Forget about all this fantasy sports stuff. Fantasy baseball leagues and the like are fun, but where are the true fantasy sports? And I'm not talking about "Celebrity Boxing" or computerized scenarios on the Discovery Channel. I want to see something crazy. And I think we found the perfect starting point.
At the beginning of this semester, my roommate asked me an age-old question that has plagued scholars for generations. In a contained arena, who would win in a fight: 40 little people or a lion? This conundrum actually comes from a fake Internet article purported as a true story covered by the BBC, but it's exactly the type of fantasy sport I'd pay to see.
Sadly, since this type of event is apparently "immoral" and "illegal," so all we can do is hypothesize what might happen. For anyone who answered that the 40 little people would win, let me explain why you are wrong:
So you might think to yourself: 40 human beings, even of miniature stature, would surely present a challenge to a lion. You may be like my roommate, and argue that the little people would rush the lion, surround it, jump on it, and slowly wear it down, perhaps poking it in the eyes. Preposterous. Anyone who has ever flipped though PBS and caught just a second of the show "Nature" has seen a lion do that "rear-up-and-thrash-its-clawed-paws-through-the-air" technique knows that 40 little people don't stand a chance. Here's how it goes down.
First, right off the bat at least 10 of the little people would confuse the old play-dead-and-they'll-leave-you-alone bit for what to do when you encounter a lion rather than a grizzly bear. They immediately would be eaten. You're down to 30 little people. Of those 30, at least another 10 would be paralyzed by fear, and would be easy pickings for the lion. The remaining 20 little people would attempt to form some kind of battle strategy against the lion, swarming the lion in the hopes of overpowering it, but this would all be for naught. The lion's tail alone would take out a handful of its diminutive adversaries, and with around 15 little people left I think it's safe to say who will win this round.
Game, Set, Match: Lion.
Now this is just the start of my kind of fantasy competition. And once science catches up to our imaginations, we could expand this sport into unknown realms of awesomeness. Here are a few to start off with:
First, let's finally declare a victor in that eternal struggle between Man and Nature. For too long Nature has sent its lackeys to do its dirty work. White whales, typhoons, global warming - how about you to grow a pair, Nature, and fight your own fights?
In the future, once time travel is possible, we could recreate some classic matches, too. Who doesn't want to see Aaron Burr versus Alexander Hamilton, Part Deux? You may have got the best of him last time, Burr, but this time, Hamilton won't be a gentleman and shoot straight up in the air. Or how about Abraham Lincoln vs. John Wilkes Booth? The tag line "This time, it's personal" doesn't even begin to do it justice.
If we have to stay in the sports world, I can think of a few cross-generational clashes I'd like to see. Let's get Bill Russell and the 1965 Boston Celtics to take on Michael Jordan and his 1992 Chicago Bulls. Both teams won the NBA Championships during their respective years, but who wouldn't want to have an ultimate winner declared between the defensive wall that is Russell and the scoring machine known as Air Jordan?
Or how about pitting Pedro Martinez against Babe Ruth? Martinez boasted a few years back that if the Bambino was resurrected, he'd "bean him in the ass." Time to put your money where your mouth is, Pedro. And for added pressure, if Ruth takes him deep, Pedro's little buddy Nelson is the first to fight the lion.
As always, though, reality remains stranger than any fiction I could come up with, and perhaps the greatest fantasy sport already exists: chess boxing. It's a fact, folks. As the World Chess Boxing Organization contends, chess boxing looks to combine the number one thinking sport with the number one fighting sport. Opponents alternate between four-minute rounds of chess and two-minute rounds of boxing. Currently bouts are planned for venues in New York and Cologne in 2006. I'm sure somewhere right now, Bobby Fisher is doing push-ups.
Finally, we could bring fantasy sports to the local level. I mean who wouldn't like to see, say, an ignorant and crude Tufts columnist get his bell clocked by pretty much anyone with common sense and a copy of Strunk and White's "Elements of Style"?
I doubt there would be a shortage of people lining up for that fantasy come true.
Andrew Bauld is a junior majoring in English. He can be reached at Andrew.Bauld@tufts.edu.
