All Sports Deserves an All-Star Game

JSG MetaNote: I posted this and a few other things on my old Substack but it got lost in the shuffle of site migrations, so I’m re-posting from the email version because I like it. If you also like it, hooray for kindred spirits! Please consider subscribing for more nonsense like this.

The history of the “all-star game” in sports is pretty fascinating. Well, fascinating to read about. Pretty boring to write about in my case because there’s not much to say that Wikipedia hasn’t covered. Although I will show you my favorite part of the article about the Aztec Bowl:

It has become prestigious for Team USA or Team Mexico to win the Aztec Bowl, because they are trying to win it for their country.^{[citation needed]}

Come on, Wikipedia. Citation needed? Just let them have this. The Aztec Bowl isn’t an Olympic gold medal, but that’s some shady bitch behavior.

Anyway: All-star games. Sure, they aren’t perfect, but they’re fun! They have celebrity pro-am games and playground games and skill drills and derbies and dunk contests and all sorts of cool stuff. The games themselves are never exactly consequential, and most attempts to make them so have been, uh, lightly received. But they’re still marquee events in the sports calendar and, setting aside the actual championship game(s), one of the best ways to showcase the players and the product to a broader audience.

Which raises today’s question: Why don’t all sports do an all-star game?

I’m gonna run through a bunch of different sports and create some semblance of an all-star game for each. My main goals will be:

1. To create a unique showcase for that particular sport
2. To give viewers and attendees an entertaining spectacle
3. To generate as much mainstream crossover interest as possible
   
   And my secret goal:
4. To get at least one governing body to implement these ideas and give me all the credit, thus becoming an overnight sensation slash billionaire

That should all be easy and fun! Let’s get started.

Golf

Let’s start with the sport where I’m most stunned there isn’t presently an ASG of some kind. Golf is enormously popular and boasts some of the most recognizable names in sports history. How recognizable? Mononym recognizable. Tiger. Jack. Arnie. Seve. The list goes on. I mean, Nick Faldo was knighted, for God’s sake. Recent estimates suggest there are at least 15,000 golf courses in the United States alone, a country where golf was not even invented. Saudi Arabia just paid something like $45 gaztrillion dollars to woo like three PGA golfers over to LIV. It is a big deal.

But I’m not here to sell you on the sport, I’m here to design an all-star game. So for one weekend a year, at a rotating golf club somewhere in the world, I propose the following:

• Skill Contests: This one’s pretty easy, right? You probably already know the main skills people would want to see. Longest Drive, Closest to the Pin, Most Consistent Placement, etc. But the twist is that, on one hole, the clubs are reversed. You must drive with your putter and putt with your driver, with only irons in the middle.
  
  Holes in golf are mostly built on a sliding spectrum from power to technique, from bombing drives to pinpoint putts. Let’s put the pros through the paces and see how they handle change. Also, I think it’d be funny if they made them do the “pool cue” style putting on one hole. Just for funsies.
• Mini-Games: Golf benefits from already having a version of itself with “mini” in the name. Let’s get our pros playing mini-golf! Who doesn’t want to see Rory McIlroy get his putt rejected by a horrifying clown?
  Also, I think there should be a game called “Golf Royale” where all the competitors chip onto the green and whoever’s ball is closest to the hole (or in it) gets points. The rub: It’s curling rules, so your ball can be bounced around and hit away by other players, who get last mover advantage. Mostly I just envision, like, 50 golf balls all flying toward a hole at once like arrows in a medieval movie.
• Pro-Am: Remember how popular The Match is? And remember how it draws in guys like Patrick Mahomes, Tom Brady, and more? That’s a legit spectacle. How do we make it better? More celebrities.
  
  I want a relay-style six-hole match of four players per team, captained by a professional golfer, where everyone has to play in order no matter the shot. Prize is $10 million. Let’s get Scott Scheffler, Ariana Grande, Luka Doncic and Deadmaus together and see who has the best short game!

Tennis

Like golf, tennis is enormously popular around the world. I suspect a big factor in both is that they’re so focused on the individuals. It’s just player versus opponent, and oftentimes, player versus themselves. The games are as psychological as they are technical. And unlike team sports, no one wears helmets or pads or anything. You get to see real, flesh-and-blood people out there, battling through hardship. It’s very visceral.

