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Ms. Darbus: This school is about more than just young men in baggy shorts flinging balls for touchdowns!
Coach Bolton: Baskets! They shoot baskets!
Jason: Joe Montana fades back to pass. He sees Jerry Rice open in the end zone! Peter: Wrong team. Jason: He sees Derrick Thomas open in the end zone! Peter: Wrong position. Jason: He sees Wayne Gretzky open in the end zone! Peter: Wrong sport.
Many Sitcoms use the gimmick of the sports episode, usually setting the man up to be humiliated by a woman. When this happens, the writers will use the most basic terminology available, and most of the time not even get that right. Most of the time, the sport is just out of reach of most of the viewing audience, but rest assured that some sports fanatic will find fault with it.
This is especially egregious when the protagonist is supposed to be a sports writer.
Films usually avert this trope, as the writers there will generally have plenty of time to research for the script. Television, however, only gets seven days of shooting.
The trope name doesn't actually come from any examples; it's just a great example of a person afflicted with this trope. (For those not in on it: Wayne Gretzky is basically the most famous ice hockey player ever to live... and ice hockey uses a puck, not a ball.)
See also Critical Research Failure. Screw The Rules I Have Plot is the version of this trope for games that only exist in the work of fiction.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Okay, so it's a shonen series and thus we can expect liberties with everything, but the portrayal of American football in Eyeshield 21 is at times just plain wrong. No, you can't grab a blocker's jersey and fling them to the ground; neither can you punch another player, whether it's to block them or to tackle them. Despite handwaving with comments like "American football is a violent sport", the referees should be showing up more than twice in the entire series. Still, it gets the basic rules right, which is more can be said for most examples on this page.
- Even more so with The Prince Of Tennis, aside from the gravity- and physics-defying shots the characters use.
- In the American near-Gag Dub of Digimon Adventure, Tai Kamiya is a soccer player who apparently doesn't play much else. He was rather prone to mixed sporting metaphors, such as "Bases loaded, two outs! And we need a slam dunk!"
- Code Geass and chess. One match had the white player put his own king in check. Meaning, of course, this guy who claims he's never lost a game of chess to Lelouch doesn't know how to play. And Lelouch doesn't even call him on it. (Granted, he was trying to give up, but you can just tip the king over if you want to do that.)
- It is worth noting that in shogi, the "Japanese chess" (so to speak), you can put your king in check. This may be a mistake or an intentional merging of the rules.
- This can also be taken symbolically, with Schneizel handing Lelouch victory (through pointing out the flagrant rule violation) on a silver platter to see if he'll take the easy win, and Lelouch refusing to go for it.
- The symbolism was that, by moving his king next to Lelouch's, Schneizel was attempting to choose Zero's next movefor him. If Zero was too proud to allow his moves to be chosen for him by Schneizel, then that would prove to Schneizel that Zero was definitely Lelouch with his memories recovered. The Wall Banger here is that under the rules Lelouch had a perfectly simple way out- all he had to do was point out that Schneizel's move is illegal and Schneizel would be forced to take it back and make a legal move. Instead he fell for the ploy (even though he knew perfectly well what Schneizel was doing) by moving his king AWAY from Schneizel's.
- In that game, Lelouch moves his king out early, saying that if the king doesn't lead, the troops won't follow. Fine analogy, but such an incredibly bad chess strategy that it doesn't even fall under "difference of opinion" or "debatable." Conclusion: Lelouch never won against Schneizel because he is the only chess player in the world worse than Schneizel.
- It's made clear that Schneizel never lost a match ever. It's unclear how that happened when he does the same thing that Lelouch does with the King. How did Clovis and multiple noblemen lose to a 17 year old who think moving the King is a good idea?
- Captain Tsubasa has a variation: while most of soccer/football's rules are respected, the players make impossible moves, and use strategies that are pathethic for anyone that understands the sport, all in name of the plot. The matches depicted on the show also have muuuuch more goals than real life's scores.
- But then it comes an episode (in the Road to 2002 series) where the main focus is a referee that was, apparently, being unfair. The episode then takes a while to talk about referee's methods and other stuff... but then you stop to think about it - this is an anime that never gives a damn thing about referees. Characters are constantly getting severely injured in the middle of matches, sometimes in the most blatant ways
 , and nobody lifts a finger. All for the sake of awesome, sure, but sends the anime squarely into this trope.
