Sports Feature Balls, Goats, Explosives

Aug. 30, 2002 — -- Baseball, football and basketball use balls. Hockey uses a puck. But if you're going to play buzkashi, you need a headless goat.

This detail might trip up your average beer-chugging American armchair sports fan.

But why stop at Afghan buzkashi and its goat carcass? Thai fish fighting requires vicious fish. And in Colombia, tejo involves explosives.

Welcome to the weird, wild world of sports — where you can find hulking Scots tossing what resemble telephone poles, and Argentines on horseback tossing a stand-in for live ducks.

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Before you laugh, though, understand it's not just a foreign thing: Americans have their own heritage of competitive lumberjack wood-chopping, wife-carrying competitions, flagpole sitting and "pulling the goose."

Across cultures and "throughout human history, there's always been sports and people have always come out with ways to entertain themselves," says David Levinson, a cultural anthropologist and co-editor of the globe-spanning Encyclopedia of World Sport.

"On a local level, some of these sports still exist," Levinson says. "You don't see them on television. You don't see them on the sports page."

On the other hand, some pretty odd sports are on TV.

The hammer throw and curling, a shuffleboard-type ice game played with stones and brooms, are both Olympic events.

Wood-chopping, pole-scaling and other lumberjack competitions are part of ESPN's Great Outdoor Games. The sports channel (owned by Disney, parent company of ABCNEWS.com) also carries the World's Strongest Man competitions, which feature boulder lifting, car pulling and truck-tire flipping.

In the 1980s, dwarf-tossing made the airwaves, and Mr. T rose to prominence by winning the televised America's Toughest Bouncer competition — which involved running an obstacle course around barstools and bar rails, tossing a 120-pound stuntman and breaking down a door.

Perhaps not ready for prime time yet, though, are sports such as Ba', a traditional game in Kirkwall, Scotland. A ball is tossed into a surging crowd of Uppies and Doonies — men representing families originally from opposite sides of town — who push and shove at the mob and try to smuggle the ball to designated landmarks in opposition territory.