The ESPN3 Chronicles: Finding the most random stuff we can watch

We’ve watched a World Team Tennis game already as part of The ESPN3 Chronicles. It’s a weird variant on a sport, with a lot of the rules of tennis but a lot of rules that are intentionally different than the tennis we’re used to. But this takes the cake kake for weirdness: a game of doubles with just three people:

Tonight was the Eastern Conference Championships of World Team Tennis, a sport you and I and everybody else have probably not heard of. It pitted the Washington Kastles -- three-time defending champs, also a team whose name is “The Kastles” -- against the Philadelphia Freedoms -- a team whose name is “Freedoms.”

I don’t mean to be the judge of whether video games -- if you prefer, eSports -- are sports.

There are valid arguments on both sides. On the one hand, they require tremendous amounts of strategy, teamwork, and perhaps most of all, execution, all of which can only be acquired after hours and hours and hours of training to master the complex techniques and skills that lead to victory.

Some sports have certain things with which they are infrangibly linked. When we think of golf, we think of dads, and/or snooty country club members. When we think of lacrosse, we think of bros. We always will, forever and ever.

When I think of ultimate frisbee, I think of two people: One is a long-haired stoner who quit the school’s ultimate team because of the time commitment and made our intramural team good. Another is a friend who told the story of how he and some friends got high, forgetting his team’s IM frisbee game, then being reminded of their game and destroying their opponent -- then facing the same team sober in the playoffs and losing horribly.

I took Friday off from the ESPN3 Chronicles, please forgive me. Although yesterday I chose to spend my time on a beautiful day outside instead of watching really weird sports on my computer, I assure you my dedication to watching really weird sports on my computer is as firm as ever.

We’ll admit: some days in the first week of the ESPN3 Chronicles, the ESPN3 crop wasn’t as plentiful as I hoped. “Haha, look, these two countries are playing in lacrosse! They’re different countries this time!”

There’s something splendid about international sports competitions that instills this wonderful sense of pride and joy in one’s country over something completely unrelated to everything about that country. Chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” as America scored during the World Cup was not endorsement of America’s foreign policies, it was simply taking a moment to love the place you are from.

There’s also something horrid about international sports competitions that instills this awful sense of hatred. Most in someone else’s country over something completely related to everything about that country. We should have been able to root against Germany without talking about a horrific war and genocide engendered by German people several decades before a different group of German people played soccer against the United States. A lot of people were not able to do that.

Germany won the World Cup yesterday, but perhaps more importantly, we watched the most horrible thing we’ve ever seen:

This was just a mean thing. This one group of people was clearly way way way better than this other group of people at something, and unfortunately, there were people with cameras and microphones forced to talk about it. If there were not people with cameras and microphones, this would have just been a few people kicking the crap out of a few other people in a sparsely attended lower division lacrosse game. Instead, it was streamed for free across the globe, so 11 people, including me, could watch it.