Introducing WhirlyBall, The Sport of Drunks

[matcom]

<snip>

Rookie Richard Busich comes prepared for practice. When you're the youngest player on the third-best WhirlyBall team in the nation, you can't mess around.

He has his training uniform: jeans, Bruce Lee T-shirt, and baseball hat turned backward over long, dark hair. And he has his modified scoop: a lacrosse stick from Dick's, taped for battle. Confident, he steps inside the large Bedford Heights warehouse, walking past the laser-tag arena without a second glance.

Game on. Game friggin' on.

WhirlyBall can be called a sport in the same tenuous way an El Camino can be called a truck. If horse racing is the sport of kings, this is the sport of drunks.

Think of it as lacrosse, only played with plastic sticks. There are five players to a side, whose goal is to toss a hard rubber ball through hoops mounted at each end of the court. Two points for a basket. Three if you can hit from half-court.

But here's the wild card: It's played on 300-pound bumper cars with no steering wheels. Navigation happens mostly by accident, by twisting a lever that sits between the player's legs. The directions are reversed for no apparent reason. To go right, the player steers left. To go left, the player steers right. To go backward, the player winds the lever and makes a wish.

It's easier to steer when you're drunk, which explains the bar five feet from the court entrance.

Players can bump and block, but they cannot ram or slash each other with sticks. Unless they are drunk (see above). "It's a little more physically demanding than foosball," says David Frey.

Rick Morad owns the WhirlyBall facility off Richmond Road. He built the two courts in 1987, after discovering the sport in Vegas. Later, he trained the Ohio team that plays at the nationals every year. You could say he single-handedly brought the sport to Northeast Ohio. But why would you say such a thing?

http://clevescene.com/issues/2005-04-27/news/news.html

[Worst Username Ever]

1. Best. Sport. EVER.

[GOPisEvil]

2. So naturally you're starting a league!

:P

[matcom]

3. i'm already WORLD CHAMPION!

i play on the Tunisian team :D

[GOPisEvil]

4. Damn Flint for getting better!

x(

[grace0418]

5. I love Whirlyball!

It's seriously dangerous and really stupid but so much freaking fun. The rules state that you're not supposed to deliberately crash into one another but that's really just a legality to protect the owners of the court when someone kills themselves. Because when I played everyone was crashing into one another as hard as possible and no one said a word to us. We were laughing sooooooo hard. I got a huge bruise on my leg because every time someone crashed into me, my leg would slam into the metal steering wheel. But I didn't care, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.