5 Failed Sports That Were Clearly Created By Psychopaths
Here we are in 2017, once again anticipating another greatest battle in sports history, where we finally find out if boxing or MMA is the ultimate combat sport. Conor McGregor is about to face Floyd Mayweather in a boxing match built around noisy dick-waving. The two sociopaths have held three press conferences to publicly tell each other to fuck themselves. Their trash talk ranged from incoherent to racist, though Conor assured us it's impossible for him to be racist since he's "half black from the belly button down." Which proves nothing because if you're allowed to start measuring from the belly button, we're all a few inches past unable-to-be-racist.
The point is, this shit is a dick-waving circus and when Conor and Floyd finally stop waving dicks they still won't solve anything. And I don't mean that in any kind of "fighting is never the answer" way. In order to explain, let's take a look at how modern boxing works. In most sports, the top athletes compete to determine the best in the world. In modern boxing, the top athletes avoid each other to protect perfect records and manipulate public interest in order to turn a cycle of anticipation and disappointment into money. Top contenders in boxing are like Charlie Sheen and AIDS-- for years, the whole world wonders why they aren't battling yet, and when they finally do it's just kind of sad.
The way boxing is evolving, there will soon be 4,000 divisions and organizations, each with its own undefeated champion and a single battered man who suffers all the sport's losses. They'll call this man Plurge Gobo, because that's all he'll say when fans recognize him in his wheelchair and beg him to stop. "Plurge Gobo!" he'll repeat as their hearts quietly break. "Plurge? Gobo?" he'll ask again, never quite sure why everyone cries when they meet him. "Plurge," he'll decide. "Gobo," he'll poop.
So most of boxing is about ducking, and no one is better at ducking enemies and punches than Floyd Mayweather. He's the greatest defensive boxer of all time and he's going up against a counter fighter competing in the wrong sport. He and Conor are going to circle and hug in a frustrating demonstration of why man invented kicks and machetes. Both MMA and boxing will end up looking bad, and everyone who buys the pay-per-view will have exactly $99.95 less love in their heart. Then again, Plurge Gobo has proven magic is real if we only reach for it, so maybe the fight will be great and everyone will be happy?
You know, this is maybe too long an intro for an article only related to Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor in that it's about other ill-advised mashups of combat sports that ended up being ridiculous. We should really get started.
XARM: Extreme Arm Wrestling
In 1993, a man named Art Davie helped invent the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Five years later, he was instrumental in bringing K-1 Kickboxing to America. He has done so much for the world of competitive face trauma that he was inducted into the Legends of MMA Hall of Fame. But in 2008 he gave fight fans his greatest gift: XARM. XARM!
XARM is exactly what it sounds like: an alien creature who doesn't understand our people's ways but with the help of a very special boy finds friendship in the most unlikely place. It mixes arm wrestling with fighting, only precisely as stupidly as you're imagining. The two competitors stand across a little table and strap their hands together. Then they XARM which means wild, simultaneous head bashing and nothing else. There's no evasion or strategy and the only move available is a left hook. If they ever make a high budget XARM video game, their motion capture actors will be an air horn and two cranky cats in the same bag. If Stephen Hawking had a twin brother and they battled using only their chair ejector seats, XARM historians would argue it was the greatest XARM match the sport has ever known.
It may shock you to discover that despite being unavoidably brutal and dumb, this sport was not well-received. It was a desperate, cocaine-party napkin of an idea by an old man's imagination of what hot youths on the go would want to see on their computer phones. Art Davie had to shop the XARM pilot around for four years before someone said they were interested, but soon after revised that interest to "not." I'm not saying the courageous XARM competitors battled for their faces' lives in vain, but if you broke your head open teaching The OA movements to your cat, it would be a more meaningful injury than a XARM concussion. So while it may never fill an arm-wrestling combat arena near you, let's go over the official XARM RULES.
