Published September 18, 2005 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
By Aaron J. Brown
Remember your high school gym class?
Was that a smile or a grimace? People tend to fall into specific groups when it comes to this topic. Some loved gym for the spirited competition. Some loved causing physical pain, relishing the opportunity to do so free of the legal ramifications found outside gym.
Then there are the others. The large. The slow. The bespectacled. The oily. The smart, who convince themselves of intellectual superiority, but who were in fact large, slow, bespectacled, and/or oily.
I was an “other.” I got lapped by the sculpted competitive people and still recall the ping sound and stinging welts raised by the textured skin of a dodge ball.
Most people’s gym classes were a lot like mine. After washing a beaker or slapping shut a Shakespearian tome, students would trudge into their respective locker rooms to don clothing riper than a fuzzy strawberry. Afterward, we assembled in the gym to participate in calisthenics. These generally consisted of pushups and windmills, done with the kind of enthusiasm usually seen in politicians pretending to enjoy stories of hardship told by old rural people.
Then we would participate in a “sport.” Some days it was kickball, which is like baseball only you use your foot and can throw people out by pelting them with a large rubber ball. Other days it was dodge ball, which casts aside the mask of sportsmanship found in kickball and rewards the pelting of innocents outright.
Rules for dodge ball vary greatly, by region and severity of school board hazing policies. At my school, it was called “boomerang” and involved defending two bowling pins AND avoiding ball-related concussions or skin lesions. More often than not, however, the pins were but a cruel façade for the widely accepted practice of Darwinian selection by rubber ball.
At our school, a roving pack of older boys always seemed to show up on dodgeball days and for inexplicable reasons were allowed to play dodgeball for all seven periods. I think they were seniors, in that they had been around a long time and had not yet graduated. They dressed like the Fonz from “Happy Days” only if you told them that they would heave a 12-inch ball into your eye socket, making the same noise as when you open a new jar of jam.
My favorite memory was watching a kid drop his glasses as a ball whizzed by and the unremitting barrage of red and green balls that came at him while he chased his goggles across the gym floor. I’m pretty sure he lived, but it was close for a while there.
Now, thanks in part to last year’s movie “Dodgeball” and America’s growing hunger for low-brow nostalgia, dodgeball and kickball are enjoying a revival, even locally. Last year, Hibbing Community College offered intramural dodgeball with great success. “It’s a way for people to relive some of their childhood memories,” said Kurt Zuidmulder, intramural director at HCC. This year, however, the dodgeball league fell short of materializing.
A similar circumstance went on in Grand Rapids, where the city’s parks and recreation department offered an adult co-ed kickball league. Mary Johnson, a city activities coordinator, said that kickball has been very popular in the Twin Cities and some had suggested a league up north, again because of nostalgia and the spirit of competition.
“You’ve got the big red ball, same rules, you kick, you run, you get whacked,” said Johnson. “It would have been fun.”
Unfortunately for kickball enthusiasts, Grand Rapids parks and rec couldn’t recruit enough teams to make a league go this year either, but Johnson said they plan to try again early next year when more people are aware of the idea.
I don’t know who is really pushing the gym sport trend. Perhaps the real world has proven too much to handle by those who excelled at these sports at the age of 17. Maybe they aren’t the best or the brightest, but they can still attempt, in the name of sport, to decapitate those who are. Or perhaps enough time elapsed where people like me can finally enjoy gym sports for fun, rather than pain.
I’ll play. That’s right, I’m in. Where do I sign …. (ping, thump).
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.