The Milan News-Leader
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Sports I'd like to see
Jerry Hinnen
PUBLISHED: January 17, 2008
It stunned me when I first took this job and, frankly, it still kind of stuns me: school districts here offer high school water polo.
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It probably doesn't seem so farfetched to those who've been around long enough to have seen water polo played for a number of years now in Saline (and even longer a little ways up the road in Ann Arbor). Consider, though, that before arriving here all yours truly knew of water polo was late-night Olympic broadcasts and the dim recognition that the U.S. team was made up exclusively of exceedingly buff individuals who went to Cal or Stanford.
As a sport, it seemed as alien as cricket, as likely a candidate for high school competition (outside Berkeley or Palo Alto, anyway) as the luge.
This is in no way to say I hadn't enjoyed the water polo I'd seen; frankly, I haven't yet found a legitimate sport (i.e. not poker, whatever ESPN might tell us) I haven't enjoyed when the stakes are high enough. If asked, I would have said "Sure, high school water polo? Sounds great! Where do I sign?"
So when I started thinking about 2008 as a sports year, and specifically the Beijing Olympics this August, I thought about some of those other obscure sports out there that might make for exciting high school competition. Well, maybe just exciting for sports nuts like myself who plan on watching every possible second of said Olympics and the hypothetical parents of the hypothetical athletes involved.
But here's a list of four of them, anyway, with the full understanding that all four are total pipe dreams for the time being (Trust me, I'm not holding my breath):
Badminton - If you've never seen it outside of your neighbor's kids messing around with their backyard setup, you're missing out. It's the love child of tennis and volleyball — complete with drop shots, spikes, lobs, etc. — with rallies to match either one when played by serious competitors.
Short-track speed skating — Like everyone else, I've followed the exploits of Apolo Anton Ohno the last couple of Winter Olympics. Unlike a lot of media types who've gotten in a huff over the Ohno hype, though, I still get a huge kick out of the sport even when Ohno's not involved. It's the NASCAR of ice sports, full of daring strategic maneuverings, breakneck speed and the constant possibility of a gasp-inducing pileup. (Actually, given that short-track's blink-and-you-miss-it race lengths suit my attention span far better than NASCAR's five-hour marathons. I sort of prefer short-track. Forgive me, race fans.)
Ultimate Frisbee —When the weekly ultimate game my church youth group hosted when I was in high school began drawing dozens of bored teens every Sunday afternoon, I thought the populist appeal and simplified approach of the sport would have it blowing up into NCAA-sanctioned competition and (relatively) high-profile professional leagues in another 15 years.
That hasn't happened — it's still pretty much consigned to pick-up games in the park and college intramural battles — and I'm not sure why. I'd still pay to see any sport that much fun to play played by A-caliber athletes with complex coaching strategies and high-level stakes. Oh well.
Roller derby — Just kidding.
Sprint track cycling —The best of all the pipe dreams on this list, the sprint events in track cycling are some of the weirdest-looking in any sport: slanted wooden track, bikes from the year 3000, helmets that look like they should be worn by the extras from "Flash Gordon." The name for an arena they compete in is the "velodrome," for crying out loud.
But watching two cyclists duck and weave for position over two laps before flying around the velodrome at seriously unsafe speeds for the third (as they do in Olympic sprint) is quite a rush on television; live, I bet it's even better. (So, when's Detroit hosting the Summer games?)
Curling — It's true: I'm an Alabamian who's kind of obsessed with curling. I've stayed up late into the night to watch it during the Olympics. I've looked up all the terms on Wikipedia. I've read up on strategy elsewhere on the Internet. No joke, I spent two-and-a-half hours a few weekends back drowsily checking out some Canadian championship tournament on CBC. I loved every second of it.
Why? I have no idea. Unlike the other things on this list, I wouldn't call curling "exciting," exactly. It's paced like chess, requires just as much athletic ability and is twice as confusing.
But it works for me. If chess required the dexterity of skillful curlers, if we could see and hear the wheels turning the way we see and hear those of curlers turn, if it was played with giant rocks with handles on a sheet of ice, well, chess would be on this list. Curling does these things, and here it is.
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