogues! Yay!

In the late 19th century, rugby came to North America. For the most part, colleges would compete with each other using eclectic rules that changed from game to game. A coach named Walter Camp was the one who came up with the idea of a line of scrimmage and one team having possession of the ball at the start of plays, along with the need to advance 10 yards within four downs.

Between the start of these new rules and the year 1905, some 300 odd college kids died at football, prompting President Teddy Roosevelt to authorize the agency which would become the NCAA to take charge of streamlining the rules and making play safer. They made forward passing legal, which ultimately changed the game into what we now know as American football.

So what about the Super Bowl? When the American Football League came into the picture in 1960, in direct competition with the NFL, both leagues knew they couldn’t coexist independently. They drained away too much of each other’s audience. So they decided to merge together, and after the 1966 season, they held a grand tournament. But what to call it? The officially designated name, “AFL-NFL World Championship Game,” lacked a certain … kick?

Well, the biggest after-season college football game in those days was held at the Pasadena Rose Bowl Stadium (named after the bowl shape of its stands, which itself took cue from the Yale Bowl stadium), and the name of the game officially became the “Rose Bowl Game” after about 1923. Eventually, all postseason college games became known as bowls. The principal founder of the AFL and coach of its champion Kansas City Chiefs, Lamar Hunt, said he jokingly referred to the game as a “Super Bowl,” because his kids were playing with the bouncy balls called super balls. You know the ones.

So there you have it. The most-watched sporting event in the United States, with all its humble origins. I, for one, think it would have been more fun if everyone from Denver had lined up against everyone from Seattle, trying to get a football to the Seattle Space Needle, last weekend, but maybe that’s just me.