In XARM, you compete in three 60-second rounds which is not long enough to deliberate about the decisions that led you to XARM, but absolutely long enough for your brain to get punched out by a tornado of haymakers. The first man to go unconscious loses, and if that doesn't happen, judges pick a winner. Their criteria are based on who hurt the other more, of course, but they also take into consideration the number of arm-wrestling pins. Which means a man with a hard-enough head could theoretically ignore punches for three minutes and win by rapidly arm wrestling. It's a move ancient XARM masters probably call "The determined public masturbator resists arrest."
One of the best things about XARM, besides that they made it into a video game, is the referee. Since it's nothing but absurd chaos, his only real job is stopping the fight after one of the men goes limp. And this is really, really hard to determine when he's being held up and cranked around by the other fighter. Like the producers of Weekend At Bernies II, he only stops you from flinging a limp human body around after it's far, far too late.
Jesus Christ, that was the real tagline for this movie.
There's also a trait the judges look for called "table generalship," which likely refers to the poise and leadership skills you exhibit while you become a cartoon cloud of fists. What's truly fantastic, though, is that aside from having your hand tied to another man (or woman), you can use the same moves you might use in an MMA match. Which means arm-wrestling kicks! Arm-wrestling flying knees! If you want, you fucking maniac! Unfortunately, kicking someone across a little card table while you're both leaning on it is like trying to kick a cigar out of your own mouth. If you've ever done that successfully, awesome, because I've been trying to get you to read my articles and then become my best friend for like 20 years, Hollywood bad boy Jean-Claude Van Damme!
Now that XARM invented it, a man climbing onto the table to kick you in the face during an arm wrestling match is how four percent of all Americans are going to die. It's the greatest move. Every time one of these XARM fighters gets cute and tries to throw a kick, he dumps himself onto his own head in glorious, mutually assured destruction. It's the true definition of "table generalship." A XARM kick looks like a brave cat curiously leaping into a ceiling fan, only the ceiling fan also dies, and the cat draws a bigger crowd.
Team Fighting Championship
One day in Latvia, five married couples were having their morning battle to the death when one of them thought, "If we were married to men, this would very much look like a sport!" Those women are still missing, but in that moment Team Fighting Championships was born. It's a brawl with two teams of five in a giant boxing ring but without the joy and sportsmanship you normally see in a gang fight. TFC is savage. It's like ten men kicking the shit out of each other in Latvia, which is a simile I wrote for five two-headed chickens making love in a grease fire, but it works here just fine.
You're probably wondering what the rules are for competitive street-ganging, and it's worryingly close to none. Let's go over them.
When the fight starts, the ten men are free to attack anyone they want together or as individuals. You are specifically not allowed to hit anyone in the Adam's apple or the dick, which presumably makes this sport a bit more dangerous for female competitors with a keen eye for technicalities. Biting is also not allowed, and for some reason, "spitting" ...? In a sport where competitors routinely stomp on the back of each other's heads, "spitting" seems like a bizarrely innocuous thing to outlaw. Is it for its ungentlemanliness? During a savage punch orgy? No, the simplest explanation is the Latvian military has developed a generation of venom squirting cobra-hybrid men, but t-that's crazy, right?
In every TFC match, the ten fighters always break off into frantic pairs. This means five simultaneous fights. If you think this is hard to follow as a spectator or a camera man, you're right. It's at least three fights too many. Luckily, each of the five fights gets its own referee, and it's his job to watch for spit and to drag the loser out of the ring after he's been defeated. The winner gets to stay and help his team, which means casually walking over and strangling one of the four men wrestling his friends. Even without spitting, it's pretty easy to hurt a man who can only defend himself with the back of his head. You can test this anywhere you find the back of heads.
Once the first winner has completed his ambush and the confused, unconscious loser is dragged out to have his surroundings explained to him later, the two winners can now go beat two more men from behind while they're very busy. This makes it fives on one, and any mathematician will tell you those are terrible odds and then add with a lick of his lips, "It's also how I FUCK." A TFC match ends with those five fighters stomping on their single, extremely fetal opponent until he's motionless enough to satisfy the referee's bloodlust. This is the only Team Fighting Championship match description that has ever been or will ever be.
