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Brie Larson can’t stop watching this obscure sport on ESPN

ESPN 8 The "Ocho" is real, or at least it was for a day.

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There once was the fictional television channel ESPN8: The Ocho that came from the 2004 comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. On August 5, 2022, ESPN had a little fun with it and designated ESPN2 as its new ESPN8 for the day to cover oddball, seldom-seen sports and recently, Brie Larson couldn’t get enough of the pizza dough-spinning competition driving the audience wild.

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When Dodgeball: A True Underdog originally aired in 2004 starring Vince Vaughn and Ben Stiller, it was a massive hit about an average gym owned by Vaughn pitted against a huge corporate gym owned by Stiller. True to these types of comedies, the rising action comes down to a nationally televised dodgeball competition with $50,000 on the line, just enough money for Vaughn to save his gym from being bulldozed by Stiller. In the story, ESPN8 televised the sport, which, by the way, isn’t just for kids anymore, as men and women of adult age sacrifice their limbs and faces on actual channels every once in a while, when those channels aren’t televising cornhole.

As history has it, ESPN2 gained the nickname “The Deuce” and was created to televise different types of sports, like extreme skateboarding, to appeal to younger audiences. Therefore, ESPN8 was given the similar nickname of “The Ocho” for the film and in 2004, an actual dodgeball competition on any ESPN channel seemed highly unlikely. However, the pandemic was the catalyst that would usher in the viewing of wacky sports, from stone-skipping competitions, to lawn mower racing, putt-putt championships, even cherry pit spitting. When Brie Larson caught this pizza dough spinning competition, she couldn’t take her eyes off of it.

To be very clear about this, ESPN8 cannot be found in any television lineup for now. However, that doesn’t keep it from seeming real when it was on ESPN 2 for that one day in August of last year.

After a nice article about chess boxing, Vaughn and the team’s success in the dodgeball competition was featured in OSQ which also had a nice shot of them holding a check for the cover.

Crossing over from the obscure sport Larson can’t stop watching to a Shaggy reference isn’t that far of a leap.

Not everyone will get the whole picture at first.

A reference to the human-sized shuffleboard game was bound to come up.

The fact that these games actually exist gives hope that everyone can be an athlete, as long as they have the ability to throw a bean bag, tweak a lawn mower engine, or master the art of spinning pizza dough.