Explication
Children invent games, out of necessity, out of boredom. They invent from the constraints imposed by available equipment, terrain and numbers of bodies. As a result, they are forced to splice elements of pre-existing games and create fleeting but fascinating mutants. These time-killing, out-of-the-sight-of-parents sports could take the form of woods rugby, rounders with bases on the opposite sides of an infrequently busy thoroughfare and a plank for a bat or football with a rock or a bottle on a rooftop.
With adults, as economic means increase and imagination decreases, hybridization of sports is forgotten. Competitive physical exercise is compartmentalized into specified, delimited, sporting activities. The appropriate equipment is purchased and play is conducted in the appropriate area for the appropriate period of time. They do not play the game; the game plays them. Due to familiarity with their chosen activity, there is no interpretation or problem-solving element. What is called sporting intelligence is merely an ability to effectively predict what will happen next from the narrow set of possibilities learned from experience. From repetition of actions comes motor memory, the muscles act for themselves in machinelike procedure. Players are in a double bind. They are limited not just by the actual laws of the game but also by its strategic exigencies. Some actions are technically permitted yet pointless within the practical restrictions of the game:
- In football, crawling is of no practical use.
- In beach volleyball, digging is of no practical use.
- In ice hockey a double axel with pike is of no practical use.
- In polo, doing a handstand on your horse is of no practical use.
- In water polo, imitating a horse is of no practical use.
- Etc. etc.
Thus a great portion of the body's athletic capability goes to waste. That said, there is great potential in the existing rules, for the concept of play thrives in the spaces between rules. If these structures (dictates of action) are disassembled and arbitrarily reconfigured, sporting strategies will necessarily be improvised and idiosyncratic movements of the body will follow.
In this adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems, the rules of 10 sports (football, polo, water polo, lacrosse, ice hockey, table tennis, basketball, rugby, the Kirkwall ba' and beach volleyball) are divided into their constituant elements (duration, playing area, objective, players per team, attire, ball and method of play/restrictions) in such a way that they can be reassembled without contradicting each other. This could well create an exact replica of one of these games. Or, one sport could be re-imagined and reinvigorated with one or two rules imported from another, for example, rugby in a swimming pool or basketball on the beach played with polo mallets. In the most extreme manifestation of this process, every rule could be derived from a different sport. Picture 30 competitors in swimming costumes on horseback (in an ice hockey rink) trying to throw a ping-pong ball into a basketball hoop. In this manner, ten million sports can be generated. Some new sports will be surreal, some will be dangerous. Some will doubtless improve upon the source games as playing experiences and as spectacles while others will, in their repetitive frustration of our endeavours, mirror the callousness of life. All - however - are possible.
Andrew MacKenzie