- one of the Clásicos between Barcelona and Real Madrid ended 6x5 for Barça!!. One of the goals in that match had Rivaul try to do an overhead/bicycle kick, only to see Madrid's defender trying to block it. He stopped the kick in mid-air and and instead did an impossible pass to right, where Tsubasa was. Tsubasa then did his own bicycle kick and scored the goal.see it in all its glory.
Film
- The 1993 movie Rookie Of The Year involves a 12-year-old boy making the major leagues due to a freak arm injury that allows him to throw 100+ MPH. In real life, sixteen is the minimum allowed age for a major leaguer. Obviously, this was a liberty that needed to be taken, or it wouldn't be much of a movie.
- Similarly, the 1994 movie Little Big League involves a 12-year-old boy who inherits ownership of a major league baseball team, and appoints himself manager. Even if the age issue could be overlooked, Major League Baseball rules forbid on-field managers from owning a stake in the team. This rule was invoked when then-Braves owner Ted Turner tried to appoint himself manager in 1977.
- If this prohibits players from owning a stake as well, then Major League 2 gives an example when Roger Dorn, then-owner of the Indians, activates himself. (Not that way, you pervs!) Rectified later in the movie when he's forced due to financial problems to sell the team back to Rachel Phelps.
- Actually, he activated himself after he sold the team, so this example wouldn't count. It does count if front office executives can't be active, since Dorn had been named general manager as part of the sale.
- These are situations where Ain't No Rule should apply, but it doesn't, because there is a rule.
- The climax of many golf movies is almost always predicated on the "golden rule of golf": Play the ball as it lies. This is almost always presented as an immutable law of physics, even when such a play would make a golfer's body contort in ways that would make a member of Cirque Du Soleil scream in pain. Apparently, the writers have never heard of the "unplayable lie" rule, which, in real life, can be taken for any shot, even one safely in the fairway. It does carry with it a penalty stroke, and you can't use it to get yourself closer to the hole, but you can do it.
- Used and subverted in Happy Gilmore, where Jerk Jock Shooter McGavin has to play the ball off the foot of the title character's former boss-turned-fan (played by Richard "Jaws" Kiel). Later, when a broadcasting tower falls between Happy and the 18th hole and Shooter insists that Happy has to play it. Happy's friends tell him to use the unplayable lie rule and win in the tie-breaker, but Happy plays the ball using his not-so-Training From Hell minigolf skills to sink it.
- Many boxing movies (most notably the later Rocky installments and Million Dollar Baby) have dramatic scenes when boxers throw cheap shots after the bell rings. But in a real boxing match, doing so will result in automatic disqualification. (This happened to Mike Tyson during one of his "comeback fights" a couple years back.)
- This concept was parodied in Scary Movie 4 during the Million Dollar Baby segment. One of the contenders bites the ref's ear off Mike Tyson style and only "got a point taken off".
- In all fairness, Tyson only lost two points for the first bite. It was the second bite that got him booted.
- As far as Million Dollar Baby goes, the most prominent example ended Maggie's career, so it really doesn't matter what the official record showed –- although chances are, having to forfeit the match would be the least of the other boxer's concerns.
- Days of Thunder and Driven were extremely inaccurate depictions of NASCAR and CART racing. It's doubly bad, since the film crews spent months following the real series around while filming. You'd have thought they could have done some research, or at least omitted the scene of the main characters having an impromptu grudge match in their race cars through the evening Chicago rush hour. Or realizing that a NASCAR team needs more than one car. Or that even Tom Cruise couldn't pass everybody else in the race in the last three laps at Daytona. Unless he's an AI driver.
- When this Troper watched Days of Thunder, he got the feeling that it didn't show Cruise passing the entire field in the last three laps of the final race, but that the scene just sped through all the remaining laps in the final minute. A more egregious error was during the Darlington race earlier in the movie - the driver would have lost a lot more than just two positions with the extra time he spent on pit road.
