This weekend there were 757 broom-clutching Muggles competing in the most intense magic-turned-Muggle sport around. That’s right, Quidditch. Nay, it gets better, The Quidditch World Cup.
At the height of the pre-theatrical hype for the second to last “Harry Potter” movie, this annual competition, in its fourth year, continues to take off and spread like a rumor through Hogwarts.
The weekend event brought students to Manhattan from all over the country, including schools like Harvard, Yale, Ohio State and Texas A&M, all in the name of chasing a human snitch and converting the fantastic into reality.
This all goes to show the Muggle world just can’t get enough of the green-eyed boy who lived. The final book in the series was so successful that it sold nearly 11 million copies in the first 24 hours. And the term “Muggle,” which is used to describe the non-magical folk of the world, was one of the first pop-culture words in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the coveted sport of Quidditch is akin to our culture’s Friday night football frenzies and our overall national obsession with the violent, pigskin toss around.
The rules of Quidditch are less than simple and the game is less than enchanted, but the sport that once began as a group of stick-wielding super nerds at Middlebury College in Vermont has spread to hundreds of colleges in 45 states and 12 countries.
Although ASU’s own Quidditch team wasn’t able to make an appearance at this year’s annual competition, there’s still a chance we could sweep onto the national scene, and maybe knock Middlebury off its high Nimbus for once. There are at least five national Quidditch events listed on the IQA’s website, the next being the Quidditch Swamp Cup in Florida.
More important than touting the teams that flew to New York City for the fourth annual World Cup is giving homage to the series of fictional stories that have inspired a generation of imaginations since 1997.
A series that one of the loudest critics of popular literature, Stephen King, called “a feat of which only a superior imagination is capable” has held true.
Whether you love the book and hate the movies, or would never touch one of those 800-pagers but happily lift a feather-light ticket stub to enter the world of Harry Potter — no one can deny how he infiltrated our very culture and the nature of imagination.
Technology is advancing faster than ever and although innovation is critical to the progress of said technology, it’s important to exercise that cerebral cortex.
The Earth-bound nonfiction version of Quidditch may be the closest we can get to Harry Potter’s favorite pastime, but it stands as a testament that we are not bound by fairy tales nor technology — although a flying broomstick would be a welcome invention if there are any science innovators reading this.
