This Wizard Should Hang Up Broomstick

Sadly, sports fans, it now appears that November 2028 will forever be remembered for the comeback that never should have happened, for the aging wizard who can no longer sky nearly as high as his legend would have it.

He said he could still do it. Many of us hoped he could still do it. But at 38, after a three-year hiatus, it is now obvious that Harry Potter, the greatest Quidditch player the game has ever seen, has lost it.

“I’m worried for him,” said longtime friend and confidant Ron Weasley, now a Quidditch commentator for the BBC. “I’m afraid he’s going to get hurt. I cannot tell you how many times I pleaded with him, begged him, to stay away, to keep to the retirement home in Essex, to let his reputation be. But you know Harry. Sometimes, there’s no talking to ‘im.”

Potter, who walked away from the game at the height of his powers, having snatched the Golden Snitch in world-record time in his final performance for the Ballycastle Bats, has been but a ghost of his former self since his ballyhooed return. He has lost feet off his vertical, seconds off his hang time. Routinely now, he is beaten to the ball by callow Seekers who couldn’t have carried his Nimbus 2020 back in the day.

Who wants to watch a Harry Potter who can no longer elevate?

Remember, this is the man who once was the boy who made Quidditch the most popular sport in the world. Before 2001 and the first installment of the famous Harry Potter film series, which made Warner Bros. rich enough to buy its own country and spawned three new religions, Quidditch was just another soccer-hockey-football-rugby-basketball-baseball-horse racing hybrid played on sorcerer’s broomsticks 50 feet above the ground. All played out, that one.

Back then, Quidditch had little more than a cult following in England and a few scattered junior high chess clubs. Although the game borrowed elements of soccer, mainland Europeans were indifferent because players could use their hands. Although Quidditch players had been killed during matches, and the occasional referee teleported to the Sahara, video gamers were apathetic because there wasn’t enough violence.

Across the pond in the United States, Quidditch was seen as just one more British novelty item, much like Oasis, Geri Halliwell and “Men Behaving Badly,” which simply didn’t translate here.

But then, movie viewers around the globe feasted their eyes on the movie “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” featuring Potter as a promising rookie Seeker for the Gryffindor school team.

Sport, as it was known at the turn of the century, would never be the same.

For the first time, Muggles caught a glimpse of the full Quidditch arsenal, and were instantly transfixed.

There was the oddly dimpled red Quaffle, the game ball, worth 10 points every time it was flung by a Chaser through one of three 50-foot-high goal hoops. This immediately impressed American fans, who don’t trust any sport unless it’s high-scoring. The very first professional Quidditch franchise in the United States, the Austin (Texas) Powers, play their home matches inside the 64,000-seat Quaffle House.

There were the mysterious pulsating black Bludgers, which wobble in the air like giant Mexican jumping beans, seemingly with minds of their own, very similar to a Shaquille O’Neal free throw.

Finally, there was the winged Golden Snitch, precious and elusive, worth 150 points and sudden-death victory to the Seeker who succeeded in chasing it down. This process, as neophyte fans quickly learned, can be interminable, causing some teams to play for months before someone won. In 2001, the Detroit Lions were playing a form of Quidditch, and didn’t even know it.

Upon the movie’s release, theaters across the United States were filled with young Quidditch fans, clad in pointed hats and replica Wizard jerseys, cheering wildly as Potter, then 11, led Gryffindor to an upset over archrival Slytherin.

The idea seems quaint today, but in 2001 it was revolutionary: A story in which the smartest kid in school, skinny and bespectacled, is also the best athlete. For millions of grade-school honor students, this was their Billie Jean King-over-Bobby Riggs moment.

Corporate America was quick to notice. Unlike major league baseball, which was too busy folding franchises in preparation for the Great Work Stoppage of 2002-2005. Or the NBA, which was completely stumped, trying to regulate ways to stop O’Neal and Kobe Bryant from winning the championship every season--even though there too, Quidditch offered the solution: 50-foot hoops.

And as we all know now, the NFL was fatally slow to react to the threat posed by the new sport. Believing itself invincible, so long as it found a way for a different team to win the Super Bowl every year, the NFL grew fat and oblivious. Parity eventually decimated the league, with all 32 teams finishing the 2007 season at 8-8, all with the same intra-divisional and conference tiebreakers, resulting in no team being able to qualify for the playoffs and further resulting in the cancellation of the Super Bowl.

Desperate for a sport with growth potential that didn’t smell like burning rubber, the television networks turned to Quidditch.

NBC was the first to sign on, thrilled to find something to fill its weekend programming schedule that did not involve Vince McMahon.

Fox was next, but only because Quidditch League officials balked at the network’s initial request to stitch ads for “Ally McBeal” on the capes of each player.

Mass production of the requisite flying broomsticks was a sticking point initially.

But in late 2002, Nike bought out Nimbus and undersold rival manufacturer Firebolt by its use of cheap child labor in southeastern Asia. When Tiger Woods proved more adept at driving the Golden Snitch than catching it, Nike signed Potter to the most lucrative endorsement contract in sports history, making the lad the first $1 billion-a-year athlete.

For the next two decades, it was nothing but glory and championships and sequels for Potter, who in 2022 was named Greatest Athlete of the Century by ESPN over the protests of several sports historians arguing that the 21st century still had 78 years to go. ESPN’s response: “It’s our scoop.”

Now it is 2028 and a sorry time, really, for the sports world, having to watch the game’s greatest legend doubled over on his broom, pushing 40, spitting out strands of straw.

Asked to comment after his latest 167-point drubbing at the hands of the Wigtown Wanderers, Potter could only gasp while trainers hooked him up to the sideline oxygen tank.

“He should’ve kept the Sorcerer’s Stone when he had the chance,” one of them said wistfully as he pressed the mask to the aging hero’s face. “He’d have had immortality, the ‘Elixir of Life,’ the whole bit. He’d still be in his prime.”