- In the blue-collar football movie The Replacements, the Sentinels run a play (called "Kick-ass" in the huddle) in which they run over, clothesline, drop-kick, or otherwise pummel an opposing defender. When assessing penalties, the referee asks for help when adding the yardage together from multiple flags, eventually calling it 45 yards. Pro football, of course, has no provision for additive penalties on a single team. "Unnecessary roughness" would be called, a 15-yard penalty assessed, and several players possibly thrown out of the game for flagrantly attacking an opposing player. The movie is on the comedic side of the action/sports genre, but it is by no means slapstick (the football scenes themselves are played fairly straighforwardly).
- Considering that earlier in the movie almost an entire team committed a false start and they only gave the team 5 yards, I'm pretty sure that the "Kick-ass" penalties being added on was entirely put in there for comedic effect and was not due to a lack of knowledge.
- Actually, in the event of multiple "Unsportsmanlike Conduct" penalties, which would have likely been called on each "kick ass player" the rules stipulate to treat them as separate dead ball penalties. Therefore a play which results in three separate U.C. penalties would result in a 45 yard penalty.
- For contrast, in Necessary Roughness, a similar penalty series is called, but it fits better with the overall goofy tone of the movie.
- Horse Feathers has to be deliberate, as there is no way anybody could possibly think that the ref would let somebody ride down the field in a chariot and use every spare football in said chariot as a separate touchdown, no matter how much bribery was involved.
- It was The Marx Brothers. Of course it was deliberate.
- Averted at the climax of Little Giants. The Giants' last play of the game, called "The Annexation of Puerto Rico" by its geeky play caller, was a legal play (at least at the time; it has since been banned by the ruling body of Pee-Wee football). It's better known as the "fumblerooski".
- Used to very painful effect in the Wesley Snipes version of The Fan. Live video replay on the Jumbotron (which is not allowed), video of arguments between players or brawls (also not allowed), a player getting his number assigned on Opening Day (numbers are assigned during Spring Training), the climactic scene occurring at a baseball game played during a monsoon...it would be easier to list what the movie got right. Such things do NOT include the long shot featuring a batter from BOTH teams warming up in their respective on-deck circles, and then later showing Snipes' character go directly from the dugout to the batter's box.
- In the 1963 Disney film Son of Flubber, Professor Brainard comes up with an ingenious way to help the local high school football team win: he'll fill up a player's uniform with his new discovery, "flubber gas", to make him light and buoyant. The other players, instead of passing just the ball, will throw him with the ball, so even if he is tackled, the team will retain possession of the ball. The only problem with such a ploy? It's illegal. Rule 17 section 6 of the official football rulebook, passed in 1910, specifically outlaws players on the offensive team from pushing, pulling, or holding the player carrying the ball. Nobody in the film, including the referees, seem to be aware of this.
- Similarly, in its predecessor The Absent-Minded Professor, the same flubber gives basketball players shoes that allows them to take gigantic leaps. Unfortunately, upon landing without passing the ball, they would be immediately called for travelling... at least in real life. Guess the refs were too in awe to call it. ...or they could be NBA refs.
- The movie It Happens Every Spring is about a college professor who discovers a wood-repellent compound and uses this discovery to become a successful major league pitcher. The movie never addresses the fact that applying any kind of foreign substance to the ball is cheating of the most blatant variety. Even more surprisingly, none of the umpires or opposing players seem the least bit suspicious of all the physics-defying things that the professor's pitches do.
- Fridge Logic makes this even worse - the rules also state that the balls used all come from the same pool, not that teams get to throw their own balls. If you coated the balls with a substance that made them dodge bats, they'd be dodging your team's bats, too. Enjoy that 0-0, extra inning game decided on walks, stolen bases, and wild pitches.
- In The Waterboy, after it's discovered that the coach forged Bobby Boucher's high school transcript to get him on the team, making him an ineligible player, the NCAA allows Bobby to still play in the team's bowl game if he passes a high school equivalency exam. In reality, not only would the NCAA not allow that, the whole team would have been forbidden to play in the game, would have had to forfeit back all its wins on the season and probably would have been banned from future bowl games and lost several scholarships for a few years.