All of that said, tennis is also a game about hitting stuff with a weapon. It’s Capital F Fun! Let’s lean into that, shall we?”

• Skill Contests: If we can’t get our tennis stars serve from the baseline and aim for differently-sized pylons, knocking them over for points, why did we even bother inventing tennis? This would test accuracy and power, and watching Coco Gauff or Daniil Medvedev tee off against helpless pylons would be awesome. Also, we should turn the judge’s chair into a dunk tank, and whoever sends them splashing down first wins money for charity. Needless to say, the “judge” should always be John McEnroe.
• Mini-Games: In theory, tennis really only requires a ball, a racket, and a net. But all sorts of stuff can be used as a racket. Semi-famously, Andy Roddick once won a match using a frying pan. Let’s see how many returns a player can hit off of a ball launcher using old wooden rackets, frying pans, wrapping paper tubes, oversized boxing gloves, you name it. For that matter, let’s see how well they collect tennis balls in a Hungry Hungry Hippos-style game. No longer are children the ones responsible for ball retrieval: four players, one in each segment of the court, must scramble to gather as many balls as possible before time runs out. Run faster, Djokovic! Show me your inner hippo!
• Pro-Am: Like golf, tennis is (mostly) approachable to everyone, and I like that. The easy answer here is, of course, celebrity mixed doubles. The better answer here, though, is seeing if anyone who isn’t a professional can return a serve successfully. 50 balls, one pro serving up lasers, one celebrity who wins $10,000 per returned shot that lands inbounds on the other side of the net. Everyone wins!

Bowling

I’ll be honest: I don’t watch a ton of bowling. I don’t do a ton of it, either. I’m not very good at it and I never have been. In theory, it’s right up my alley*, given that it’s more about technique than skill (and you can eat nachos while you do it, which: why isn’t that part of more sports?). It just never clicked with me. But if I were invited to the first-ever PBA All-Star Game — which I both hope and expect to be — here’s what I’d want:

• Bumper bowling, where the ball has to hit at least once per side before it strikes the pins or it’s an open frame.
• Drunk bowling, where every time you don’t get a strike you have to drink a beer before the next frame starts.
• Speed bowling! Whoever knocks over the most pins in 5-7 minutes wins. None of that weird bowling math of strikes and spares, just pure pin count. I assume pin resetting technology is good enough to make this work.
• Psych-Out Bowling! Remember the old show Let’s Bowl on Comedy Central? And/or the movie Baseketball? Both featured one thing that more sports generally need: intentional distractions during otherwise mundane moments. Any idiot can roll a ball down a lane. (Trust me, even I can do that part.) But how would Pete Weber do if he had someone blowing an air horn as he went to throw? Or scattering sugar on the lane to make the ball go all sorts of weird directions? Or making vulgar comments about his mother and his heritage and the things he was going to do with Weber’s mother later? Probably wouldn’t throw a perfect game, I can tell you that much.
• 100-Pin Bowling: Okay, I don’t know how possible this one is, but one of the challenges I remember from Wii Sports was to take the standard pin arrangement (four rows, 10 pins) and mega-size it (14 rows, 100 pins). I’m not exaggerating when I say this is something I think about at least a couple times per year. How fun would it be to do this in real life? Incredibly fun, I suspect. Watching a professional do it would be the next-best thing.

*This pun was totally unintentional, believe it or not. Apologies for the pun sensitive. I promise I’ll do better.

Rock Climbing

My wife has gotten super into rock climbing in recent years, an interest that is at least in part sustained by my sister-in-law and her husband. They’re all pretty into it, down to watching competitive climbers do their thing in worldwide events I never knew existed.

Having been exposed to this world a bit, I gotta say: These athletes are freakishly incredible. Ninja Warrior gets a lot of hype for the wild things it makes its competitors do, and rightly so. Sport climbing is basically the same thing, just more vertical. Gravity is one of the fundamental forces in the universe, and watching a 5-foot-1 Japanese woman tell gravity to go fuck itself is something else.

