Pimp Thy Sport
What the Formula One night race in Singapore can teach other sports
By J Chew
So the first Formula One race in Singapore has come and gone, with the fanfare worthy of a visit by the Pope himself. Draped in black and bathed in floodlights, F1’s night race was proclaimed a roaring success. The Singapore skyline looked positively regal as a backdrop to the twisting Marina Bay track, and Singaporeans have taken to calling their F1 venue the ‘Monaco of the East’. F1, we notice, has moved to the dark side.
I’m here, though, to use this as a springboard to call all other professional sports to task: where your balls at? When a sport as stately and swanky as Formula One racing—where F1-themed mousemats can go for almost RM1,000—has the guts to try a race at night, why can’t other sporting bodies put their inventive caps on and break out a novelty here and there? Take volleyball into the sand, and you’ve got one of the more popular Olympic sports. Where’s the glow-in-the-dark footballs? Trampolines for half-court dunks at basketball games? Swimming with one hand?
Let’s take the cue from F1, and add one revolutionary new twist to three sports. The cheques can be made out to THINK later, thank you. And don’t forget the copyright.
1. To football, add walls
The secret allure of futsal isn’t wearing super-tight shorts—it’s that games are never paused on account of “Oh shit, we just ballooned the football onto the main road”. So let’s take the age-old Anglo game, add rubberised walls along the sides, and do away with the out-of-bounds. Kick the ball above the goal, and it just rebounds back on field. Use your sideline walls as part of your bag of tricks, and watch Cristiano Ronaldo flick the ball off the side wall, and away from his astonished defender. Think of it as squash meets soccer. The games will be shorter, faster and hell, infinitely more fun.
The downside: Fans might complain ’cos, you know, it’s hard to see through walls and stuff. But if engineers can make an entire building from bubble-foamed translucent polymers and call it the Water Cube, no reason why we can’t make our walls transparent and bouncy.
2. To basketball, remove gravity
Remember NBA Jam? That game you played at the arcade, where you could make Muggsy Bogues (who’s like 5’3”) jump like a man pumped with steroids and helium over Shaquille O’Neal (who’s like 120’13”), and thunder down a dunk from the three-point line? Like finding porn in your dad’s sock drawer, it was a little boy’s dream come true. So we take it to reality—basketball in a vacuum, where gravity has no part to play. See Kobe run. See Kobe jump. See Kobe perform a double-pike, triple somersault before slamming it in the basket—only to be blocked by a four-foot Vietnamese scrub who then takes the ball the other way. With so many possibilities, you’re only limited by the breadth of your imagination (and the throbbing pain in your well-worn ankles).
The downside: Playing in a gravity-less environment might be a little stuffy—it sucks when you’re exercising without oxygen. And who knows what kind of injuries LeBron James will sustain when he realises gravity is taking him way past the basket and into the glass wall ahead. Nothing that Nike can’t fix with a hyperdunk gravity-regulated shoe, of course.
3. To cricket, add women
The true gentleman’s sport, it’s about time we add a little oestrogen. Women’s cricket is already in existence—they even have their very own World Cup—but let’s take it to the mainstream. Remove their amateur status, and make them full-time cricketers. Bring women’s test cricket to the television. Make them wear singlets sponsored by Adidas. And most of all, showcase their talents in a PR blitz that pushes the likes of Karen Rolton and Mithali Raj on equal par with the boys. After all, the use of two balls and three stumps isn’t constrained to the men behind the bats.
The downside: You can hear the cries of dissent coming from the cricket grounds a mile away, especially from traditionalists who wouldn’t venture a change in their brand of car tyres, let alone the introduction of women in the grand ‘ol game. So sue us when 14-year-old boys no longer choose to follow cricket on TV because the adjacent channel is showing women’s ice hockey. Change in sports, it seems, is always the final frontier.
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