- In general, character positions are defined based on what someone who knows nothing of the sport might know about them. This means that in football movies, important characters are almost always Quarterbacks, and occasionally runningbacks/wide receivers/generic defensive position (watch the Replacements and look at how Jon Favreau's character plays ALL over the field on defense). This is less of a problem in baseball movies, where the positions aren't so dissimilar or complicated, but only serious basketball/hockey films will make an effort to elaborate on the positions played.
- Not sports, but Game Shows: Slumdog Millionaire changes brutally how Who Wants To Be A Millionaire works for the sake of drama (the show it's not live, but recorded in studio some days before the actual broadcast - which is why they reread the hotline question on the phone and have a time limit on it; the hotline is never directed to a mobile number, to prevent connection troubles, and for the same reason it's never issued directly when the contestant asks for it; the call is first made in the very moment the contestant begins his round and it's then kept live - but soundless - until the contestant calls for the hotline).
- Subverted in the Will Ferrell movie Blades of Glory. Critics point out the errors made in the rules & points system for Pairs Figure Skating in the Winter Olympics — except that these aren't the Winter Olympics, they're the "World Winter Sports Games."
- Similarly for Speed Racer, incredibly anal critics will point how they're not following the rules of NASCAR/Formula One Racing, completely oblivious to the fact that the World Racing League obviously has very little to do with either NASCAR/Formula One.
Literature
- The Black Stallion. Another one of those cases where something was within the rules when it was made, but not now... except it's a Long Runner, and the series kept following the obsolete rule. The rule in question? Allowing Arabians to race against Thoroughbreds. (It was prohibited between the release of the first and second books.)
Live Action TV
Web Animation
Web Comics
Web Original
- Episode 54 of Awesome Video Games mixes references to game shows at one point. It's kicked off by Dad claiming that his historical knowledge "has been likened to one Pat Sajak".
Western Animation
- In an episode of Family Guy Peter says...
Peter: You'll be the Arnold Palmer of golf!
- Brian and Stewies game of chess in the movie (now series of episodes) certainly counts. The lingo thrown around is wrong on a level as to be cringe-worthy, yet there's no indication that this is supposed to be humourously incorrect, so obviously the writers just didn't know.
- Actually, the terminology used in the chess game between Brian and Stewie was correct. "King's rook six" and "Queen five" are forms of Descriptive Chess Notation, which was commonly used until the 1970s, when it was overtaken by the much more easily understood Algebraic Notation (the equivalent squares would be H6 and D5). This troper, who played chess competitively for many years, used to see the notation (abbreviated as KR 6 and Q5) in older chess books.
- Parodied in Futurama by the legendary Zapp Brannigan, only with board and parlor games:
Brannigan: If we can hit that bullseye, then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
- The South Park episode Make Love, Not Warcraft makes many, many errors with the game World Of Warcraft. Just to name a few: a player-character human cannot attack another PC human; about 3000 players cannot be in one zone without some serious lag; and surely you cannot level up just by killing low-level boars. These errors, however, were deliberate on the part of the writers (Blizzard actually helped them make the episode), as if Calvinball but with a real-life game.
- The ability to attack other P Cs was one of the things that made the villain so dangerous, and the Blizzard staff was properly horrified by this development.
- And since they mentioned he could break the rules because he had reached a level they thought unreachable, the rules of the game were actually being acknowledged at this point.
- There is no way they didn't know exactly where the flaws were, there are even background references to earlier Warcraft games.
- At least one example is so amazingly thick with errors it might be due to deliberate effort: Randy Marsh's character is a level two human hunter who has defeated the bad guys at Jerod's landing, and he has just joined a big party of night elves to explore the tower of Azora together. It's amazing how there's so much in-game nonsense in such a small space.
- In the WITCH episode "V is for Victory", the writers got certain aspects of a swim meet wrong. All Will needed to do to win the gold was to get a good time in the semifinals (she didn't have to win it), then win the finals. Her coach told that she needed to win the next two races. Furthermore, Will should be in lane 3 or 4 in the finals, as she won the semis (she was in lane 2).
- Dexter of Dexter's Laboratory, being the overly stereotypical nerd he is, is quite naive when it comes to sports. One episode had him distract his dad by constantly asking inane questions in regards to a golf tournament they were watching:
Dexter's Dad: What? What'd I miss? What just happened?
