The Wild Wild World of Sports – This Week in Anime

Are you ready for some footbaaaaaaaall?!!

It’s funny that Eyeshield 21 is so iconic as “the football anime” given that it is the football anime! As you described, it really stymied our ability to do a timely rundown of various series with the NFL preseason having kicked off. It’s not necessarily odd that it’s in this position though: American Football is a sport so dragooned to its home country that they have to put “American” in its name everywhere else! I’m pretty sure the other most notable impact the game had on anime culture was this singular frame from the Re: Cutie Honey OP.

Small wonder that soccer, the real football, is so much more robustly represented in anime and manga. At least we do have Eyeshield 21, in all its extremely 2000s, extremely Shonen Jump glory.

Honestly, he’s such a hilarious bastard; I was shocked by how much I actually loved this guy. I was less surprised at Eyeshield 21‘s aforementioned explanations of the rules. Honestly, any good sports anime can and should do that efficiently, doubly so when it’s an odder game that they can’t count on their audience being familiar with. Though it’s funny to me because I am very well-versed in the admittedly notoriously confusing rules of American Football, which made it breezy for me to follow. I do wonder how it lands for that neophyte audience.

And from what I’ve seen so far, Eyeshield 21 portrays the appealing parts of the game well, with the bone-crunching hits and selling Sena’s superpowers of running and juking around dudes that make him such a good running back. It helps that I know this kind of discovery story actually isn’t uncommon in the real-world game leagues. Teams are always on the lookout for a little guy who can run real good!

Anyway, as a fan of football and anime, I’m shocked it took me this long to even get around to the only representative of that game in this medium. I can see myself sticking with Eyeshield 21, at least until Taki shows up, because I’m aware there’s a spunky spats-wearing tomboy cheerleader on rollerblades in this show, and I am only human.

But as we said, Eyeshield 21 is hardly the only anime repping an underutilized sport. Hell, there’s something of a stereotype around the medium that no matter how obscure the game, competition, or activity, there’s probably an anime or manga turning it into a hot-blooded showcase! There are even a couple of examples from this very season, keeping things current, and one that I guess was considered so niche we didn’t even get it officially streaming in English!

Look at this! How the hell did we not get Dodge Danko this season? Least of all because a dodgeball anime would go perfectly with this ANN 8: The Hachi gimmick we cooked up. Robbed, robbed I say!

Which, yeah, it’s flippin’ wild that the crazy dodgeball anime has this much legacy behind it, but does make it both less and more surprising that the powers-that-be didn’t think to bring it over here. Come on, we got the new Battle Athletes for god’s sake. Why did this one dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge around our release schedules?

But then, using a real-world game does let this anime swing that much closer to depicting an actual “e-sport” and being a series about that. And they still find ways to include character expression through the new game, like Aya having a set Cammy costume/color scheme she always selects while Mio just picks the default, Ryu.

Also, it’s funny that, even in an anime universe sponsored by Street Fighter, nobody cared about Street Fighter V.

That said, your mention of Heated Rivalry does let me wind expectations back a little bit. Because a hockey anime would’ve been something I’d dream of, so how in the hell is Pride of Orange still the only representative of that?!

Granted, I later learned that they actually don’t allow checks in girls’ hockey there, but still, let me have this.

Oh dear. Really hoping for Dogsred to pull it off here!

Being the only representation of a seldom-seen sport does mean that an anime can be even more of a let-down if it doesn’t deliver. I remember a ton of us were looking forward to Iwa-Kakeru! -Sport Climbing Girls- for, uh, regular-cough-reasons in the run-up to it.

But in practice it was another watered-down-feeling girls’ sports series that didn’t make much of an impact, even in the necessarily narrow field of rock-climbing anime.

Unlike the last couple phone-ins we’ve talked about, Hanebado! is an awesome example of taking a sport no one’s really done an anime with before (girls’ badminton, in this case) and patterning a plot about toxicity in sports, pushing one’s limits, and how that can be informed by generational trauma in such a space.

The show features one of the most brutal rivalries depicted between girls I’ve seen in a series like this. It was a treat to grapple with as it was airing, and as you said, a crying shame you can stream Pride of Orange and Iwa-Kakeru!, but not Hanebado!. It might be a contender for the most underrated sports anime of the modern era!

Honestly, the only other series that gives it a run for its money in that regard would probably be Stars Align, which is technically about the soft tennis subgenre of tennis, but is in practice mostly a brutally heavy coming-of-age family drama. With multiple families (almost all of which have parents who suck).

An irony of anime about underrepresented sports is that even for only one or two shows per sport, that’s still a lot of anime overall! Kabaddi, bowling, ballroom dancing, yosakoi dancing…they’ve all been covered at least once to varying degrees of success!

Hell, despite a fair amount of gymnastics anime and with rhythmic gymnastics specifically having a sizeable following in Japan, there’s seemingly only been one anime about the activity itself, in Hikari no Densetsu! And it apparently got cancelled before even finishing its full Japanese run!

Anime that just make up their own games are a dime-a-dozen (shout-out to my beloved IGPX), but I feel like Keijo!!!!!!!! fits the bill in regards to this subject by taking a sport as singularly outlandish as it is, and still treating it like a real sports anime.

That’s the tenor that’s defined the best of these offbeat entries we’ve talked about here: you really can make an anime about anything, and it’ll be good so long as you actually commit to it and take it seriously, no matter what it is.

That said, maybe you and I should get our dash times up. When word gets out that we did a whole sports column without Coop, we might need to make sure we can run fast enough!