5 Modern Sports That Started As Excuses for Sex and Violence

5 Football: Basically a Town-Wide Riot

American football was cobbled together from a bunch of different sports, as you can pretty much tell by watching it. It's got some rugby, some soccer, some attempted murder. Probably the oldest ancestor was mob football, which was played throughout the Middle Ages and was really closer to a spirited match of Calvinball than anything else.

This medieval football distinguished itself from the modern game by doing away with those silly and pointless conventions we know as "rules." Teams could be as large as they wanted and occasionally involved entire villages, and the only thing expressly forbidden was the killing of opposing players (although many agree this is a fine strategy if it can be done without attracting the attention of the refs).

Anything else was fair game. Unsurprisingly, matches often dissolved from "rioting" into "rioting while things are on fire." The goal of the game was to get the ball to the other team's goal line, which were often put at opposite ends of the town. As a result the field was huge and littered with troublesome obstacles like buildings and the elderly.

Needless to say, there were some accidental deaths and the game was banned no less than 30 times in England over the course of three centuries.

Who's winning? All of us.

Over time, they steadily changed the game as people decided they wanted less murder in their sports. By the 16th and 17th centuries, it was civilized enough to make its way onto university campuses, and a few centuries after that it was all about pads and rules and not stabbing people. Still, to this day after their team wins a big game, some fans like to take to the streets and reenact the old days.

4 Baseball: Cows and Sexual Innuendo

Long before baseball was a game for steroid-infused musclesaurs, it was a pastime enjoyed by 14th century English women on wooden barn stools.

It wasn't quite baseball as it's played today but rather Stoolball, which immediately suggests people trying to smack turds out of the air with sticks. Unfortunately, it was actually called that because milkmaids used their milking stools to catch the ball. Teams would take turns pitching and batting, with the batter wielding a paddle to prevent the pitch from hitting the milk stool. Why they were doing this instead of milking the fucking cows is not clear in the official rules.

Pictured: The 2008 Kansas City Royals.

But at the core of all this was hot, nasty, 14th century sex.

Most early references to Stoolball say male spectators would watch the women play and bawdily cheer them on, and the winners would be rewarded with cakes, kisses and sexual favors (the logical progression after cake and kissing). Shakespeare even coined the phrase "playing Stoolball" as a euphemism for sex and, quite frankly, we're not clear on why it isn't still used today (for a certain type of sex anyway).

Despite this, games were most often played in churchyards much to the ire of the priests, who tried to discourage matches from taking place presumably by chasing the unruly players in a delightfully madcap fashion while the Benny Hill theme played somewhere nearby.

The game eventually evolved in different regions of England, went through rule changes and merged with other games before making its way to North America and developing into baseball. While it retains the quality of being something you avoid work to engage in, modern baseball is noticeably deficient in the "women," "cake" and "sexual favor" departments.

3 Basketball: Rocks and Human Sacrifice

You probably already have heard the part about the guy who invented basketball with a peach basket, but the story is much older and weirder than that.

That guy was James Naismith, a coach from Canada that came to teach at a YMCA in the States, where he invented the sport as a way to keep people active during the winter months. But few people know Naismith's terrible secret: His new activity was inspired by a combination of a children's game and ancient Mesoamerican rituals. Sort of like Candy Land mixed with blood sacrifice, only more geared towards the sale of sports drinks.

The children's game was called Duck on a Rock, which involved one child placing a small rock on top of a larger one, and then protecting it from other children who threw rocks in an effort to knock it down. Yeah, they didn't have video games back then.

We realize this sounds nothing like basketball but the most effective way to get past the guard was to softly lob one's rock over their head towards the target rock. Naismith, having played the game as a child, thought this was a good way to provide players of his sport with a challenge, likely because he was struck in the face by one of the aforementioned rocks.

The other inspiration came from Mayan and Aztec ball games, which were decidedly more brutal and/or awesome. The goal of these contests was to get the ball through stone rings located on either end of a large court. The ball itself was heavy enough to cause injuries, and players were even known to have been killed by head trauma, further demonstrating Naismith's love of games that injure people.

Hurry up and take the picture, I need to break someone's nose with this.

The sport was used as a proxy for war, with an additional element of human sacrifice, as either the losing captain or entire teams would be killed after ritual games. That must have made for some tense fucking free throws in the fourth quarter.

2 Bobsledding: Theft and a Gross Disregard for Bystander Safety

Contrary to its charming representation in Cool Runnings, bobsledding was born from an amalgamation of drunken, over-privileged negligence.

In the late 19th century, a brand new winter resort was opened in Switzerland to the delight of young, wealthy Europeans. Winter resorts were pretty new at the time, and as such there wasn't a great deal offered in the way of entertainment other than drinking, looking at mountains and throwing coins at poor people. So travelers decided to amuse themselves by stealing the sleds the resort delivery staff used to carry supplies, fuse a couple of them together and go sledding through the streets of St. Moritz, presumably with delivery food flying out along the way.

"Hey poor people: Look at how much fun money is!"

The innovation pretty much stops there, as the inventors didn't bother to devise a way to steer their contraptions or to think of going sledding in an unpopulated area. Actually, they didn't bother with anything that would help them avoid mowing down the Swiss working class in their merriment.

Still, bobsledding's popularity as a recreational activity for the rich and asinine grew steadily over the next several years. Eventually more runners were added to the bottom of the sled to make it easier to turn, organized races were introduced and women were made a necessary component of each team presumably to make the sport appear less gay.

Sausage fest.

However, actual runs for the sleds to race along had yet to be invented, so elite Alpine vacationers were still barreling down snow covered streets, smashing into trees and mailboxes. Finally succumbing to reason, the resort built the world's first naturally refrigerating bobsled run in 1902, and two decades later a committee was formed to standardize the rules which allowed the sport to appear in the first Winter Olympics in 1924. It isn't clear which rule--"go," "that way" or "fast"--needed clarification, but the world is unquestionably better for it.

Ah, fuck, I forgot the rules. Just keep going, it's probably fine.

1 Boxing: Pretty Much Fight Club

Boxing, or variants of it, goes back to the first time some caveman figured out you can make the other guy hurt worse if you curl up your fingers into a ball before you smack him. However, the direct precursor to the modern version comes from England during a time when, after a long day at work, the average man wanted nothing more than to punch another working class man in the face repeatedly and possibly to death (the simple things in life we all take for granted).

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, bare-knuckle boxing was all the rage. These fights didn't have any limp-wristed sissyfits like "weight classes," "referees" or "rules," and thus matches often ended with "grievous injuries" and "dead bodies." By 1743, boxers had grown sick of getting bruised and battered and killed in the ring, and so London Prize Fight rules were introduced by then champion, Jack Broughton.

Fights were still brutal, bare-knuckled affairs though. Fighters were permitted to wear spiked shoes, holds and throws were legal and there were no round limits. The rules even discussed how to resolve a match that was interrupted by a rioting crowd or police interference, showing how chaotic things could become. Imagine Mike Tyson wearing a pair of knife boots to the ring.

That mustache is fist-proof.

London Prize Fights continued for about 100 years, but the chaos could only last for so long. Eventually the Marquess of Queensberry rules were introduced, which standardized the ring size and the number and length of rounds, and added padded gloves to the mix for the safety and protection of fighters. Amazingly, it took about 120 years for fans to realize the gross mistake that had been made and invent the UFC.

Nice gloves, pussies.

And make sure to keep boning up on your sports trivia by reading The 8 Most Baffling "Sports" From Around The World and 6 People Who Made A Living Playing Retarded 'Sports'.

And stop by Cracked.com's Top Picks to see some sporting boobs.