Dexter: Looked like a popfly into the endzone.
- While this troper will admit to The Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series as her guilty pleasure, she has found, since getting into sports, that it’s harder to enjoy the sports aspect of the show, because she keeps wondering how the team hasn’t gotten reamed out by their league for having no coach, being below a minimum roster requirement, having a goalie in the role of captain, having a player wear #00, and other irregularities. But at least there Ain't No Rule against giant anthropomorphic ducks playing.
- The goalie-captain rule is kind of relaxed, though: see Roberto Luongo.
- The rule banning #00 from use is league-specific. The NHL, for example, didn't have that rule until the late 1990s. The reason it was added to the books? The league bought a new statistic-tracking system that broke if a player's number was less than 1. Rather than fix the software they banned #00.
- In an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, at the climax of a football showdown with their rivals, Perfecto Prep, it looks like Buster kicks Plucky off the team for signaling plays to Perfecto. But as he reaches the sideline, he suddenly turns around catches a quick out from Buster, catching Perfecto off-guard and scoring the winning points. (It helped that they'd scammed Perfecto with a fake playbook). In reality, on every level of organized football there is, the play would've resulted in a five-yard Illegal Procedure penalty for Plucky being too far off the ball and for moving non-laterally when the ball was snapped.
- There was also a Tiny Toons Genesis game which pretty much thrived on Rule Of Funny regarding this trope. Between soccer and basketball, the characters rode the ball around, flew across the court with it in their mouths, and, IIRC, could even run over the other players with a car.
- On the other hand, a fairly uncommon but legal trick play is having the quarterback move towards the sideline, pantomiming something wrong to the sidelines, and while he does that, the ball is snapped to the running back to start the play. As long as the QB was the only man in motion, and following the motion rules (not running towards the line of scrimmage), that's a legal play.
- Sex and the City features an episode in which a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel is purchased because it has "one leg shorter than the others" and shown at the Westminster dog show IN THAT EPISODE and without training, while in heat. There's a lot wrong here, starting with the fact that estrous is an immediate disqualification from dog shows, as well as that the Westminster is essentially the superbowl of these shows - it is HIGHLY invitational, and one must be a champion to even enter. The idea that an unevenly hocked dog with no prior experience, an amateur handler and a disqualifying (as well as obvious and terribly disruptive to the other dogs) medical condition could win the Westminster is as accurate as saying Carrie Bradshaw could enlist and play for the NFL.
- Another episode had the four attending a Yankees game. When they take a visit to the locker room afterward, one unnamed player is seen wearing jersey number 9. The Yankees retired that number for Roger Maris.
- Rocket Power: One episode has Reggie and her team winning a volleyball game 15-14. In volleyball (and for that matter, tennis and badminton), you have to win by two.
- In Johnny Test, Johnny goes skiing and is denied access to a trail due to it being "NK-13", for no kids under age 13. Trail markers do not work that way, despite the size or difficulty. Though it's unlikely they'd want 10-year-olds going on double-diamond trails, they don't regulate it.
- Parodied in an episode of the Casper, animated series where the Ghostly Trio decide to participate in a golf tournament and Stretch vows they will "get the highest score ever seen!". Casper, of course points out that's not how it works.
- The Simpsons episode "Lisa On Ice" takes a few liberties with Ice Hockey. No kids league allows checking, much less checking in the back and sending someone face first into the glass. That's illegal even in the NHL. The clock doesn't run on penalty shots, undermining the cute ending. And Bart is shown repeatedly skating past the entire defense only to stop outside the blue line for a slapshot. Technically, that's a legal play but incredibly insane. In this case there Aint No Rule but the Rule Of Funny.
- Ben 10: "The Unnaturals" has a scene with the Opposing Sports Team reminding the team from Ben's hometown that they've beaten them 28-3, and threaten to beat them even worse next game. Sure like to see them try, since they're playing Little League baseball, with its 10-run mercy rule.
Video Games
- There are several things odd about the boxing in Punch Out. To begin with, the series seem to have no concept of weight divisions, which results in the comparatively scrawny Glass Joe being in the same group as Fat Bastard King Hippo. And then there's characters like Hoy Quarlow who use weapons.
