For every ‘real’ sport out there, like football, golf, chess, fishing and base jumping, there have to be hundreds of ‘new’ sports whose competitors are just as serious, but slightly less self-obsessed. With mainstream sport’s current falsehoods growing ever more obvious to its fanatical fan base, a new breed of sport is taking over. Invented sports that have as their premium draw card something that mainstream sport lost years ago — fun.

Ever heard of pooh-stick racing, zorbing or sheep wrangling? How about Toe wrestling? No! Well a cure to your modern sporting blues has been steadily festering away behind the scenes, lurking, and waiting for the right time. Which is right about now.

Dwayne van der Sluis and Andrew Akers wanted to find an entertaining way to walk on water. All out of divine power, they decided to use a large inflatable ball made from see through plastic. A ‘Zorbonaut’ fits into a man sized pocket in the centre of the ‘zorb’ and then bounds away on water or — even better as the originators were to discover — on land. The aim of the sport is to travel down a hill at speed while 360º of the world goes whizzing by as you get hurled about inside a soft air cushioned giant plastic ball.

Name of the game

Recalling a rather uneventful Sunday at my late grandmothers retirement village, I now know what my siblings, parents and I were doing in the little brook that slid through the back of the property. pooh-stick racing. Named after something Winnie the Pooh did, pooh-stick racing is the art of finding a stick — or something else that floats — and dropping it into a stream at the same time and point as your ‘competition’.

Running (depending on how fast your ‘stick’ is) along the river bank shouting encouragement to your ‘stick’, (and then maybe adding to your diatribe the fact that all other racing ‘sticks’ are fat, ugly, can’t float or are just plain old twigs) is probably the most fun you can have with a stick and a few friends. I know this because ‘fatty’, the discarded chocolate milk bottle that was my ‘stick’ on that uneventful Sunday won the race! Woooooo Hooooooooooooooo!

Sheep wrangling doesn’t sound like that much fun — unless you like chasing sheep a lot or maybe you like to stress out or beat up on animals. Toe wrestling on the other hand could conceivably replace football in the next few months as the world’s favourite sport. Depending on your aversion to toe jam, you could be the next toe wrestling world champion. Apparently invented as a sport in which Britain could be successful, toe wrestling hasn’t caught on as it should have as it remains a non-Olympic sport. But brace yourself.

Reinventing fun

With lunacy aside, the common sports enthusiast is turning to alternative ‘sports’ as a way to make outdoor physical activities more of a human thing, as opposed to trying to identify with the machine like performances of the world’s top athletes. What’s more is that this movement has as its basis an honest, relaxed, fun seeking and most importantly non-money driven sentiment that is a testament to the world’s yearning for the buckets of fun that professional sport seems to have forgotten.

A dear friend told me about the new game of pineapple balloon tennis that she got roped into recently. That sounds like a bescreechingly large amount of fun to have, with the added bonus of being able to do it indoors. Apparently the games’ rules developed during a particularly tense match resulting in the provision of alcoholic penalties for every pop! Wait. Hang on. That’s way too much fun to be classed as a sport.

What is your take on new, invented or just plain crazy sports. Do they have a place in our world of steroids, broadcast rights, sponsorship deals and professional athletes?

Mail your new sports invention to Rorz at sports@metropolis.co.za and he will come and take part with vigour.


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