Get ready for professional stone skipping and Tetris: ESPN is bringing back The Ocho early
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Every August, ESPN celebrates a pretty good gag from the movie Dodgeball by turning into ESPN8: The Ocho, a low-tier off-shoot that highlights the forgotten sports (or “sports”) that aren’t normally televised. This year, with everyone stuck inside their homes for a while, ESPN2 is taking advantage of the sudden lack of actual professional sports by turning into The Ocho a little early—specifically this Sunday, March 22. For 24 hours, the network will be airing everything from the World Axe Throwing League to Putt Putt Championships, Tetris and Golden Tee tournaments, and something called Slippery Stairs that… yes, is exactly what it sounds like.
ESPN lays out the whole schedule on its website and offers little primers on some of the sports like Stupid Robot Fighting League (it’s about boxing puppets that are just kind of simple, not necessarily stupid robots like those two racist Transformers), Jelle’s Marble Runs (“in which both participants and spectators are marbles”), and an “amateur diving competition” called “Death Diving” that is probably safer than it sounds. Earlier in the day ESPN8 will have Golden Tee and Tetris video game championships, eatings contests, a competition between electricians, and—the NFL of non-televised sports—the Johnsonville ACL Cornhole Championships.
This all sounds like a lot of fun, especially now that it’s happening earlier in the year instead of late in the summer, but hopefully this all doesn’t end up looking like so much fun that people start breaking their self-isolation so they can meet up with friends to slip on stairs, throw around some cornhole bags, or see who can eat the most sausages. You can do some of that inside, but we don’t recommend throwing axes or doing arm wrestling tournaments unless you’ve got a dedicated axe room or your isolating with people who have really beefy arms.
19 Comments
I rarely ever watch ESPN, but I somehow got caught-up watching a cornhole tournament one day. It was surprisingly compelling. Unlike Australian Rules Football or whatever, I actually know the rules of cornhole already because I went to a college with tailgating.
When you were at Princeton on Scholarship, if memory serves…
Go, Tigers?
Are you still in contact with your former college buddy who deals weed? I ask for a friend…
oh great now in like two months i’m gonna have to read some harrowing NYT account of the depraved sexual politics run amok behind the scenes of professional slippery stairs competitions
#MarbleToo
After watching that YouTube video…I can’t believe that anything untoward would be going on behind the scenes of the sport where college girls in skintight body suits get hosed with some kind of lube by the local Bud Light Lime Street Team.
If they hadn’t murdered Deadspin*, you wouldn’t have to wait two months.*Zombie Deadspin doesn’t count.
To make things worse there’s also a kids division.
Comin up next on the Ocho we have the final round of the melbourne semi-international arm wrestling competition. two titans. two hands. one winner. the catch? due to the recent spat of health concerns each competitor will be outfitted in… a medical grade hazmat suit. i’m brayden laferve, and this is the Occo
“…a competition between electricians…”EASILY the most anticipated event for me. Send me my spectator card now.
Cotton McKnight: “What’s this? It looks like Simovitch is using stranded wire instead of solid!”Pepper Brooks: “That’s a bold move, Cotton.”
CWTC on broadcast tv? Sign me up
I kinda hate how excited I am for the prospect of a Golden Tee tourney
Also, if you’re missing Around the Horn, Tony Reali and some guests are posting occasional “Around the Home” segments on @Aroundthehorn twitter and they’re even more delightful than the show normally is.
Lebatard is doing a version of Highly Questionable on Twitter as well, “Highly Quarantined”
It shouldn’t just be day. They might as well just make it a daily thing for the foreseeable future since there’s no sports and the only thing to talk about is NFL free agency. Give those poor NFL reporters who have had to say the same reports over and over about Tom Brady some time off.
It shouldn’t just be day. They might as well just make it a daily thing for the foreseeable future since there’s no sports and the only thing to talk about is NFL free agency. Give those poor NFL reporters who have had to say the same reports over and over about Tom Brady some time off.
Sports are a good outlet. G/O Media should have an outlet dedicated to sports that can also speak about more than just sports. And it should have a comment section.