Young Justice does such a remarkable job at faithfully adapting many of its characters and plotlines. It also does such a good job at restructuring decades of tangled comics continuity into a sensible world of its own that it's sometimes easy to forget that there are areas where the animated series puts a completely unique spin on certain aspects of the DC Universe.
Perhaps no character saw a bigger improvement in their Young Justice reimagining than Sportsmaster. However, the fresh take on the character that's clearly an improvement on the version in the source material has yet to be used by DC Comics.
In his origins, Sportsmaster was a hokey concept for a character. Many supervillains of the Golden Age of Comics were built around a thematic motif that helped define them. Because villains needed to be pumped out in large quantities, it was easiest for creators to work with a simple idea, with many of the most popular examples being Batman villains like Joker or Riddler. For Sportsmaster, a villain who originally fought the first Green Lantern Alan Scott and the boxing fighter Wildcat, that gimmick was "sports."
In his early days, Sportsmaster used exploding sports equipment and other gadgets and had the background of a disgraced athlete. Over the years, several other iterations on the character would riff on the same idea and serve as cute callbacks to the hokey concept. But when the character was adapted for the series Young Justice, he received a top to bottom redesign that made him cooler than ever.
In his redesign for the show, Sportsmaster was a mercenary and top enforcer for the primary villains known as The Light. Though he maintained the aesthetic of primarily utilizing athletic equipment, each weapon was creatively reimagined into variations of real-world weapons. A hammer used in Olympic hammer throws was refashioned into a flail, telescoping javelins could explode on contact and metallic hockey armor practically protected the assassin on his missions.
Yet, the comics have yet to use this take on the character. His connection in the show to the League of Shadows, known in the comics as the League of Assassins, would be a straightforward enough way to reintroduce the character during any of DC's various reimaginings, and Damian Wayne's activity on the Teen Titans and his own ties to the League would make him a natural villain for the group. Given the show's connection between the villain and his daughter Artemis, who serves on the Team in Young Justice, it's already clear how perfectly Sportsmaster works as an antagonist that has personal ties to the team he fights.
Aside from examples from the DC Animated Universe, such as Harley Quinn, there are few instances of DC re-adapting the ideas utilized in TV and movie projects. The wildly popular Music Meister first appeared in Batman: The Brave and the Bold and has since made his way into The Flash and Supergirl, but he too similarly lacks fresh ideas transferring to the comics. Sportsmaster even recently appeared again with clear parallels to his Young Justice incarnation in Stargirl, and yet, the comics continue to leave him untouched.
Ignoring such demonstrably popular and effective characters is a curious choice, but there is always hope in the future that such adaptations can occur. When it comes to Sportsmaster, it's clear that DC could hit one out of the park, but for now, it seems like he'll have to wait on the bench.