Kabaddi (International rules)

Who likes a good game of tag?

Who likes seven dudes wrestling one guy to the ground?

How about wearing short shorts? (me!)

Let’s imagine that all of those things combined into one crazy sport originating in Asia and the Middle East and you have Kabaddi!

(Skip to 2:05 and watch at least two minutes or so of what they’re doing.)

Pretty weird, yeah? My first thoughts encountering this sport were, “What’s the point?” Then I realized that’s a pretty dumb question considering my favorite sport involves grown men swinging at a ball with a thin bat coming towards you at 90 mph whilst attempting to reach a base safely 90 feet away from where you were standing before someone catches the ball on the fly, tags you, or throws you out by having someone stand on the base and holding the ball in their possession. Yeah…baseball is weird you guys. Moving on.

I want to be that “suit man’s” best friend. It seems like I could do anything along his side.

Kabaddi seems so much simpler to me now and makes so much more sense than baseball. I mean all you have to worry about is your seven guys, their seven guys, not getting tagged, holding your breath, repeatedly saying “Kabaddi” over and over, tackling your opponent, the boundaries…OH WAIT. It’s just a crazy! Which is why I love it.

The reason I chose to post about Kabaddi right now is because guess what is coming up soon? The World Kabaddi Cup from Novermber 9-23! I’m going, if I could. “Dear readers and subscribers, please send money to send me to this World Cup so I can live tweet everything for all of you. Sincerely, desperate David.”

Now, to show how much this sport means to some people, and how much good a sport can do for your city or town, the city of New Delhi is holding a Kabaddi tournament in town to sway voters into viewing the government in positive light. How cool, and somewhat strange, is that?

One of the best parts about Kabaddi…

FINISH HER!

Women play too! They go just as hard as the men do too.

The other part of Kabaddi that I find appealing is the fact that it can be played on multiple surfaces and, unlike last week’s post about Bossaball, is pretty much the least expensive sport I’ve ever heard of in my life. Just wear similar colored shorts, make boundaries with anything you can find…AND THAT’S IT!

Now that I think of it, I’m going to grab 13 of my closest friends (ha, let’s be real) and start a game right now.

Kabddi…kabaddi…kabaddi…kabaddi…kabaddi…kabaddi…kabaddi…kabaddi…

 

Bossaball: Volleyball and soccer

Guys,

This quite possibly is my new favorite sport in the world. I’m not kidding when I say that either.

If this just doesn’t look like the most fun you can have…

To lend background, Bossaball is a fairly new sport to planet Earth and was thought up around 2004 in España. Thank you man named Filip Eyckmans. You rule.

I like to think that when Filip was dreaming up this sport, he was legitimately dreaming and said, as he rose from his slumber, “Tengo que escribir esto!” Which obviously means ‘I need to write this down’. I’m sure all of my readers and subscribers can comprehend Spanish of course.

He then wrote all of this information down and went to the local Spanish equivalent of ‘SkyZone’ (you know, that place with the trampolines as floors, trampoline dodgeball/basketball/free for all where your parents were skeptical about you going to when you were 13 because they thought you would injure yourself…and you did…yeah…that one) and told his friend Anbessa (coolest Spanish name I can think of – it means lion – I mean, c’mon…LION) to come up with a design for a portable volleyball court with a trampoline in the middle of each courtside. The rest is history I would assume.

Some super awesome people who specialize in the ways of Bossaball decided to spread the news about the new sport and brought their videographer friends along with their cool SLR’s and GoPro’s and filmed this sweet video that for some reason I cannot tell is a promotional video…or a music video…or both?

This sport is perfect. You can go to a beach and drink some brewskis with your bros or lady friends, read a good book for a while, and then when you gain consciousness, you can go jump around on a gigantic inflatable volleyball court with a decent sized trampoline the middle and smash a ball that’s volleyball-esque into your opponents face…and then do a backflip as a celebration and not get flagged for it.

I also, kind of want to create a sport branching out from this called “Bossa Nova ball” with the same exact concepts and rules as Bossaball, but whenever you aren’t playing the ball, you have to dance the bossa nova…just a thought. Then that video would make way more sense…?

You’re officially welcome for having me to expose this beautiful sport to you. Now go travel to Spain or somewhere one of the, most likely, 5 places in the U.S. where one of these inflatable bossaball courts exist and ball hard.

This guy…

BLIND SOCCER

Yep.

It’s a thing. And they play it at the Paralympic games.

I’d like to start this post by saying that I am an avid soccer fan who played the sport for a decade of my life. I absolutely love the sport at it’s purest state. Some of you are going to rail on me here, but soccer is becoming a sport I don’t want to watch anymore because of the sheer ridiculousness of “cheating” or “faking”. It makes me sick about the complaining that goes on in soccer today.

So, how do you make the game fair? Let those who are legally blind play the game!

These dudes are legitimately blind and they dribble the ball around and have a feel for the field, with their heightened sense of sound, with skills that surpass some professional soccer players with sight. Never would I make fun of blind people, so I am going to make fun of soccer players who fake things on the pitch in order to get their way…*cough* the entire Spanish National team *cough*. Especially Fernando Torres in this clip.

I mean, look at that diving form!

Hopefully you get the irony behind this photo

Now, back to “blind soccer”.

It’s really called Paralympic association football and only the impaired can play the game. The rules used in the game are those equal to ‘FIFA’, but the difference is, obviously from the video, you play on a smaller pitch with either 5 or 7 players per team, the seven-player-team consisting of players with cerebral palsy  These games are also genuinely called 5-a-side and 7-a-side football.

I’d like to say that the system in which the ‘divisions’ or ‘conferences’ are split up might be more fair than any sport in the world and the playoff system makes sense as well. Here’s to 2015 Bud Selig. Essentially they break up conferences into the magnitude of how impaired each player is. It’s simple, fair, and efficient.

The first organized event for ‘blind soccer’ was apparently held in 1978 and was added as an official Paralympic game in the 1984 summer olympics.

To add some final thoughts about the sport after you now have been so elegantly exposed to its rules and history, I’d just like to say the game would be way more entertaining if the referees were also blind. Maybe Roger Goodell, Lance Easly, and the NFL crews can lend a hand.

ZING!