I INVENTED A NEW SPORT

I invented a new sport. I invented it right there in the lounge room, in amongst Margie doing homework and baby Jason tossing pillows around and Jenny watching TV and all of them generating a lot of noise and creating movement in my peripheral vision. For anyone it would have been a lot. But while all that was happening I was devising gambits and rucks and salchows. I hammered out the plays and the turnovers. I named the hurricane passes. I forged the whistle with old cans and a jet lighter. I crushed up the chalk with a mortar and pestle. It was hard but I got it done and when I rolled up all my charts and plopped all the balls into a big string bag everyone stopped and said, "wow, Tyler, you really worked hard on that." It was an achievement, plain and simple.

The sport that I invented was very straightforward, on the surface, but in an ingenious way that only revealed the full subtlety of its craftsmanship to the truly dedicated. Under the surface it was deeply complicated. It had to be complicated to be meaningful. The sport took place on a normal rectangular field but with an incline of 30%. Both teams had an up side and a down side. And at each goal end of the field was a long chute and you had to get the ball in the top of the chute and it had to roll all the way down to the bottom and plop into a bucket. And at any time grabbers from the opposing team could grab the ball from the chute and convert it over the one-third line to a waiting huckspinner, which turned it into a negative points ball for three minutes or until it had been passed 4 times. The chutes were called The Chutes Of Aegea in the rules, and speculation as to the meaning behind the name was invited. 

The Chutes Of Aegea were open-topped, so the grabbers could grab it at any point if they got close enough. You can imagine the drama. You can imagine commentators years down the line saying things like, “Disaster on the Chutes of Aegea!” when grabbers stole the ball halfway down. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up thinking about it. I redrew the blueprint for the Chutes of Aegea over 50 times. I listened to YouTube videos of Wagner songs while I was doing it. Sometimes I put my drafting pencil down and closed my eyes and just felt the energy course through me. One time Jenny walked past and shook me to see if I’d had a stroke and died. I told her to make her own damn blueprints if she was that worried. It was envy, pure and simple.

The grabbers could travel within 1.5 metres of the chute for more than 10 seconds, which was a power only they had. Other players could approach the chute for less than ten seconds or for six steps or fewer, whichever came first. But grabbers had a major weakness of their own: they could get balls thrown at them by strikers, which would be the "superstar position" once the sport was commercialised, the quarterback, so to speak, due to the athleticism required. There were rollers who rolled slow but powerful hay bales at the strikers and could take them out of the game, and lighters, who had to light a row of candles. There were points assigned to all of these things in case no one scored before the game timed out. The umpires were encouraged to add bon mots directed at the audience through the matches. There was an appendix detailing ball weights and materials. There were recommended pitchfork suppliers for the tossing of the hay bales. There were guidelines about which muscles players should train. And everyone had to know the Lord's Prayer. Which wasn't a religious thing, by the way, just a thing people could say that had a certain gravitas. Just before the end a player from the winning team would be randomly selected to climb on top of a small woodpile at the high end of the pitch and they would have to recite the Lord's Prayer. And if they fucked it up the ball would go right back in play.

That was the bit that turned everyone into bad sports when I made them play it. I made the whole family come out to the field. “Even baby Jason?” Yes. I made baby Jason a special helmet and stilts so he could participate properly. There was a hill on one side where we set everything up. I made chutes out of PVC pipe which I cut in half and set up the candles and drew the lines with chalk. I hammered stakes into the ground for the swinging vines and the hoops and the storage baskets. It was going so well. I told everyone what their job was and after we’d played a bit I told everyone what they could be doing better at. And then finally Margie's team's ball got all the way down the chute into the bucket and I picked Margie to get up on the woodpile and she couldn't even remember the first line. "It includes the word 'Lord'", I whispered to her, but she just didn't know it. I took the ball and tossed it back onto the field and everyone threw their hands up and said they were tired and wanted to go home. “Baby Jason’s happy out here,” I said, to make them feel bad about taking baby Jason away, but baby Jason started crying and the writing was on the wall.

If you want to invent a successful sport you need people to pay attention. And how? You give ‘em something different. Most pro sports are sorely lacking profundity. That's just a fact. Most mid-season comp games in any sport it's just players and fans going through the motions. There's no emotional heft. There's no narrative. The only thing that counts is the bottom line. I tried explaining this and it didn’t go great. There was no appetite for it. “I’m trying to create meaning,” I told them. “True meaningfulness lies in tangents and subroutines. This could be so meaningful for you.” And I believed that and it’s true. 

“Create it some other way,” they said. They went home and moved on with their lives. I stayed on the pitch. I made better chutes. I left flyers with the Lord’s Prayer printed on them scattered around the field just in case anyone who was there for another sport memorised it. I wove better baskets. I stood on the sidelines of soccer games and tried to sign the kids up but it never worked out. I tried to sign up their parents but they didn’t get it. I started my own junior soccer league and booked the hillside and hoped they’d see the potential of playing on an incline so I could introduce the chute and the bales later on but they just wanted to play on the flat. I let them go. I added new rules and the option of commandeering box kites from which hung special point bonuses, which I thought was fun. I toiled and refined. I added more and more meaning to the sport until eventually I realised that I had arrived at my destination. It was a beautiful afternoon in late winter, when the air was warm with the promise of spring and the three o’clock sun cast a pink glow on the boundary bunting. I looked at the pitch and was humbled by the realisation that, in my magnificent sport, form and meaning had joined in ultimate communion. I was completely sated. I knew deep within that with or without a thriving little league of shining young children, my utter tranquility was secure. 

The day the last kid quit I emailed the parents to ask if they really thought soccer would make their child happy as I was and they never wrote back, and I didn’t need them to. I just wanted them to know they were wrong.

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