The point is, martial-arts innovators didn't see Team Fighting Championships and scramble to invent new types of human pyramids for this "evolution of combat." This is just MMA only sillier. Adding madness and increasingly impossible odds to fighting is like adding a bucket of hot dogs to fighting. I guess maybe there's a chance something amazing could happen, but why would you bet so many human skulls on it, you deranged Latvian cobra-man?
WWF Brawl For All
In 1998, the WWF decided to see who was the toughest wrestler, only like, for real. So they held a shootfighting tournament where gigantic wrestlers, whose martial arts training was mainly limited to very specifically not hurting people, bashed each other with their full strength. It was such a sloppy disaster it looked like dull gorilla pornography, except gorilla pornography doesn't maim as many professional wrestlers. It maims some, obviously, just not as many. If Tito Santana took the entire WWF roster discount zip-lining in Tocula, Mexico, you could not cause more wrestler injuries with less entertainment payoff.
They fight like they keep finding a new spider on themselves every two seconds.
In the Brawl For All, the wrestlers wore boxing gloves and fought three one-minute rounds. They scored five points if they landed the most punches in a round, but they also scored five points for a takedown and ten points for a knockdown. I know that's more math than you were expecting in a beef-slapping competition, but it's important to know. Because this unambiguous scoring system left the door wide open for "clever" competitors to get a decisive lead on points and then avoid their opponent for a couple minutes. This tactic, combined with everyone's lack of actual combat skills, led to angry crowds calling for better, more make-believe fighting. For WWE fans, it was like going to the dildo store and finding only hundreds of real, exposed, and moist penises. It was close to what they went there for, but grossly, almost offensively not right.
Clap! Clap! Clapclapclap!
Just-pretend-please!
It's actually hard to describe how bad the Brawl For All was, and not because I used the description of two-headed chickens fucking in a grease fire already. These were men wildly pawing at each other to determine which among them was the best at a thing they don't do. It would have been just as appropriate if they sat across from one another and debated whether pizza was real in Cantonese. But long after audiences decided they hated it, the Brawl for All continued. The two WWF stars who knew how to fight, UFC veterans Dan Severn and Ken Shamrock, were suspiciously removed from the tournament, and most of the other competitors were in the hospital with torn hamstrings and caved-in faces. Almost by default, but also by terrifying bear strength, Bart Gunn won the tournament. Yay. Surely after literally ending the careers of four WWF superstars and delegitimizing several more, they stopped there, right?
At Wrestlemania XV, the WWF pitted their newly crowned toughest tough man against Butterbean, a ham-based tank designed by Eternia sorcerers to knock down fortresses with his head. To say it went badly for Bart Gunn is like saying the French and Indian War was a bit inconvenient for the Shawnee.
Less than 20 seconds into the fight, Butterbean knocked Bart Gunn down as effortlessly as he might eat a 15th pancake. It was the easiest thing Butterbean has ever done, and that includes eating a trophy for eating 15 pancakes. If you digitally removed Bart Gunn from the video, you'd think Butterbean was simply swatting away helicopters during an afternoon rampage. Bart Gunn fought like a weirdly eager participant in an XXXXXL boxing glove clinical trial. This was a goddamn industrial video on how to turn horse remains into gelatin, not a fight.
After the knockdown, Bart wobbled back to his feet, which bought him two more seconds of fight time. Butterbean threw an overhand right at Bart's motionless skull, turning it into a sludge of fluids and rubble haunted by the ghosts of once-vivid memories and dreams. This was jarring for audiences both because every obviously predictable head injury is a tragedy but also because in 1999, it was unusual to watch anything get hit so hard without seeing CGI chunks of it fly straight into the camera. The night janitors of the First Union Center still report seeing echoes of Bart Gunn's soul, howling unheeded warnings of Butterbean. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the WWF should not have done this.
Las Vegas Gunfights
Las Vegas Gunfights is a sport combining paintball and shoving that was breathlessly covered by a few media outlets earlier this year. Like cardio pole dancing and hot yoga it was reported as the latest Derp plus DERP!? craze to sweep the nation before immediately vanishing into its own tiny, terrible community.