But climbing is, by worldwide standards, a pretty niche sport. Or at least it will be until my all-star game gets implemented. Consider:

• The Aggro Crag: You guys remember Nickelodeon GUTS, right? Because you’re all … I mean, I’m in my late 30s and … you know what, forget it, the point here is that show pitted three contestants against each other in a race to the top of a fake mountain — a mountain that threw strobes, glitter, falling prop rocks and more at its climbers, all of which were children. Adults could handle that! They could probably do it even if the crag had overhang sections. Best of all, they’d win a piece of the crag as a trophy!

• Soapy Stairs: Now, this is a different sport entirely, but I think it’d be fun to see these climbers try to “climb” ESPN8’s soapy stairs. Your physical strength won’t keep you safe from slapstick comedy, Adam Ondra!

  • As a quick aside: Who do you suppose came up with slippery stairs, and what was their goal? Was it just the pure physical chaos of people trying to climb while getting wet and soapy? Was there some sort of weird punishment/retribution aspect to the concept? Was it a misguided and deeply weird sex thing? I bet it was a weird sex thing.

• Corporate Ladder Climbing: No one can doubt the climbing prowess of our all-stars. At least, not when it comes to rock walls. But climbing the corporate ladder is a whole other skillset. What better way to get to know our competitors than to put them in the high-pressure, fast-paced world of corporate domination? I figure each climber will be given 30 minutes to prepare a pitch for a randomly-chosen sponsor’s product and whoever does the most compelling job wins. It’d also be a great showcase for new gear, which I’m sure sponsors would go nuts for. Ball’s in your court, Arcteryx.

Dog Shows

Hear me out. Dog shows aren’t technically “sports” and the dogs aren’t really “athletes” in the way we usually think about it. The American Kennel Club is great, sure. The Puppy Bowl is adorable, of course. But where’s the staying power? The animals that enter the public conscious are just as quickly forgotten about. There’s no staying power. There’s no brand recognition. Quick, who’s the most famous dog you know? Better yet, just start naming famous dogs. How many did you get through before you started naming fictional ones? My guess is zero.

The truth is, dogs are more famous as fictional characters than real animals, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s their relatively short lifespan? Or — and thank you for bearing with me, here’s the payoff — maybe it’s because we don’t know how to actually give the best dogs the crossover celebrity appeal they deserve.

An American Kennel Club all-star game would fix that. Consider:

• Team Agility Course: I could watch dogs run through agility courses all day long. It’s incredible. It’s doubly incredible when you consider that afterward, the dogs often look like the happiest beings in the world. If I have to get up to answer the doorbell, I’m agitated. If you made me crawl through a tunnel and jump over poles for fun? I’d throw you in front of a moving car.
  
  But what really needs addressing is the workload distribution. The dog has to do all the hard stuff while the handler just sort of jogs around offering commands. That’s not fair — so we should make both parties do their own size-appropriate agility courses. Hey, I love watching your Ridgeback slalom through pylons. Now it’s your turn, human! Hurry up — your dog is already at the finish line! Move, move move!
• Human Grooming Challenge: Hear me out again. No, I don’t want the dogs to actually do the grooming. Giving dogs access to clippers, scissors and delicious-looking Barbicide is a terrible idea. But what dogs can do is pick things out for their humans! We’ve all seen animals picking the winners of sporting events, like our dear friend Paul the Octopus. We’ve seen Jimmy Fallon have puppies predict the outcomes of all sorts of stuff.What if we expanded on that and had the competition dogs dress up their humans with a similar random-choice mechanic? Set out five toys, each with one outfit written on a card in front. Whichever toy the dog picks, that’s what their human wears. Do the same with hair, makeup, accessories, hats, and so on. Whichever dog does the best job prognosticating based on the theme wins. Best of all, we’ll get plenty of ridiculous-looking people lined up next to each other, getting judged just like the dogs do.

So there you go, everyone. Five sports, five ingenious all-star game ideas. I think I’ve pretty thoroughly satisfied Objectives 1-3, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think these all had the potential for adoption. I’m expecting Objective 4 to be completed as well. I’m waiting for your calls, sports organizations.