Team Sports
Ice Hockey
The fastest of the major team sports, with a rulebook that technically bans fighting and then shrugs and gives it a standard penalty anyway.
Soccer
Twenty-two people chase one ball for 90 minutes, and somehow it's still the most popular sport on Earth.
Basketball
Ten players, one hoop each end, and a shot clock ticking down that turns the whole sport into a 24-second sprint, over and over.
Rugby
American football's ancestor kept the tackling and dropped the forward pass entirely — and somehow that makes it faster, not slower.
Baseball
A sport where the ball is in play for only about 18 minutes of a three-hour game, and somehow that's exactly the point.
Cricket
A sport famous for matches that can run five days and still end in a draw — and somehow it's the second most-watched sport on the planet.
Football
The rest of the world already had a sport called football. America built an entirely different one, kept the name anyway, and never looked back.
Water Polo
A sport that looks genteel from the stands and turns into an underwater wrestling match the moment the camera stops looking.
Volleyball
A sport built entirely around one rule: never let the ball touch the ground on your side — for either team.
Lacrosse
A game with real ceremonial roots stretching back centuries before "organized sport" was even a category — some Haudenosaunee communities still call it the Creator's Game.