My daughter was telling me about the games she plays in first grade gym class. Let’s see. There was one called Tiger Tails. What I understand is someone runs around and steals tiger tails from other kids.
“Does anyone get horribly maimed like a real tiger attack!?!” I asked expectantly. It was typical dinner table conversation with me.
“Um, no,” she said. Then she went on with her story.
There was another one called Fire and Ice. It was kind of like team freeze tag. Kids had orange and blue balls …
“Oh, right,” I interrupted. “You nail other kids in the head with the balls, right?”
“No!” she replied. “Why would you do that?!?”
Silly child!
“Why?” I said. “To see if you could make their ears switch places! To see if stars circle their heads like in cartoons!”
“Boys are so weird,” she said.
What?!? I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up from the table and went into the kitchen to calm down.
“A ball in their little hands and they don’t hurl it at someone?” I mumbled to myself. “What are they teaching these kids!”
“You know in my day,” I called out, “you would still be picking chunks of rubber out of your spleen!”
I sounded like your typical meathead dad. But it seemed so far-removed from my own days on school playgrounds and ball fields.
I went to an all-boys Catholic elementary school where testosterone, violence and traumatic injuries ruled PE and recess each day. My school looked like a convalescent home. Kids walked the halls in casts and bloody head bandages. Teachers proactively handed out crutches and ice packs as we left the lunchroom for recess. The area hospital considered opening an on-site triage tent so they wouldn’t have to dispatch so many ambulances.
Shoot, we even turned library quiet time into a full-contact sport. “Will someone please explain how Eric sprained his ankle while reading ‘Green Eggs and Ham!’”
And if there was a ball in your hand, it became a speeding missile. Balls had only one purpose: hit someone so hard that his hair parted the other way.
We had simple games with simple rules. They boiled down to three basic elements: beaming with a ball, tripping and three-ton tackling. Three-ton tackling was when three tons of children piled on to the poor, unfortunate kid who had just been tripped. He rarely survived.
We came home with skinned knees and raspberries down our thighs. Our school uniforms — white polos with the school’s emblem and khaki pants — were shredded. Grass stains three feet long streaked down our legs.
“What happened to you?!?” horrified mothers would ask while applying antiseptic to open wounds.
“I don’t know,” little boys would reply. “I just I slid into first base. Wasn’t my fault it was in the parking lot.”
We had black eyes and twisted ankles. Welts and bruises. And we loved it all. There was no badge of honor more impressive than walking around campus with the imprint of a ball still tattooed to our faces.
I remember our PE coach actually encouraged aggression. It wasn’t that he was some brutal, gung-ho guy. Rather, he was a practical man with a lot of common sense. He realized that the quicker we injured ourselves, the quicker we were sent to the bleachers to heal. And the sooner we were all sent to the bleachers — propped up on casts and crutches — the sooner he could pull out a magazine and spend the rest of the semester reading.
But it never lasted. We couldn’t be contained. We couldn’t just watch empty fields and meandering butterflies. Our bodies healed too quickly. Often miraculously. Doctors were quick to clear us so we could get back into the fray. They had mortgages to worry about.
Somehow we still survived elementary school. We may walk crooked or live with slipped discs from tackling sessions, but we never knew a ball we didn’t fire at a friend.
And we always took it as a compliment when a little girl told us, “Boys are so weird!”