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Eye of Newt and toe of frog

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    Eye of Newt and toe of frog

    As flagged on the WTF thread, I am intrigued by the recent trend for inventing new sports simply by combining elements of existing ones (see witches brew reference in the title). It's a fairly long list - one of the biggest at the moment appears to be Paddleball, which is mostly (Lawn) Tennis but played on a walled court rather like Squash or more like Real Tennis as there is a net halfway up, with bounces off the sides and back walls part of the game, as in those events but not Lawn Tennis. It also uses solid bats with air holes in them rather than a strung racquet. It seems to be making serious inroads into the sporting market.

    Pickleball is also highly successful as a participation sport, but I'm not sure how much of a professional tour exists for it. This is mostly Tennis, with a strong similarity to short Tennis played by Juniors, though the court layout is pretty well a Badminton court for the lines.

    As mentioned on the WTF thread there is also Teqball. Which is a really mash-up. In fact it is a mash-up of a mash-up as a combined Football and Volleyball sport, called Footvolley already existed. Teqball is Footvolley played on a Table Tennis-alike table but one that curves downwards on both sides (presumably a standard Table Tennis table would make the bounce too high, with too much time to successfully defend shots).

    Some other older ones are;
    Ultimate: once known as Ultimate Frisbee, which takes some of the gameplay of American Football - touchdowns in end zones as the scoring - but does it with a Frisbee (sorry Flying Disc) and is non-contact like basketball.
    Octopush: ice hockey played with the hands on the floor of a (full!) swimming pool
    Footgolf: Golf holes played by kicking Footballs instead of clubs and a little hard ball
    Chessboxing: Sort of a poor example of this category as despite being a combination sport the chess and boxing elements are sequential rather than combined. Possibly the most famous of the mash-up sports though


    But what is this thread for? Well, why? What is motivating people to invent these sports? As mentioned, there seems to be a growing trend for them.

    I guess the thread can serve as a catch-all for discussing any events in a brand new conjured up sport.

    #2
    Does the unicycle hockey that I once saw people playing at the sports center under the Westway count as one of these?

    I have played pickleball as mentioned on the WTF thread, and enjoyed it. I don’t know how much money there is in pro-pickleball but I have seen on the listings that it does get broadcast. Which feels pretty weird because it seems to be designed to be tennis for old people who used to play tennis but their knees can’t handle much running and turning. Certainly in the US, it’s the sport of retirement communities not professional athletes.

    I have also played footgolf. It is theoretically fun. But I am catastrophically shit at it.

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      #3
      Disc Golf and Roller Hockey are other examples.

      It so happens that both Paddle Tennis and Roller Hockey have been popular in Iberia for decades.

      Traditionally, the motivations tended to be either equipment manufacturers looking to expand the market for their products (the flying disc sports are a good example) or players/promotors trying to adapt to conditions that were in someway inhospitable to traditional forms (e.g., paddle tennis, roller hockey or five a side football pitches).

      More recently, people are seeing this as a potential moneymaking opportunity, perhaps best illustrated by the promotion of pickleball (originally a social form of tennis more suited to seniors' more limited mobility) as a professional sport broadcast on the likes of ESPN.
      Last edited by ursus arctos; 28-11-2022, 13:55.

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        #4
        The UCI (international cycling federation) also deserves mention here for having held "World Championships" (complete with rainbow jerseys) in "Artistic Cycling" and "Cycle Ball" for decades.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCI_In..._Championships

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          #5
          Anyone for gonnis?
           

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            #6
            Originally posted by San Bernardhinault View Post
            Does the unicycle hockey that I once saw people playing at the sports center under the Westway count as one of these?
            Hell yeah. That might run Teqball close as the most bizarre new sport.

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              #7
              Octopush sounds a lot like underwater hockey. But in underwater hockey, players push the puck along the bottom of the pool with a little stick thing. It sounds exhausting and not really like much fun.

              As we've discussed...

