Imaginary Sports Trivia Quiz

Answer: Croquet, from in "Alice in Wonderland"

Using a live flamingo as a mallet to hit an unwilling hedgehog (the "croquet ball") is a terrible way to play croquet, as Alice learned at the Queen of Heart's party. It also did not help when the Queen screamed "Off with his head!" to resolve every question about the rules or as a means of removing slow players. "Alice in Wonderland" was written by Lewis Carroll (1865).

Answer: Rollerball

The original movie version of "Rollerball" (1975) was based upon an SF short story by William Harrison called "Rollerball Murder." This violent sport is vaguely similar to Roller Derby. Two teams skate or drive around a circular banked track shaped like a shallow funnel. Players try to catch a steel ball fired from a cannon, then throw it into a magnetic cup (the goal) to score points. Skaters could grab motorcycles from their team to speed up and attack other players, but motorcycles could attack the other team as well.

Answer: Transcontinental Road Race

The race is basically a legalized form of serial murder that serves as televised entertainment in this depraved future. Drivers kill pedestrians (and each other) in creatively brutal ways to gain points and help them win when they reach the finish line.

The movie was based on a short story called "The Racer," by SF writer Ib Melchior. David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone starred in the film. This movie spawned dozens of similar movies, board games, and videogames.

Answer: "Battlestar Galactica" (2004-2009)

In the original "Battlestar Galactica" show, aired from 1978-1979, Pyramid was the name for a futuristic card game, and the sport later known as Pyramid was called Triad. A mistake was made when "re-imagining" the 2004-2009 series from the first: Pyramid accidentally became the new name for Triad, and so it has remained.

Answer: Thunderdome

Thunderdome, of course, came from the 1985 movie "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome." After civilization was bombed out of existence, Bartertown (a community cobbled together by survivors) decided to never again let a conflict grow so great as to endanger humanity. Thunderdome, though ruthless and violent, was the town's means of limiting the destructive urge, though in the end it failed to stop the miles-long, wreckage-strewn battle between Auntie Entity's forces and the lone warrior Mad Max.

Answer: "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Sadly, some of these sports are not well described in "Brave New World." We do learn that a hotel with only 25 Escalator-Squash courts for 200 guests is not much of a hotel, and that some people think Electro-Magnetic Golf is a waste of time. Centrifugal Bumble-puppy is a children's sport in which twenty kids encircle a steel tower.

A ball is thrown to the top of the hollow tower, where it falls inside, hits a rotating disk, and is flung out one of many holes in the tower to be caught by a fast or lucky child. (Incidentally, tennis in this future requires a "Riemann-surface," whatever that is.)

Answer: Middle Earth

J.R.R. Tolkien informs us, in "The Hobbit" (1937), that the oversized hobbit Bullroarer led an army against a goblin horde at the Battle of the Green Fields. From horseback, Bullroarer swung his club at the evil King Golfimbul and decapitated the monarch.

The king's head sailed 100 yards to fall down a rabbit burrow, and thus "the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment."

Answer: BASEketball

"BASEketball" was a clever 1998 comedy film starring Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of "South Park." Two jobless twenty-somethings invent a form of basketball played using baseball rules, mixed with attempts to "psyche out" opposing players with outrageous taunts and deeds.

The game turns into a full-time American sport in which National BASEketball League teams compete annually for the coveted Denslow Cup.

Answer: 43-Man Squamish

George Woodbridge and Tom Koch inventing this impossible-to-play game in "Mad Magazine" issue #95 (June 1965). The rules make no sense, and player positions include Inside Grouches, Deep Brooders, Wicket Men, Offensive Niblings, Overblats, Back-Up Finks, and one Dummy per team.

Despite this, a number of American and Canadian universities are reported to have formed their own 43-Man Squamish teams, though their success at actual competitive play is unknown.

Answer: "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace"

"Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" (1999) introduced us to pod racing, in which small children and aliens ride in one-man cockpits attached by cables to gigantic turbine engines, to race each other over chaotic desert terrain at an altitude barely above ground level while being shot at by tribesmen, rammed by other pod racers, or crash into rocky cliffs to explode in the most amazing fireballs. Anakin Skywalker's mother Shmi deserved everything she got from the Tusken Raiders for letting her little kid go pod racing. What was she thinking? Oh, sorry, I was channeling my parental side. An entertaining sport, nonetheless.