BOOKS: Sports From Hell, Rick Reilly (2010)

Sports journalist Rick Reilly sets off on an international quest to find the world's dumbest athletic competition.

Only one major sport makes the cut -- baseball, which Reilly describes as "more boring than Amish porn." Well, two, maybe, depending on whether you consider women's pro football to be a major sport.

But generally, Reilly's targets are more obscure. There's the World Sauna Championship, in which Finns (all of the serious contenders are Finns) compete to see who can sit in a 261-degree room the longest; chess boxing, which alternates rounds of boxing with intervals of chess, the winner being the first to either checkmate or knock out his opponent; and an entire chapter on collegiate drinking games, for which Reilly goes to Las Vegas for the World Series of Beer Pong.

Reilly's tone is breezy and comic, which is generally effective, though there are a few spots where it falls flat. He ends his chapter on the Angola (Louisiana) Prison Rodeo with a few quotes from the father of a young woman who was murdered by one of the rodeo's participants, raising the issue of whether it's appropriate for prisons to be providing this sort of entertainment (with cash prizes, no less) for convicted rapists and murderers, but Reilly's transition to that question is so abrupt, and the time spent on it so brief, that it would probably have been less insensitive to simply ignore the question. And a chapter on nude bicycling begins with a long digression on how difficult it is to be a sports reporter and have to interview (ick) naked men, in which Reilly comes across as rather homophobic. He does a much better job, though, when dealing with the question of lesbianism in women's pro football and how team dynamics are altered when team members are sleeping together (or even worse, when they suddenly aren't any more).

Despite those few brief sour spots, the book is a reasonably amusing look at the varieties of human competition, and if you've ever wanted to pay a brief visit to the world championship of Rock-Paper-Scissors, or watch as grown men drop live ferrets down their pants (while wearing no underwear), this is the book for you.