Sports used to be much more interesting. Part of this was due to the fact that we hadn’t figured out steroid testing yet; however, another part can be attributed to the ability of our forefathers to dream up sports that were simultaneously entertaining and incredibly dangerous.


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I’m not talking about lawn darts here — I’m talking bear-baiting, bullfighting and that one Indonesian game where they throw spears at each other.


See, back in the day, you weren’t able to just turn on the TV and watch whatever was on. Instead, you had to actually go places and see things. For example, if you were bored one Saturday afternoon, you could walk into town and watch a man wrestle a lion.



Better than anything Netflix has put out in the past few years.


It’s really unclear what led up to this, but a news report from the time identified the man as a “Californian wrestler.” When this video was posted to Reddit, users speculated that the lion had also been declawed and raised in captivity, as the behavior shown in the video indicates “play” more than “attack.”




Still, declawed or not, wrestling a lion is no laughing matter. In case you forgot, lions have teeth — and if they want to, they can bite you, as they did to this Russian lion tamer back in 2021.


I guess it’s good that we’ve moved beyond sports like these to more refined, mature sports like football, which don’t leave any lasting injuries at all.