              There are several versions of hockey designed to mimic ice hockey to some extent but without the ice. Outside of North America, "roller hockey" seems to usually refer to the version played on quad skates, but in North America, the preferred version is played on in-line skates and that is often called roller hockey or in-line hockey Same idea. It's great for casual/street games when there isn't ice to be had and there is a bit of a serious in-line hockey scene (IIRC, Pat Maroon of the Lightning played on a US team that won a world championship), but it didn't really boom like it's proponents hoped it would after a brief ESPN2-led effort in the late 90s. The problem is that to play it properly requires a purpose-built facility and although there are a bunch of those around and they are cheaper to build than ice rinks, there are still probably actually more ice rinks available - at least in the places where hockey is popular.

              There are also a variety of versions played by just running instead of any kind of skating, with a ball instead of a puck - alternatively known as ball hockey, deck hockey, floor hockey, etc. There are "official" ball hockey rules and it is becoming a "real sport" but mostly the rules are modified to suit the circumstances.

              Floorball is very similar to what we'd call ball hockey, but perhaps in Europe, some may see it more as an indoor version of field hockey rather than a version of ice hockey or rink bandy. Although indoor field hockey is also a separate thing. Field hockey - known in the UK as just hockey - is still fairly niche in North America and almost only played by women due to assorted historical factors.


              There are, of course, a variety of sports designed for people who cannot run or skate on two legs. Sled hockey (sleigh hockey?) is extremely entertaining, except for the fact that the US is so completely dominant, even over Canada. I suspect that's largely because we've got so many young athletic men who suffered severe injuries in our endless overseas military misadventures.

              There's wheelchair basketball, sitting volleyball, wheelchair rugby and, I recently saw, wheelchair lacrosse, which is very challenging because the players have to use their hands to move and to hold the stick.

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                #8
                I feel I should defend Ultimate a bit. It's a sport that is played on an American Football pitch and uses the endzones, but doesn't really have anything else in common.

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                  #9
                  Originally posted by Gregario View Post
                  I feel I should defend Ultimate a bit. It's a sport that is played on an American Football pitch and uses the endzones, but doesn't really have anything else in common.
                  It doesn't now, but it was originally often called "frisbee football" and indeed, the first time I was introduced to the game by an older kid in our neighborhood, that's what he called it.
                  https://thesportjournal.org/article/...imate-frisbee/

                  There are a lot of sports that are connected on the evolutionary tree, so to speak, but aren't all that similar now.

                  Baseball superficially looks like rounders and, to a lesser extent, cricket, but it's very different from either of those.

                  Another obvious example would be American football and association football (i.e. football or soccer). Legend has it that the first college football game was Rutgers-Princeton in 1869, but that could just as easily be regarded as the first college soccer game or the first college rugby game, as the version played in that contest involved a lot more kicking (both of the ball and opponents, I think) than what we'd recognize as American football now.

                  In Britain and the former colonies, there were a bunch of different versions of "football" and they all evolved separately. American and Canadian football were once similar to rugby, but over the last 120 years or so, both American and Canadian football diverged from rugby and are now much more similar to each other than to any anything else called football. But the evolution happened slowly enough that nobody thought to change the name.

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                    #10
                    There is no blocking, tackling, running with the disc or system of "downs", but one scores by receiving the disc in the "end zone".

                    As a result, I think it "looks" more like gridiron than any other sport to the uninitiated.

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                      #11
                      Oh that's very interesting.

                      I think in the UK when I played it at uni we were all familiar with sports with endzones or similar and the lack of movement while holding the disc was strongly redolent of netball (even if half the people had never played netball everyone was familiar with it).

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                        #12
                        I like the idea of calling it Frisbee football. Not only are feet not used but there isn't even a ball.

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                          There is no blocking, tackling, running with the disc or system of "downs", but one scores by receiving the disc in the "end zone".

                          As a result, I think it "looks" more like gridiron than any other sport to the uninitiated.
                          Other than the lack of downs, it does resemble the version of touch/flag football that most of us played as kids in that it's all about passing and defending against passing.