- Blitz: The League. The entire game is devoted to the Rule Of Cool, at the expense of any pretense of realism (are there any referees?). However, in this case, it is something of a Justified Trope, as the series' makers are on record calling the NFL the "No Fun League" for forcing their licensed football titles to be squeaky-clean in terms of content, which pretty much forbids developers from even alluding to any of the shadier aspects of American Football culture. When EA got exclusive rights to the NFL license, Midway was more than happy to go completely over the top with their latest Blitz title, bringing in notorious ex-linebacker Lawrence Taylor as their spokesman, and hiring the writers of ESPN's controversial hit Playmakers to write the story.
- In fact, BTL actually was a Playmakers licensed game, until the NFL forced ESPN to kill the show. Also, take in mind that Blitz was not the first time Midway made a Aint No Rule style sports game: Arch Rivals is one of their earlier attempts at the genre, which they then followed with the popular NBA Jam series.
- In Brain Dead 13, Moose, the Frankenstein's Monster-esque, jock, talks vaguely sports related gibberish when you're fighting him.
- Practically all licensed sports titles avert this trope, due to their focus on providing the most realistic sports experiences possible for fans of the sport. A few, however, go in a less realistic, more arcade direction, realizing that some players feel that increased accessibility and the Rule Of Cool are more important than a simulation experience. Examples include Midway's NBA Ballers games and EA's Street series of sports games. A former licensed example would be Midway's NFL Blitz series, until they lost the license to EA.
- As seen in the image at the top of the page, Super Mario World 's "Chargin' Chuck" enemies wore American Football uniforms. While some attacked you with footballs, others would attack with baseballs. Even others resorted to non-sports activities, such as digging up large rocks with shovels, or whistling underwater to summon a school of fish to swarm Mario.
- An official Nintendo of America strategy guide called the baseball-throwing Chuck a "Confused Chuck".
Universal
- Chess. Any chess game played between over-competitive nerds is always done wrongly. There is never a clock. The players move absurdly quickly (especially as there is no clock!). They never record their moves (which is required in any competitive game). They do not shake hands before or after (even if they hate each other, they would still do it, in a snarky way). Worst of all, a player wins a decisive advantage by killing his/her opponent's queen. (This only really happens in beginner's games; in a game between talented players, a tiny material advantage or a slightly advantageous position would be enough.) The game always ends in checkmate, even though it's standard practice to resign when one's opponent is guaranteed to win. Finally, the game is never drawn, even though our heroes are supposedly both brilliant players, and perhaps 60% of top-level games are draws.
- In fairness, in a casual game, much of the above can be ignored, such as not writing down moves or using a clock. There's no excuse if it's a tournament game, though.
- Let's not forget the bit where one player puts his opponent in check and the opponent checkmates him on the next move. It's technically possible, but there are very few situations where a single move can put one's own king out of danger's way and completely trap the opposing king. It generally requires the losing player not to pay close attention, and the winning player almost always wins because of sheer luck rather than planning.
- The "no draws" thing can be justified by the Rule Of Drama, though. Unless it's an Evasive Fight Thread Episode, in which case you might see a draw.
- Also the all-too common cases where a character is shown to be smart in that he can either win most games of chess in less than ____ moves or can think 10/20/you name it moves ahead.
- Silliest of all: in Sailor Moon episode 71, Ami and Berthier replay a real-life game between Spassky and Fischer. Ami continues after the point at which Spassky resigned - and wins. (There have been cases where players resigned and analysts later discovered a possible winning continuation, but the game in question is not one of them.)
Other
- Private Eye has the spoof sports columnist Sally Jockstrap. A typical Jockstrap column might say how pleased she is that Michael Owen (a footballer) is playing in the Six Nations (a rugby tournement) and she hopes he scores a six (a cricketing term) against Paraguay (not one of the six nations, but at this point it hardly matters).
- Although there is a Welsh Rugby Union player called Michael Owen, which was confusing to overhear in recent commentary.