It's what a person with little-to-no imagination would expect: Two teams of competitors face off in a dark arena filled with barrels, armed with handguns modified to shoot paint bullets. And if you run out of bullets, or if you feel like it, you can start a fistfight. It's absolutely the perfect activity for men too fat for the military and too tiny-penised for human relationships. It's the kind of hobby Eric Trump would tell his prostitute about right before he explained how he owns multiple copies of "Sun Chu's The Arts of Warfare" because he likes to apply those same principles to the business world. The shitty assholes who created Las Vegas Gunfights actually call it "enter-train-ment." And it's also a hookah lounge.
Obviously, Las Vegas Gunfights is more of a mid-cost suggestion for an insecure man's bachelor party event than it is a real sport. Still, it has rules. One side gets blue paint bullets and the other gets red. When the time is up, everyone stops shooting and fighting and they count the number of paint spots on the competitors. Whichever team made the most paint spots wins! Which means... wait, what the shit was the fistfighting for? They market this like MMA meets paintball, but you get no points for the MMA part? How is this anything more than paintball with temper tantrums? You can't add useless fistfights to a thing and act like you invented an all new athletic event. If you could, killing a hooker with a necktie would be called an Eric Trump Biathlon.
Calcio Storico (Historic Football)
Calcio storico is a maniac's best guess at how ancient Romans played soccer. At first, it sounds like regular soccer: Two teams enter a field and score points by getting the ball into the other side's goal. Only in calcio storico, each side has 27 men and they're allowed to do whatever the hell they want. And they always want to recreate a prison riot vaguely near a soccer ball. It's the same sport hyenas invent when they find a baby antelope corpse.
Calcio storico has a rich and ridiculous history. It was created around 200 A.D. by extreme athletes too ancient to invent motorcycle jumping and too angry to surf. Nobody really knows what rules they played by, but Italian archaeologists apparently found enough shattered human remains in mass calcio storico graves to decide it was something close to "death pit with ball." They did their best to recreate it in the 16th century where the sport held friendly races with the bloody flux to see who could maim the most assholes.
Sports that cripple and sometimes literally kill its athletes don't stick around for long, so calcio storico disappeared for a few hundred years. It was brought back again in 1930 by Mussolini thinking it might be a fun alternative to the tired old extermination camps. It wasn't, and calcio storico has remained unpopular to this day. It's only played three times a year, and enjoyed by small crowds of psychopaths too cowardly to do their own murders.
Like I mentioned, no one really knows what the original rules were, but in the modern version you can sort of do anything. A player can advance the ball or attack his opponent's genitals with his hands or feet and defenders can use karate, headbutts, or bare-handed strangulation to stop him. Players are not allowed to kick to the head or sucker punch opponents, which is a strange rule that theoretically makes you punch-proof if you're careful to always look in the wrong direction.
Games usually start with everyone just beating the living shit out of each other. There's no bench, so once you've thrashed an opponent to death, he is "out of the game" and not replaced. These eliminated players are then presumably thrown into a pile where their weak bodies can feed the local cats far from the thoughts and interests of the real men still biting each other's dicks over a soccer ball.
Once one team decides they've killed enough men to have a solid numbers advantage, its bravest player picks up the ball and runs for the enemy goal. Then every conscious man on the other team tries to kill him, and it usually works. If he manages to get past the 20ish men clawing at his throat and biting at his dick, he has to very carefully get the ball into the goal because anytime he throws or kicks the ball above it, it gives half a goal to the other team. The end result is chaos. Calcio storico matches all look like someone dropped a human vagina into a fraternity party.
In ancient times, the triumphant calcio storico team would get rewarded with a cow while the losing team rotted in an undisturbed heap, their blood apparently too craven even for the hungry stray cats. Today, the trophy has been downgraded to one dinner and no cash prize. Which means, and I stole the second half of this sentence from a Domino's Pasta Bread Bowl, these madmen are literally putting their lives on the line for a single fucking dinner.
For more check out The 8 Most Baffling Sports From Around The World and 5 Dumb Ways People Have Won at Sports.
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