Get a load of that big sword up there! That's what was presented to the KBO League's NC Dinos when they won the Korean Series earlier today; that's catcher Yang Eui-ji lifting it in triumph. This could only have ruled harder if he'd been allowed to behead the rival Doosan Bears' mascot with it.
I'm told that the sword is a branding gimmick: that the NC Dinos are owned by a video game company and that the sword is, basically, an ad for a phone game made by the company. In that respect it is, as Dan McQuade put it this morning, as if the Dallas Mavericks won the NBA Finals and celebrated with a Shark Tank–themed prop. That's supremely gross. It's also beside the point here. There is no particular reason the giant gleaming sword presented to the Korean Series winner has to be an ad for a phone game made by the winning team's ownership group, beyond the sort of dismal corporate capture that defines basically all life in capitalist society in the year 2020. It could just be that the KBO League's Korean Series trophy is a giant sword. That's what I recommend. Sports trophies should be cool things.
Presently, the World Series winner receives the almost incomprehensibly lame Commissioner's Trophy. Apart from its world-historically dull and anticlimactic name (Congratulations! In addition to being champions of the world, you're also champions of the commissioner!), it's just a dumb ugly metal plate with a ball on it, and a bunch of spindly metal flags sticking out of it. It looks like shit. You could never charge that thing up like Link and do a bad-ass spinning move to bisect all of the teammates who have gathered around you to celebrate. What if instead of presenting the World Series winners with a bathroom wastebasket made of silver, they presented the World Series winners with the giant wolf's head battering ram from Lord of the Rings and allowed them to bash down the front gate of the loser's stadium with it? Participation in youth baseball would increase 12 billion percent overnight.
Basketball's champions get a gilded silver and vermeil representation of a hoop with a basketball about to enter it. Super Bowl champions get a silver football affixed to a silver pedestal. Bullcrap! They just spent the better part of a year interacting with normal versions of these items. This is like if you won a contest at your office job and were rewarded with an extremely heavy, nonfunctional laptop. I'm offended on their behalf. Present the NBA Finals winners with jeweled breastplates. Picture the Super Bowl champions receiving an 18-wheeler as a trophy; picture them taking turns hauling ass all over the field in it.
Hockey's champions receive an extremely large cup. They already have cups, man. I feel certain that each and every hockey man possesses many cups at home. Many of their cups do not require both hands and a generous application of core muscles in order to take a drink from them; this makes those cups better than the extremely large one. I bet none of the hockey men—no hockey men anywhere!—possess a tokamak reactor, nor the awesome fusion powers contained therein. Given the choice, who would want their triumph over all of the sport of hockey commemorated with a large drinking cup when instead they could be presented with a mighty tokamak (and possibly invited to hurl the losing team into it)? No one.
In conclusion, make the sports trophies cool things, instead of dull and lame things. The next 82 Wimbledon champions should each receive ownership of one moon of Saturn.