- It's very rare for Professional Wrestling to be portrayed as anything less than 100% real in fiction. In fact, many wrestling movies even feature the hero's refusal to take a dive to satisfy a shady promoter as a pivotal plot point. This may have been forgivable back in the day, when the average film or TV show's "Technical Consultant" would be trying to uphold Kayfabe, but in the modern day, when even Vince McMahon himself admits it to be staged, one might think to take a look at the world behind the curtain...
- Of particular note here is an episode of Quantum Leap in which Sam leaps into the body of a wrestler playing an Evil Russian; in this episode, it's confidently declared that wrestling actually is staged — except for the title matches, and Sam and his partner's refusal to take a dive in a tag-team title match is the main conflict of the episode. If anybody can explain to us how this was supposed to work, it would be appreciated.
- At best, I could see it being more of a people issue - a wrestler switching promotions or some such and unwilling to drop the title to someone else, for instance.
- The conflict came about because the promoter was loathe to even take the chance that two "Communists" could be their champions (fearing the fans wouldn't accept it. A fair fear in 1950s Texas), so wanted them to take the dive. Crisis averted when one of the champions (played by legendary wrestler Terry Funk) insisted on playing things straight... mostly so he could pound on Sam without consequence (And Sam was barred from using any martial arts to defend himself).
- What tends to annoy is the set up of the ring area: the ropes are almost always too loose and there's no gap between the ring and the fans, both of which would be detrimental to putting on a good match.
- In Forrest Gump (the novel), Forrest spends some time as a professional wrestler during a time when the fact that wrestling is staged is a carefully guarded secret. He's supposed to lose an important match, but a friend of his tells Forrest to break the script and try to win for real so they can make money on a bet. And actually, this is a fairly accurate description of how wrestling worked back in the day, as some wrestlers would "go into business for themselves"; usually, though, this was for higher stakes than just a bet, as it tended to get a wrestler blackballed.
- Somewhat averted, oddly enough, in an episode of Family Matters—a series of unfortunate events lead Carl and Steve to replace the Psycho Twins (including dressing in their costumes) in a match against the Bushwhackers. While they do take liberties—wrestlers exchanging friendly jokes and commentary isn't unheard of, but except in certain character-based situations they wouldn't shout it across the ring at each other—the Bushwhackers are portrayed as guys doing a job, and they're impressed at how Carl and Steve are doing well for "a couple of blokes off the street". However, when Steve mentions that Carl's a cop, suddenly Its Personal and the Bushwhackers stop pulling their punches, looking to actually hurt them. That this would get them suspended at the least if they were the top wrestler in the company and related to the boss isn't brought up afterward.
- On the other hand, to perpetuate the "Wrestling is real" phenomenon, whenever someone yells "Wrestling is Fake" in a TV show, rest assured any wrestler who hears it will wade into the crowd and show him just how "fake" it is. Apparently blatant assault with hundreds to thousands of witnesses is pretty casual. Unless the guy's a plant...
- Believe it or not, there is some truth to that. Back before guys like Vincent McMahon actually admited wrestling was staged, that was company policy. If anyone was to ask a wrestler if what they did wasn't fake, they could expect to get body slammed. As a result, many wrestlers really did get arrested or sued.
- This actually happened to journalist John Stossel. He even sued and won.
- Also, many more extreme professional wrestlers do take offense to people calling it "fake" because it implies they aren't actually doing their impressive stunts. Yes, the matches are played up to look a lot more like real fights, and the winner is often pre-determined, but as Mick Foley would point out, there is no way to "fake" jumping twenty feet through a table covered in thumbtacks.
- Rubber thumbtacks, shoddy table. Easy.
- Annnnnd the twenty-foot drop?
- Camera tricks! But seriously, even with props and such, the fact is, they're still throwing themselves around like stuntmen with far less protection than stuntmen. Spend ten minutes or more getting throwing around, lifting another 200 lb man, and what have you is a heavily physical activity. Perhaps different than the implied 'fighting' aspect but real in the underlying physicality of it. Calling it out on the thumbtacks is like complaining that movie martial artists are using flashy impractical movies - that's entirely the point. To be a show and not real. And missing the fact that it still takes a lot of training to fake something. Or saying that American Football is faking the big hits because of the padding. On a bleaker note, just look at the various newstories about people getting hurt by trying to imitate wrestling or even of wrestlers getting hurt themselves in the ring - the harm and damage from doing it wrong is very real and very dangerous and the training and trust not to get hurt when someone wants to drop you on your head is very real.
