Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 06.07.04

It wasn't enough that summer co-ed rec leagues — on top of working your body and satisfying your competitive jones — be a means to meet new friends and potential dating partners. Now, they're also an opportunity to work out your childhood issues.

On the surface, it seems like fun to have schoolyard standards like dodgeball and kickball becoming popular adult activities. Sadly, these new leagues seem more about overcoming your p.e.-class memories than reliving them.

There couldn't be more people looking for redemption if they were all serving time at Shawshank. "There's always that kid who wasn't picked for a team in the fifth grade," said Colleen Finn, founder of a dodgeball league in Portland, Ore., to the Associated Press. "This is the perfect chance for redemption." Tom Costello, an NBC reporter, filed this take from a dodgeball league in Columbus, Ohio: "If you were one of those scrawny kids in grade school, this is redemption, a chance to exorcise those old elementary school ghosts. I happen to know one of those kids." And with that, facing the red rubber ball of his miserable childhood head-on, Costello runs onto the court.

Dodgeball (or bombardment, depending on where you're from), as you may be trying to forget, features two teams throwing balls at each other. If you get hit or if someone catches a ball you've thrown, you're out of the game. The team that knocks out all of the other team's players wins. The wild variance in junior-high kids' size and violent tendencies tend to make dodgeball a one-word term for childhood peer abuse. Fox is banking that enough of us have dodgeball issues that we'll pack theaters starting June 18 to see Dodgeball starring Vince Vaughn as a put-upon schlump who leads a team of former childhood geeks against the kind of big jocks who slammed them upside the head in school.

At least the threat of maiming means dodgeball is legitimately as traumatizing to children as the monster under the bed. But if you're trying to overcome your childhood pain through kickball, you must have been more sensitive than Kenny Loggins. In Seattle, the league is called Underdog Kickball, and it's pitched like a rubber ball over the plate toward the "kids who were always picked last."

Kickball league founders will tell you this isn't like softball or basketball, where one of your fellow competitors may have had high school glory days on the varsity team. As Johnny LeHane, co-founder of the World Adult Kickball Association, told the Washington Post: "Nobody was the captain of their high school or college kickball team." Now really. Do you see former jocks forming Underdog Spelling Bees or whining about how they were always the last ones picked to answer a question in science class?

Working out these always-picked-last issues in kickball has the air of ugly ducklingism to it — I was a dork in school, but I'm grown up and beautiful now! This feeling of being put-upon has gone a bit far. There's a perverse desire, it seems, for successful adults to talk about how they were dowdy and always picked last, but you know it's not possible that many people could have been picked last. As one who had a lock on being picked last in two different elementary schools in the late 1970s, I was the subject of a significant percentage of "OK, I guess we'll have to take him" discussions.

You're not going to find me in any of these leagues, pouting on the inside with fellow schoolyard outcasts. And I have even more reason to feel bad about my gym-class experience. My sophomore p.e. class in Carmel, Ind., played the most violent game ever conceived for pubescent boys.

The game was called wallball. It consisted of putting about 60 or so teenage boys in the school's wrestling room, with mats on the floors and the walls. The boys were divided into two teams and instructed to take the ball to their respective opposite end and place it within a taped-off box on the wall. You could advance the ball by throwing, but all ambulatory motion had to be on your knees. Plus, you could pretty much tackle, punch, clothesline or do whatever it took to dislodge the ball from your opponent. At least in dodgeball, you could try to avoid contact. In wallball, with so many raging hormones in a space about the size of a suburban living room, getting hit was inevitable.

One time, after throwing the ball, I got my right wrist split in two places after a jock a hit it with his head on my follow-through. But did I cry — hell no! I went to the nurse's office, where she checked to see if there was an injury by twisting my wrist around like Linda Blair's head in The Exorcist. Then she sent me to lunch, confident of the curative powers of the cafeteria. A few hours later, I finally went to the hospital to get X-rays, which confirmed the breaks.

So if you're the type who's still mopey over being picked last for kickball, remember my story and — oh, who am I kidding? Wallball was terrible! I've never been able to get over it! How could a sensitive soul like myself been subjected to such cruelty?

I can think of only one way to get over this. I'm going to start an Underdog Wallball league. Who's with me?

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.