Though many sports exist that do not require the usage of a ball—such as running, swimming, and quicksand escaping—most professional athletes agree that to make it in the big leagues, you must be able to recognize the following balls:

Footballs: These “balls” aren’t balls at alls! A symmetrical tapered ovoid, pigskins can more accurately be called pig eggs because of their shape and their actual biological origins. The shape of a football allows you to throw a tight spiral, although this is only provable by first affixing it with a grenade of dazzling colored smoke.

Basketballs: The exact color, size, and shape of a pumpkin, these dimpled spheres are crisscrossed with black boundary lines—this is because each basketball is also a miniature basketball court! Gut it and lay it flat like an open newspaper for an exciting game of overturned ant farm vs. army men.

Golf Balls: These handheld esophagus-clogging beauties keep players from being dishonest when they jot down their score—you’ve probably heard the old golfers' expression “the more you cheat, the more you eat!” Golf-ball ingestion is responsible for more hospital visits than shark attacks and mechanical-shark attacks combined.