                          And don't forget flickerball, the game that was designed to not be fun. I'm told this is actually played voluntarily as an IM sport at some liberal arts colleges, but the only place I've ever seen those goals is at West Point.
                          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmW_ztZsheE

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                            #14
                            Originally posted by Gregario View Post
                            Oh that's very interesting.

                            I think in the UK when I played it at uni we were all familiar with sports with endzones or similar and the lack of movement while holding the disc was strongly redolent of netball (even if half the people had never played netball everyone was familiar with it).
                            As I've mentioned before, netball looks to me like basketball with all of the exciting fun parts removed.

                            And yet, I'm told it's popular in a lot of places.

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                              #15
                              Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                              Octopush sounds a lot like underwater hockey. But in underwater hockey, players push the puck along the bottom of the pool with a little stick thing. It sounds exhausting and not really like much fun.
                              Exactly the same in fact - alternative names for the same thing.

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post

                                As I've mentioned before, netball looks to me like basketball with all of the exciting fun parts removed.

                                And yet, I'm told it's popular in a lot of places.
                                Australia, mostly.

                                The similarity isn't accidental. It was Basketball copied and adapted for girls in the 1920ish when girls doing things like moving or sweating was considered outre and beyond them. Not that there was much moving and sweating going on in Basketball in that period, as I recall. That was roughly the era of games where the winning side got 20-odd points.

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                                  #17
                                  It was Basketball copied and adapted for girls in the 1920ish when girls doing things like moving or sweating was considered outre and beyond them.
                                  I was going to suggest that it looks like a game invented for girls at a time when men widely believed women shouldn't do sports because their ovaries might fall out. But I was reluctant to say that in case that was totally wrong and, possibly, offensive.

                                  I'm not a big basketball fan now, but I don't understand how anyone was interested in watching it when there was no shot clock. The three-point shot is also a huge improvement, not so much because it rewards long shots, but because it spreads out the defense and opens everything up for more movement and tactics other than just get it to the big man down low.

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                                    #18
                                    Similar "concerns" led to adoption of the Midwestern US version of the women's game with teams of six and three players on each being required to stay in their half of the court at all times.

                                    That was still incredibly popular in Iowa into the 70s.

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                                      #19
                                      As someone who watched college basketball before the adoption of the shot clock, I can definitely confirm that it at times severely tested one's patience

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                                        #20
                                        Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
                                        I like the idea of calling it Frisbee football. Not only are feet not used but there isn't even a ball.
                                        Similarly, disc golf didn't use a ball, clubs or holes (the targets are trees, stakes or baskets).

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                                          #21
                                          Another of these weird sports that springs to mind is Kayak Polo. About 15 years ago I went on a back country rafting trip in Wyoming and Utah, and it turned out that a friend of the friend-who-oragnised-it was on the US kayak polo team. I'm pretty sure he had more experience in boats than the entire remaining 10 or 12 of us did put together. Apart from him it was pure amateur hour - we desperately tried to follow his lead, but he was usually way ahead and I think we just lucked out getting to our camp sites each day. Anyway, a couple of years later a second friend of mine announced that he'd taken up kayak polo. This time in the swimming pool in Tring. He was not national team level.

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                                            #22
                                            I’m fairly sure Kayak Polo was part of a rejected early draft from Coogan et al.

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                                              #23
                                              I’d heard of kayak polo, but never seen it. I looked on YouTube and was surprised to learn that the players handle the ball directly. I assumed they just knocked it around with their paddles.

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                                                #24
                                                My friends and I invented one of these games 45 years ago which we called Batterball. It was played in the street, when it was too windy to play our version of badminton. So the court was a section of quiet cul-de-sac, a string tied between roadside trees for a net. As soon as it got windy, racquets and shuttlecock were replaced with two square cupboard doors (de-knobbed) and a deflated plastic soccer ball.

                                                A slower, noisier alternative with a lot less finesse.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Just play cricket by kicking a football. As seen on at least one Friday afternoon a long time ago, at an English language school (my rules, so I bat first, except there's no bat).

                                                  Bowler kicks, batter kicks, fielders can catch for a dismissal if it's in the air, otherwise no hands, kick for a run out.

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