The World of Sports ...
The general idea of a broom-riding basketball/hockey/soccer game is not unsound. The problem is introduced with the position of seeker and the hunt for the golden snitch. The objectives of having chasers get the quaffles into the goals and the seeker catching the golden snitch are completely unrelated to one another. It's as if two separate games have been clumsily welded together.No one faults J. K. Rowling as lacking talent for commercial success, but Will Baude at Crescat Sententia thinks he knows how the rules for Quidditch should be changed to improve the sport:
You can ... play quidditch at home! The NBA finals are upon us. Bring a friend over, turn on the TV and each pick a team. Then pull out a chess board and play while the game is going on. If you win the chess game, give yourself 150 points and add it to the score of whichever NBA team you picked. If that total score is greater than the number of points of your opponent's NBA team, you win! The marriage of the two contests into one makes just as little sense as quidditch.
Keep the scoring the same, but have the game automatically end when either team is winning by 100 points or more. That way, most of the time a snitch-catch will still win the game, but it won't always end the game, (they could re-release the snitch) and there will never be a time when a team is down 160 points and so shouldn't even bother to try any more. That's just sad and depressing.Now, if"sucks" is not your favorite verb or, worse, you don't even know what"Quidditch" is, then treat yourself to reading Harry Potter. The books are a lot of fun. Or, see the films. They are, too.
But, if you still must be serious, read Fred Barnes' review of Michael Mandelbaum's new book, The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football and Basketball and What They See When They Do, in the Wall Street Journal. I know. I know. Barnes is one of those dreadful"neo-cons"; Mandelbaum is a foreign policy wonk; and the Wall Street Journal, well, we know what that is. But Barnes captures Mandelbaum's important insights into the centrality of these three sports in American life. They elevate heroes and reflect our quest to be e pluribus unum.
The three sports are of different periods in the nation's history, Mandelbaum argues: 19th century agrarian baseball, mid-twentieth century industrial football, and post-industrial basketball. The last seems a stretch to Barnes and me, but it's an interesting idea; and Mandelbaum is surely right that making the ball more visible made these sports spectator events. Babe Ruth did it with the home run in the 1920s, Knute Rockne did it by popularizing the forward pass before World War I, and Hank Lusetti did it by inventing the jump shot at Stanford in the 1930s. It's a ball ..., in the air ..., it arcs ..., and, in a moment, it either breaks your heart or makes your day.