Professional Leagues For The World's Most Ridiculous Sports

The board game of Scrabble is single-handedly responsible for ensuring that paper dictionaries continue to be printed and for introducing the word KWJIBO to the world. While most people think of Scrabble as a game to be played during a power outage or while hanging out in a fallout shelter, the few and the proud members of the North American Scrabble Players Association think of the game as something more noble.

The HASBRO corporation used to organize official Scrabble tournaments until their executives started choking to death on that sweet Transformers cash. What the people at HASBRO never realized was that competitive Scrabble players are a little insane. In 2009, the North American Scrabble League was formed to fill the void that HASBRO couldn't find an intern to fill. Since then, the league has been overseeing Scrabble tournaments and set their 2017 championship in New Orleans. The Crescent City has survived invasions, fires, hurricanes, and some of the most impressively corrupt politicians in American history, but these Scrabble players just might do the city in.

Shortly after George Nissen invented the modern backyard trampoline in the 1930s, he dedicated his life to turning competitive trampolining into an actual sport. For reasons that probably involve blackmail photos, obsession, and a probable clerical error, competitive trampolining is now considered part of the gymnastics family of Olympic sports. Competitive Trampoline participants, or Trampletes as we like to call them, score points by bouncing in aesthetically pleasing and seemingly arbitrary ways.

One organization overseeing the sport of competitive bouncing is the Trampoline and DMT League. By their claims, the league has overseen 24,000 competitions, has thousands of members, and has given out actual cash as a prize to various competition winners, but as of this moment, the sport appears seems to lack fans who are not related in some way to a competitor.

Prior to Finland discovering death metal, the Finns invented the sport of Wife Carrying to prove how hard-core they are. According to Finnish legend, famed 19th-century bandit Ronkainen the Robber used a variation of Wife Carrying as a way of evaluating potential members of his merry band of thieves. Since then, Wife Carrying has become a rather progressive semi-legitimate sport, where couples (team members no longer have to be married) compete on an international level for fame, glory, and bragging rights.

In a Wife Carrying competition, men sprint through 235 meters of obstacles and water hazards while their female teammate clings to them for dear life. The women being carried must weigh at least 101 pounds, and those who fail to make weight will have weight bags strapped to them to level the playing field.

Every year, officially sanctioned wife carrying tournaments take place in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. The winners of those competitions then advance to the annual World Wife Carrying Championships in Sonkajaervi, Finland, where the true insanity begins. Prizes are awarded for the fastest completion, best costumes, creativity, and best couple. As humorous as the sport sounds, it would be wise not to poke too much fun at an individual who can quickly run through an obstacle course with a human being strapped to his back.

For readers who have never been on a cruise ship or visited a retirement community (go visit your grandma more), shuffleboard competitors use a stick the length of a pool cue to push a disc across a slick surface to a scoring area. As far as excitement for spectators goes, shuffleboard ranks somewhere between watching paint dry and competitive beard growing. With all of that in mind, the International Shuffleboard League (ISL) formed in 1979 to feed world's insatiable appetite for competitive shuffleboard.

The ISL serves as an umbrella organization for the various competitive leagues around the world and seems to be serving the sport well. Their website is updated regularly and has some pretty nifty animation. Taking advantage of an abundance of empty stadiums, the ISL will be holding their 2017 tournament in Brazil, where the winner will most likely join the ISL Hall Of Fame, which is a thing. It seems that with the infrastructure the ISL has in place, the league appears to be just be a minor sex scandal or two away from complete legitimacy.

For many of us, the card game memory holds a special place in our hearts. Memory was the game that taught us how to notice freckles and strategically fold the edge of a card so it could be found more efficiently later, and both of those skills can become extremely useful later in life. While the majority of Memory players leave the game behind quickly after they discovered videogames, recreational arson, or the opposite sex, some Memory players continued to play variations of the game well into adulthood.

Memory players now emerge from their mothers' basements and dingy studio apartments to journey to the annual World Memory Championship. Every year, the World Memory Sports Council invites players from thirty countries to meet to play ten different versions of Memory over a three-day period for the title of the world's greatest Memory player. We could make a joke about the best memory player, but in all honesty, we had to Google the spelling of the word "memory" too many times to be in a position to mock anyone so gifted in that department.

Hobbyhorses are toys consisting of wooden sticks with a stuffed horse head attached at one end. Unless the hobby horse is owned by a serial killer, the head is usually made out of cotton and fabric. Recently in Finland and Sweden, young women have turned playtime into an actual sport by riding hobbyhorses in competition. During these, the participants wear traditional equestrian outfits and ride their hobby horse through an obstacle course. After completing the course, the participants are given a score based on a variety of factors, and then a winner is determined.

The most recent hobbyhorse competition saw upward of 10,000 young women participating at the annual Finnish Hobbyhorse Championships. Fans of more traditional equestrian activity are a little confused by the growing popularity of the sport but generally agree it is a good thing that the participants are doing something besides staring at their phone for the entire day. The sport is growing to the point to where a slick looking documentary has been made about the phenomenon, and according to the scholars at IMDB, the film is not a scripted comedy.

It truly is a strange and wonderful time to be alive.