On Dodge Ball

One of my very favorite television shows ever was a short-lived, hour-long comedy about the atrocities of adolescence called Freaks and Geeks. It’s one of the funniest shows I’ve ever seen because it has the teenage years pinned down perfectly.

As I was growing up, school was more of an alienating experience than an ingratiating one. I hardly dreaded going to school, but negotiating the confused landscape that is adolescence seemed heroic enough, and then they wanted me to do homework, too.

Once I got to middle school, I had something of an emotional breakdown.  Once I entered the doors and encountered the busy hallways of Harry F. Byrd Middle School, I knew right then that it was too much for me.  I wanted to go back to elementary school.  Surely someone could arrange this for me.

Middle school made me feel even smaller than I already felt.  People grow up way too much between 6th grade and 8th grade.  This wouldn’t be a bad thing except for the fact that the 8th graders knew this.

The hallways in between classes in middle school were like bowling lanes.  The 8th graders were the bowling balls, and guess who the pins were.

I feared for my safety.  8th graders slammed 6th graders against the walls of the hallway coming out of the gym locker room.  The strategy for keeping safe involved staying in the very center of the hallway and keeping low, and even that didn’t guarantee anything.  If you made the mistake of walking down Yellow Hall against the wall, some big 8th grader would make you into a wall ornament.  It was a bloodbath.

My guidance counselor arranged it with the principal so that I got a pass to take the outside route to get to gym class, safely detouring the “running of the bulls/splattering of the 6th graders” that happened everyday on Yellow Hall.

My friends were envious of my pass.  Once I reentered Yellow Hall from the outside doors, I would watch from my safe place to see whether my friends made it through the day’s 8th grader target practice.

♦

The pilot episode of Freaks and Geeks is my very favorite.  It has a dead-on treatment of another sort of schoolyard “target practice” that the bigger, more physical students thrived off of, and the “less bigger, less physical” ones had to endure and were forever scarred by.

It is the legalized form of torture more commonly referred to as “dodge ball”.

I hate dodge ball.  I hate every form of it.  The circle kind.  The German kind.  Whatever other kinds there are, I hate them too.  I hate the guy who invented it.  He must have pinned a couple of 6th graders against the wall in his middle school, too.

Here’s what I imagine the first explanation for dodge ball being like:

So, you take a big red ball that weighs, oh, maybe 2 pounds and is about three times larger than a human head, and you give it to the biggest guy on your team, and you let him throw it as fast as he wants right at the smallest guy on the other team.  If that guy doesn’t catch it, he’s out!  Get it? Let’s play!

What a knucklehead the inventor of dodge ball must have been!

My strategy at dodge ball was to get out as soon as possible and laugh at all the wide-eyed suckers in the middle of the circle scurrying from one side to the other, frantically avoiding the big red ball of death.  This strategy worked for me until we were introduced to the German version.  In German dodge ball, there was no “out”.  Once you were hit in the middle, you went to the sidelines (where you could still get hit) where your job was to get the ball and throw it at the ones still in the middle.  There was no end to the suffering!  I believe the Buddhists call this “Samsara”.

There is no healing from dodge ball, because nothing good can ever come from something so evil.

It’s a good thing most of us don’t stay teenagers forever.  The bitterness of our school years fades along with our acne scars.  Adulthood is much more tame than our teenage years were.  In adulthood, there’s little threat of being thrown against a cubicle by one of our colleagues at work.

And best of all, nobody these days forces us to play dodge ball.