Rave sports!!

Wow, this sounds like fun!

Make way for the greatest sport ever invented

Blackminton - in all its Day-Glo shuttlecocks-in-the-dark glory - is the first time the spheres of cool and sport have collided.

Steven Wells

July 19, 2007 1:50 PM

Some sports are so patently in need of improvement, and those improvements are so ridiculously obvious, that one suspects the status quo is only maintained by some vast and sinister conspiracy.

Rugby union, for instance, would obviously be massively improved if it became rugby league. And who wouldn't much rather see Tiger Woods weave his way through an insanely imaginative miniature/crazy golf course - as opposed to the tedious every-hole-the-bloody-same borathons he slogs through at present?

Basketball would be way cooler if it got rid of all the breaks and time-outs. Baseball could learn from all the crazy innovations that have recently made cricket watchable for the first time in 300+ years. And American football would be way cooler if the squads were halved so the same players had to play attack and defence and weren't allowed to trot off for oxygen, massages, Gatorade and a nice long sit down every time it looked like the precious lambs might be about to break into a bit of a sweat.

And, of course, as anyone who tried to sit though the arse-aching slogfest of this year's men's tournament at Wimbledon can testify, tennis should be first to 21 - inna old skool ping pong stylee.

And then there's badminton, which is much more fun than tennis. In fact - as Lee Calvert pointed out on this very site - badminton kicks tennis's ass.

But can badminton be improved? Hell yes.

There's speedminton - faster than badminton with a bigger, harder shuttlecock. With speedminton you can say goodbye to boring old net misery and play across rooftops, on mountains and in deserted swimming pools and shit. It's todally sick.

And then there's Blackminton - invented by the same crazy Germans who invented speedminton.

As sick as speedminton is, blackminton is way sicker, deffer and phatter. It's speedminton played in black light with a luminous shuttlecock while wearing crazy Day-Glo fluorescent rave slap. And is therefore the best sport ever invented ever by anyone.

In the words of New York based cultural critic Tom Cowell: "It's less about exercise and more about dressing up like a cyberpunk-rocker and pretending to be in the movie Tron. Rules take a back seat to sprinting about like an electrified lunatic and looking really cool doing it. For a helpful image, think of the street gangs from The Warriors playing laser tag with squash rackets while recreating the video for Pop Will Eat Itself's Ich Bin Ein Auslander as directed by Steven Wells and Nick Small of Gob TV. This is the answer to America's obesity crisis."

So blackminton is an improvement on speedminton which is an improvement on badminton which is an improvement on tennis which isn't quite as good as ping pong.

But blackminton is also a massive improvement on the disco dancing phenomenon known as raving. At a rave young people who have taken a drug that makes them twitch to simple music designed to be twitched to by people who've taken the aforementioned drug, twitch. While covered in crazy Day-Glo fluorescent rave slap and waving glo-sticks.

Well blackminton is exactly like that but without the drugs and with someone keeping score. In short, it's the first ever cool sport. Meaning two spheres that have been kept entirely separate for millennia - cool shit that bad teenagers like doing and sport - have been joined to create a sexy Siamese new thing.

This collision of cool and anti-cool might result in an explosion that destroys the universe. Or it might not. My bet is the innate German-ness of blackminton will act as a safety valve, rendering the sport just uncool enough to avert any potential matter-meets-antimatter style meltdown. Praise be.