Music and sports go hand-in-hand much like fish and chips, Jack Daniels and Coke, and Jägermeister and major hangover. Almost every professional sports team has its own anthem, a song that the fans know off by heart and that intrinsically links them to their beloved club.
What if certain sports represented specific music genres. Snooker would likely be classical music. Precision instrument playing, the occasional crescendo, but mostly delicate tunes expertly played. Football would be pop music with catchy choruses that you could sing on karaoke. Would any sports be from the world of metal? You bet your ass they would!
Ice Hockey Is The Most Metal Sport In The World
Ice Hockey is, without a single doubt, the most metal sport known to man. Just look at it. Teams of massive men skating around the ice at 30mph with blades of steel attached to their feet, each armed with sticks with blades on the end, fighting over a puck that is so hard it can shatter bones! The game is played at breakneck speed for an hour at a time and the NHL teams do this across 82 games in a season! Throw into the mix that fights are not only half-allowed by fully expected and you have a sport that is pure lunacy! If sports could be metal music, ice hockey would certainly be thrash metal!
The NFL is another American sport that challenges ice hockey for the title of the most metal sport. The game is brutal, to say the least, with players subjecting themselves to hits usually reserved for crash test dummies. Those playing in the NFL have a life expectancy of only 55-years, which goes some way to highlight how physical this crazy sport is. Hip Hop is a music genre heavily linked to the NFL so why not consider the NFL to be Nu Metal?
People always draw comparisons between rugby and the NFL and it is easy to see why. The game was once frequented by fat blokes with normal day-to-day jobs on the side. Players are professional these days, built like brick outhouses who collide into each other with the ferocity of a train crash. Think heavy bass guitar riffs, thumping drums, and a massive moshpit.
“Ice Hockey fight” by Wikimedia is licensed under CC BY 3.0
MMA Fighter Need a Special Mention
No list of metal-like sports would be complete with the inclusion of the absolutely mental fighting sport that is MMA. If any sport is metal then it is surely the UFC. These men and women step into the octagon with only a pair of lightly padded gloves for the company and proceed to not only perform expert martial arts on each other but can do almost anything to knock their opponent unconscious.
We have to throw motorsport into the mix now. The drivers of these ultra-powerful machines take their life into their hands every time they sit behind the wheel. Look at NASCAR racers who hurtle around the track at 220mph knowing full well that one tiny mistake from the car in front, a blowout, or even a slight mechanical failure could result in you dying horribly in a huge fireball or surrounded by twisted metal. What is more metal than that?
“MMA, UFC” by Jeff Bottari is licensed under CC BY 3.0
Honorable Mentions
There are dozens of other sports you could consider to be metal music personified. Aussie Rules Football, for example, has a scoreboard that also displays major injuries suffered by the players. Our Irish cousins love the beat the living daylights out of each other during a game of hurling, while powerlifters have the strength to throw a family car at you if you were to as much as even think of disrespecting them!
Which sport do you think is the most metal?