- Compare as well movie/TV martial artists. Many people mistakenly believe that all of them are trained fighters that could kick their arses or that the moves they see are practical. While some are trained fighters, many more aren't and the movies they use are merely for show. Bruce Lee even said as much that the stuff he'd use in a movie fight and the stuff he'd use in a real fight were completely different things. But that doesn't mean it doesn't take a lot of work and training to fake it or appreciate it or confuse it as the real thing when the point is the theatricality of it.
- This is totally inverted by the fandom. Browse through the wrestling section at fanfiction.net and compare how much of it is based on Kayfabe to how much of it is basically Real Person Fic.
- Invoked in Archie Comics, after the Riverdale team shows up to a football game, and the rival team is female. One Curb Stomp Battle later, Archie and Reggie are moping around, depressed, when Betty and Veronica ask to be shown how to "shoot baskets with this horse hide"[a football]. Reggie and Archie walk off with the girls in hand, going "When will you learn football is a man's game!" The girls wink at each other.
- If Segata Sanshiro wants a football team to win, it will win. He did get called out for it in the second one.
- When Calvin And Hobbes aren't playing Calvinball, they'll be making a mockery of any actual sport they try, usually baseball but also football, croquet and golf. As the boy himself puts it: "Our favourite games are ones we don't understand!"
Real Life
- After the Philadelphia Eagles and Cincinnati Bengals played to a tie in an NFL football game, Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb revealed after the game that he had no idea NFL games could end in a tie.
- The truly hilarious part? That tie put the Eagles into the playoffs. If it was a loss, they would have been eliminated.
- The whole thing was made
more hilarious worse when other players stepped up to defend McNabb's gaffe. Most notably Pittsburgh Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger, who stated that probably half the league's players wouldn't know that rule (...which is only mentioned every time there's an overtime game and has been in effect since 95% of the players have been born) and Steelers WR Hines Ward, who stated that he might not have realized it either, had he been in McNabb's place (doubly painful, since Ward played in the last tie game, four years earlier)
- The best response was from ESPN, who did an entire video entry about "other things Donovan McNabb might not know": "a team earns a first down after going ten yards, a touchdown is worth six points...", etc.
- ...and then, in a 2009 game between the Bengals and the Browns, Rich Gannon debated whether the Bengals should kick an overtime field goal with time left on the clock, so as not to allow the Browns to return a kick. His broadcast partner helpfully reminded him that NFL overtime is sudden death.
- Check this quote from soccer player Lukas Podolski: 'Soccer is like chess, only without the dice'.
- Although chess was played with dice in the 1400s (which led some churches to ban it as a form of gambling), one really doubts Podolski knew that.
- Shoeless Joe Jackson had the puck in the form of House Member Christopher Shays' "In 1919 the Chicago Blackhawks Scandal..."
- When Sarah Palin resigned the Alaska governorship, she described herself as a "point guard"...and then it got weird.
- The fact that her major in college was sports journalism just adds to the absurdity.
- And she actually was a point guard when she played high school basketball. Though if you think about it, maybe her inability to properly understand how to defeat a full-court press is why she didn't play in college.
- While competitions are rarely shown, plenty of visual media show Western fencing being practiced, especially by wealthy, WAS Py Americans or Brits. Common mistakes include showing fencers wearing two gloves (fencers only wear one), fencers circling each other (fencers can only move within a narrow rectangular playing field called a piste) and, because presumably most people portraying them aren't actually fencers, really bad technique, like poking their arms out at each other hoping for a touch (in the sabre and foil subsets just about all offensive actions involve lunging, running or jumping at one's opponent).
- More than one retired baseball umpire has admitted he had no idea how to correctly identify and call a balk on a pitcher.
- Baseball announcers will frequently refer to the last game of a three-game series as a rubber game. The rubber game is the deciding game in contract Bridge, while the third game of a series in baseball matters as much as any other game on the schedule.
- Perhaps on the whole, but for the 3-game series, it would be the rubber game. Of course, who wins a single three-game series is pointless in determining who wins the division (except if they tie...)
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