Fantasy Sports At Their Worst

DISCLAIMER: If you are a Harry Potter fan, you probably won’t appreciate this post. However, you are encouraged to read it, like it, and pay me lots of money.

Alright Harry Potter, we get it. You’re a wizard. You have a lightning bolt tattoo on your forehead. You create a mass hysteria every time you release a new book or movie. You’re a bad a**.

…to nerds worldwide.

But when you cross over to the athletics threshold, I have to put my foot down. That’s right, when Harry Potter nerd-dom comes interefering with my sports world, I feel obligated to speak out against this pre-teen wizard and his national pastime of “Quidditch.”

Apparently non fictional-book-characters, yes real people, have made the sport their own, playing on college and high school campuses, public parks, and in their mother’s basements for years (since 2005). Thus giving a much worse definition to the term fantasy sports.

No seriously, much worse.

The sport, according to the book, is described as:

An extremely rough, but very popular, semi-contact sport played by wizards and witches on flying broomsticks.

Ok, now let’s go back through that statement once more:

An extremely rough (compared to football, hockey, etc. this is highly debatable), but very popular (amongst nerds who are forced to play outside by their parents), semi-contact sport (semi-contact, yet still extremely rough… beginning to sound contradictory) played by wizards and witches (not real) on flying broomsticks (impossible).

Claiming that Quidditch is an actual human playing sport is like claiming Dennis Rodman is an attractive bride.

However, that hasn’t stopped Potterholics from doing everything in their power to make it into a human pastime. For “muggles,” the books term for non-magical people (It took every ounce in my body to not throw my laptop across the room for actually typing “non-magical people”), they are forced to race around in capes and goggles with broomsticks between their legs while throwing balls through placed hula hoops.

It sounds about as cool as showering with your dad.

The Wall Street Journal released an article on Monday about the sport and it’s growing numbers. Due to the increased popularity, according to the article, the “Quidditch World Cup” was forced to move from Middlebury College in Vermont to a park in Manhattan. Yes, (sigh) New York’s Manhattan.

Over 60 high school and college Quidditch teams have already signed up for the World Cup. This sport is nearly as popular in America as soccer.

The WSJ interviewed a really nerdy guy to get his nerdy take on the sport and it’s nerdy relativity to society:

“Quidditch was this bridge between the fantasy world of the books and the more concrete world of college,” says Mr. Manshel, who has graduated and now teaches English. “For us [playing] was a way to have both.”

Some really pasionate “Harry Fairies” even want to turn the sport into an NCAA sanctioned sport. But they don’t want that to be the ultimate goal. In fact, that would just be a stepping stone for the sport to become an Olympic sport.

Good gosh.

We have sports, like lacrosse, that have been around since the pre-colonial days of America that aren’t in the Olympics nor is it a sanctioned sport in a lot of colleges around the U.S. But some kids want to take a make-believe game, from the mind of an author who probably doesn’t even know how to spell NCAA, and try and make it a collegiate and Olympic sport? Some one just teach these kids rugby and let’s move on with our lives.

Are these people serious? I mean, I thought it was bad enough people dressing like wizards and witches to go to the movie theater eight days before the movie premiere. But now they want the Olympics to adopt this broomstick flying sport as a worldwide, medal winning, sport? It’s bad enough we have curling. The Olympics don’t need any more brooms.

You can call me a Harry Potter hater (which I am), but I will treat this the same way I treat Barrack Obama talking about sports on ESPN. I don’t want politics to cross over into sports just like I don’t want fictional fantasy books crossing over into sports. It’s bad enough I have to watch Obama fill out his March Madness bracket, but if I ever have to see Quidditch highlights on SportsCenter, I’m going to unplug my TV, carry it to my car, drive to the Hoover Dam, proceed to drop the TV off of the Hoover Dam, repel down, pick up the pieces of the now broken TV set and light them on fire.

I also don’t want to be kicked off any fields while at the park playing football with my friends for a Quiddtich practice by a brigade of goggle and cape wearing book worms.

Leave Harry Potter in the library and off the athletic fields.

Leave Harry Potter in the Barnes and Nobles and out of the sports bars.

Leave Harry Potter in Hogwarts and out of REAL LIFE!

…Then again, Quidditch may be more exciting to watch than women’s basketball.