This review contains affiliate links, which earn me a small commission when you click and purchase, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting my small business and allowing me to continue providing you a reliable resource for clean book ratings.
Not content with just being a writer for Sports Illustrated or ESPN — or perhaps he was bored with being a writer of normal sports — Rick Reilly decided to go on a quest: over the course of three years, he (and his lovely researcher/girlfriend, TLC) searched the world over for the World’s Dumbest Sport.
And because he’s a journalist, he felt the need to share it with the world, as well.
The sports range from the pretty cool (women’s football), to the retro (the Jart; remember those? If not, you didn’t grow up in the ’70s and ’80s), to the weird (ferret legging; in which you put ferrets down your pants while you’re not wearing underwear) to the “I wanna try” (Zorbing; seriously looks like fun), to the eye-rolling (his chapter-long rant on baseball), to the certifiably insane (bull poker). Not to be outdone, there’s a chapter on drinking games (did you know there’s a world series of beer pong?), the world championship Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament, and the Finnish “sport” of Saunaing (or whatever they call it).
It’s a completely useless book — there’s really nothing of value in here, unless you want to impress people with your synonyms for vomit — but it’s entertaining. Or, at least, it tries very hard to be.
See, Reilly’s use of similes drove me completely batty. Literally. I laughed at them at first, but as the book wore on, I grimaced and eventually rolled my eyes. I wish I had the actual book in front of me, so I could write a few of them down; they were literally that bad. And all over the place. Which I found highly distracting.
Still, it wasn’t enough for me to give up the rubberneck value of the book: the sports were so bad, I had to see what Reilly would find out next.
Oh, and for the record, the dumbest sport? Chess boxing.
Rated: High for language. It was going OK, but then about halfway through, he drops (quoting someone) about a half-dozen f-bombs. Killed a milder rating. Also: naked biking (the less said about that, the better).
Click here to purchase your copy of Sports from Hell on Amazon.
