Genre Bender Challenge: The Sports Game

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The point of a genre-bender is to take a well known, genre related trope or story starter and transplant it into another genre.


The Sports Game

It's that time of year again, where different sports' seasons begin to overlap. Fans and athletes, teams and owners, arenas and fields, referees and umpires. They're all part of 'the game'. But how do sports look in another time? In another realm? On another planet? You tell us!

Is it a team sport? Individual? Is it even legal? What are the stakes, and what are the rules? What drama plays out on the field or in the locker room and behind the scenes?

Write your story here, the more creative the better!
 
Its name was simply The Competition and it was a spectacle that was known to all of the universe, especially to the members of the species that created. It was the remnant of the long-forgotten ceremonies of the past, in which warriors have fought each other to see who is superior to the other, often ending in the death of one party or another. Depending on how many the warriors have killed, each of them would be assigned a standing in society, a standing that could be challenged, but more often than not, it was solider than granite. Of course, the height of the event was always when the would-be commanders engaged each other in battle, sending thousands of their soldiers against each other just to see who was the more capable one amongst them.

Of course, now The Competition was nearly not as savage as the ones that the history books told of. Weapons were now strictly non-lethal, multiple species could enter into it, and one's social standing did not necessarily come from how they performed at this great game. Alternative measurements of strength have also been introduced, such as completing certain excercises under a certain time, or comparing quantified units of strength in simulated battle. In a way, such challenges have reduced the value of The Competition, but it also extended it. No longer was it necessary for warriors to fight to the death if they thought that they were evenly matched, not to mention that combat was much more civilised than it used to be.

For some reason, this event, or rather, series of events became rather popular amongst the various species of the universe, especially those who were interested in honing their combat skills without unneeded violence. The societies that built themselves around physical strength or combat prowess also took part in The Competition, but what was really staggering, was the amount of spectators it would get. In average, at least one billion people per planet spectated The Competition in some form, even if it was only in their homes, far away from the planets on which the event took place. Whole marketing campaigns were launched along at the time of The Competition, often using the fame of particularly skilled warriors to promote themselves, or just merely advertise themselves.

Naturally, there were several people who thought that The Competition became overly commercialised and that it lost its true meaning over the decades, so they got together and established a much more serious alternative event. They chose to call it the Ring Of Combat, an event which had rules close to that of the original Competition, but without the lethality. Sponsors were banned from the event completely and instead of money, the warriors that took part in the Ring Of Battle would fight for possessions that they offered, or they would do it for the mere status, nothing more. At first, only a few people attended the Ring Of Combat, but slowly, it started to gain popularity because of how truthful it was to the original rules of The Competion. A few decades after it was established, it gained roughly quarter of the spectators that The Competition had, becoming one of the most viewed events ever.

The news of the success spread rapidly, and seeing an opportunity in events like The Competition, people started to organise their own events based around combat, or raw physical skill. Millions of companies were launched and many of them prosped while even more collapsed, but as these events became more common, people slowly started to lose interest. Eventually, only a select few remained, and what started as an intergalactic wonder ended up as a relatively obscure event.