Any human pastime gets complicated.
Sometimes, you have to do something about it. The Geneva Convention, Anti-trust laws, Bicycle lanes… you get the idea.
Take Football, for instance. It used to be a bunch of guys horsing around in thick jerseys for the honor of… whatever team they made up to play whatever other team some other neighborhood formed. Then they’d go eat and drink and bleed on one another at the pub. Now? There’s lots of rules that have to be obeyed and a lot of people who don’t even like football lobbying for safety reforms and lawsuits and heaven knows what else.
So. Unicycle Jousting. There’s not a lot of rules yet, so there’s a lot of room for the sport to grow in unexpected directions. Right? I’m right, right?
It starts with a lance, but you add a boxing glove. Safety first, y’know. Well, there’s no rule against it, so what if you set your boxing glove on fire? The other guy’s not expecting it the first time, so you win! Trouble is, next match the other guy sets his glove on fire, too, and it’s not ’til your turn’s over that you notice the guys after you are riding in with extinguishers in their off-hands. Then the various kinds of sprayings happen…
Eventually, the sport of Unicycle Jousting is in the news every night because some family is suing one of the leagues over perfectly normal injuries that some professional athlete has sustained while playing the game! I mean, who expects the Prime Center Jouster for the Anaheim Unicorns to have both eyes and no tracheotomy scars? Really! And he has always worn his regulation helmet- at least ever since they made the regulation about helmets- so what’s a little early-onset stupidity if the guy has earned fifteen million dollars over a (lengthy, really) seven season career?
What we really need to concern ourselves with is the little guy. The collector who has the autographed 2019 lance glove used by the Washington Chupacabras’ Crispin Ausperger in the first world championship and has been keeping it in a vacuum-sealed pouch in a bank deposit box until it accrued enough value to put his daughter through college, or the bookie who illegally runs betting on the Large MidWest Conference college unicycle jousting games! Those people have families, both legal and on the side, to support! How do we balance their well-being against the well-being of professional athletes with cauterized puncture wounds to their lungs? It’s a tough game.
See?
Any human pastime gets complicated.
