By Jon Roe
Have you ever felt like there weren’t enough sports in the world that could focus your manliness on the goal of using a stick to put some balls into a hole?
Boy, do I have the sport for you: buzkashi, the national sport of Afghanistan.
Horse riders must take a mutilated goat corpse from a centre hole across a great field, trampling spectators and taking whips from their opponents, around a pole and back to the hole. Back in the days of Genghis Khan, the pole used to be placed hours away on horseback and riders carried knives to stab each other and their horses. The standard whip was replaced with a more malicious one with a metal ball at the end.
These days the sport is still brutal, but less fatal. There are no knives involved, the poles are much closer, but riders regularly break bones, stopping only long enough to splint them, or conspire to drown each other in nearby rivers.
The U of C should probably seriously consider turning the west campus into a buzkashi field. It’s Alberta, there are probably plenty of calf corpses around. And everyone loves broken bones, possibly planned near-fatal encounters and animal corpses in their sports. Plus, you get to eat it. Roasting animals is delicious.
It’s time to submit a quality money proposal.