the contemporary shopping lifestyle

What if I told you there was a sport that’s part football, part rugby, part soccer, and part mixed-martial arts?  A sport where players play an entire 50 minute game with no rest and no time outs.  Sound too crazy to be true?  It’s called Calcio Fiorentino, it’s played in Italy, it has a hardcore following, and it is absolutely brutal.  And if it wasn’t for last weeks’ jaw-dropping article in Sports Illustrated, no one outside of Italy probably would have ever known it existed:

Its origins can be traced to the first century B.C., when Roman legionnaires played it to prepare for combat. The game’s official rules date to 1580, and it was played by the Italian aristocracy, including three popes. Discontinued for centuries, the sport was revived in 1930 as an annual rite in Florence.

The rules are few. There is a normal soccer ball, a 100-by-50-meter sand pitch with goals running the width of each end zone and two teams of 27 men. Fifty minutes of play. No timeouts, no substitutions. A few tactics are expressly forbidden, such as sucker-punching and kicking in the head. Otherwise, head-butting, punching, elbowing, choking and throwing sand in opponents’ eyes are encouraged, if not applauded.

And of course, what you’ve all been waiting for - videos.  There aren’t a ton available, but they should give you a taste of what it’s like to play this brutal game:

Unreal.  All I can say is WOW.  Oh, and why isn’t this televised?  It’s like MMA on crack!