David Roth's Weak In Review: "American Ninja Warrior" Is The Only Sport

My wife laid it out. We were in the neighborhood restaurant we go to every week, and she was describing the attributes shared by serious contenders on NBC's happily psychotic reality-sports obstacle course program "American Ninja Warrior," which is pretty indisputably the best and brightest sports thing you can see on television, and which concluded its most recent season early this week. She cautioned that this list was not comprehensive. So let it be noted here, then: this list is not comprehensive.

She continued, with a confidence aided both by wine and the expertise that comes from watching a sport closely over a period of months, that the ones you need to look out for are going to tend to be: bald/hairless; possibly emotionally disturbed in some mostly benign/salutary way; gigantically forearmed; fathers of young children, who possibly somehow help in their impish way with the training, like maybe it helps the guy doing avant-garde pull-ups on the homemade obstacle course in his backyard to have a couple of wriggling four-year-olds clamped onto his ankles. These competitors will not be too bulky or too slight, too short or too tall, although they will be more short than tall and lighter as opposed to heavier. They are, on balance, more likely to have been college gymnasts than not. It is helpful to do a lot of rock climbing, probably. This may not be comprehensive, but these are facts.

The people who tend to do well on "American Ninja Warrior" are people who look like more intense versions of people on the sidewalk. They mostly are that. The two competitors who completed both the obscenely difficult final course and the massive rope climbing endurance test on Monday—the first two ever to get that far in the show's seven seasons—are a 36-year-old freelance sports photographer and a man-bunned Colorado busboy who lives in a 1978 Dodge Jamboree RV. If you have read this far, I will not need to mention that the former shaves his head, has forearms the size of prosciuttos, and has a six-year-old daughter; neither will it be necessary to note that the latter is an elite rock climber. My wife is pretty sharp, and she has been paying attention.

She went on to say that the people clambering around on the show's elaborate-unto-sadistic courses project both the self-possessed charisma of an elite athlete—the understated, featherlight confidence of people that know they can do strange, cool things with their bodies that other people cannot—and the humility of ordinary people half-guiltily explaining their goofball hobby. For every sinewy go-getter who has made a life out of what the show's sublimely straight-faced and enthusiastic broadcasters call "Ninja training"—personal training, more or less—there are all these mailmen and stuntwomen and firemen and stock traders and hairdressers and at least one local television weatherman, all of whom appear not just relieved but delighted to be around other people that have homemade obstacle courses in their backyards.

What we are talking about here are all-American weirdos—obsessives and savants, misfits and multiply blessed dorks, athletes too untameable and too elementally strange to play games with actual rules. Which is why, in this week of dreary reruns, the transcendent oddballs of "American Ninja Warrior" not only gave us the best spectator experience of the week, but a blessed escape from the claustrophobic lock-groove of business as usual.

If there is anything notable about the drearier and objectively more significant sports news of this week, it is the grim sense of deja vu that attends them. There is little that feels new about the newest developments in the further collapse of the Rutgers athletic department from mere tragicomic mess into pure and pathetic failed-state warlordism, or the study showing that an overwhelming percentage of retired NFL players likely have CTE.

It is not that these things aren't shocking—the carnage that football throws off is staggering, still; the sheer accumulation of offhand venality and crushing indifference in the way that the NFL's casualties are treated after football, as revealed Aaron Gordon's three-part series, is shocking in both its scope and scale. Rutgers' flailing pantsless tumble down an endless MC Escher staircase is perhaps the most astonishing spectacle in college sports. But these are things we already knew, provided we cared to know them. And they are not changing, not as quickly as we'd hope and maybe not at all.

All the new things we learn serve mostly to deepen an old feeling——that this thing we enjoy is not good for us or really anyone else. There is something in football that is great and even beautiful, and it streaks through the games in little wild moments; they are unmissable and intoxicating and unique, and the high is not like anything else. But there is also everything else, the boggy reeking fever swamp that periodically gives up these bright diamonds. If you bother to know it, you know already know that this is a poisonous place. We are coming to understand, probably too slowly, that it is making us all sick. But we wade out there all the same because there is something in the murk that we want, and which really is valuable.

"American Ninja Warrior" is a different thing, and gives us different things. Football is rules and rhetoric, conflict and contact, archetype on archetype all the time; it's a little televised war that we somehow once believed had different consequences than war always does. "American Ninja Warrior," in contrast, is a TV show about a super-crazy playground. It is as much a cartoonish physical comedy as it is a sport, with the set-up being the gantlet of inverted pipes and bare plexiglass walls and little ledges and doorknobs mounted on sheer surfaces and the punchline being the fact that these delirious goofs—the freegan contractor and the ordinary-looking weatherman and the mountain climber who first competed on the show while in costume as Jesus Christ—somehow navigate it, upside-down and smiling.

So of course it's lighter and sillier; of course the people bounding around on the playground are stranger and shaggier and happier than the ones thrashing around on the little pretend battlefield. They do not look alike, and are not outwardly alike in most any way. But what ties them together is both thin and strong. It's the thing that ties all sports together, and ties us to them. In all these cases, the moments that are easiest to love, the most open and fully felt and precious, are the moments of play and surprise. This week, "American Ninja Warrior" showed us something we had not previously seen. Every week, it showed us more of the thing we most want to see. If there was something startling about how readily it gave us that gift, it is mostly because we are not used to getting it at such a fair price.