Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook

Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.

With poker taking a break, it's a good time to ponder what will end up replacing it as TV's non-sport sports du jour.

It's a tricky thing. When judging which leisure activities translate to hit TV, you never quite know what will stick. For every hit like televised poker, there's a miss like televised Magic: The Gathering. World lumberjack championships get their own made-for-ESPN coverage; world air guitar championships do not. ESPN is offering coverage of the world Scrabble championships, but you don't get the sense that ratings will be the Nielsen equivalent of a triple word score.

Even if something becomes a hit, like poker, it's only a matter of time before the backlash sets in. Somewhere, there's a hulky Dane named Thor bitter that ESPN2 dropped their World's Strongest Man coverage, and now he has to stack enormous rocks atop a wall on his own time.

With this in mind, I offer to any network the following ideas for these untried, untested, sports-like events:

World Series of Knitting: Knitting is hot among the hipsters, so they say, and the World Series of Knitting can serve as the Interpol-worshipping crowd's equivalent of gymnastics. As in, knitters can enter individual competitions in crochet, cross-stitch, purling, quilting and darning, or they can go for the all-around title by competing in every category. Unlike gymnastics, competitors may be older than 16, eat regularly, have breasts and not get yelled at daily by an expatriate Romanian.

World Freeze Tag Tour: You may think of freeze tag as a game that 6-year-olds play in suburban back yards, but think again. The tour will send players to exotic locations such as the Taj Mahal, the Kalahari Desert and Graceland for nonstop action. Well, nonstop except for when somebody gets tagged and frozen. Each game will reflect the vagaries of how it's played at each location. For example, whether the item you can hang onto to avoid being tagged is called "safe," "base" or "glue."

Celebrity Marco Polo: All those big Hollywood stars have pools, right? So why not use them for America's favorite childhood swimming game? When Ben Affleck yells "Marco," Danny DeVito, Wayne Brady, Kathy Bates and Kim "Tootie" Fields yell "Polo!" On second thought, maybe the show would get better ratings if it had celebrities who looked good in bathing suits.

Solitaire: The success of this program is based on the notion that no matter who's playing this game, no one can help themselves from standing behind the player and saying things like, "You forgot to put that red 4 on that black 5." The show will be linked with an online alert viewers can click when, indeed, the player forgets to put that red 4 on that black 5.

The National Acrostics Tournament: What are acrostics, you say? Acrostics are crossword puzzles in which the letters to each clue answer correspond to a series of numbered blanks and spaces. Typically, the numbered blanks and spaces create a sentence from a famous literary work, and the first letter of each clue answer spells out the author and title of the work. If it sounds like the sort of thing old ladies love to do, you're right. But I do them, too, and I believe this event could be my chance to make the jump from columnist to TV commentator, like Norman Chad did with the World Series of Poker.

I even have some commentary ready: "The secret to great acrostic playing is knowing when that three-letter word with H in the middle is 'the' or 'who.'" Or how about, "Wow, now he's just filling in letters for the sake of filling in letters!" Or maybe, "The answer to the clue 'North American elk' is always, always, always 'wapiti!' How in the world did he get to this level of competition without figuring that out?"

Any of these could take off into a cultural phenomenon, defined as a breathless local TV-news sweeps report on "this emerging trend." Or not. But if they do, please e-mail me to find out where to send the checks.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.