OT: Rich, here's another in that "legal" series about self-esteem. I very much disagree with the author's conclusion, as made evident by the title.
Ban Dodgeball
By Tom Vannah
Published 03/14/02
I may be a politically correct wimp, but I'll tell you this: In a game of dodgeball, I'd knock Bryant Gumbel on his sorry ass.
Yeah, yeah, Gumbel is a highly competitive guy who's managed to climb to the pinnacle of the media game and keep his golf score under 100. He's a notorious over-achiever, who was once in the top echelon at NBC. And he's tough, having suffered the indignity of falling so far out of the top echelon that he ended up providing feature commentary for, of all things, Survivor.
But I'd still knock him on his butt. Golf may be a sport, and Gumbel might be good at it, but golf does little to improve one's overall agility. Now the host of the generally superb HBO series Real Sport, Gumbel can talk a good game. But while I've been out there training, keeping myself within spitting distance of my best form, Gumbel has gone the way of so many former athletes, letting himself get fat and out of shape. And so I'd show him if he'd lift his bulk out from behind the microphone and put himself to the same test to which he'd put every elementary school kid in America: dodgeball.
Quick as a rabbit, steely as a wolf, hopped up on the natural testosterone one necessarily associates with an alpha male, I'd fake left, fake right and just when I had him flat-footed, I'd slap him dead on the nose with my pink rubber ball.
And when I got done with Bryant Gumbel, I'd pick up my ball and going hunting for the awful gasbag who wrote that crap for the Weekly Standard.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I'll acknowledge that, though I always held my own in whatever the phys ed teachers came up with, I always thought dodgeball was stupid.
As an adolescent, my game was baseball, but in the mandatory class we all knew as "gym," real sports were inexplicably bastardized into weird hybrids such as kickball, a grotesque composite of soccer and softball, and "capture the flag," an amalgam of football and tag. Though genetically reengineered, kickball and capture the flag had, for me, one saving grace: They were played outdoors. Dodgeball was something our gym teacher pulled from his pedagogical bag of tricks only when inclement weather forced us inside.
If it were derived from any actual sports, dodgeball could only be the freakish offspring of water polo and bowling. But what made dodgeball really goofy was the sheer chaos it inspired among 30-odd bored, screaming children packed in a gym. It was if the game had been invented on the spot by a booze-addled gym teacher who needed to go out for a quick nip.
"Yeah," he must have bragged to the other coaches, "I just locked 'em in the gym, gave 'em a ball and let 'em go. They knew what to do. Should have heard them little ones howl."
Until a few years ago, I'd forgotten about dodgeball. It wasn't that I'd stopped looking back at earlier athletic experiences, thinking about the good and bad coaching advice I'd received over the years and wondering how it shaped the athlete I am today. I frequently marvel at how far the athletic world has come in its collective understanding of physiology, of sports medicine and nutrition, of training strategies and techniques Athletes who grew up a generation or two ago were, in some ways, still in the dark ages. For example, I remember being told to take salt tablets on hot days -- and that was only 20 years ago.
Dodgeball, like the habit of eating blood-red steaks before grueling sporting events or rubbing Ben-Gay on sore muscles after workouts, is one of the silly things we used to do that I figured would have simply died out by now.
Hard as it is to believe, however, dodgeball survives. And as a result, not only is there a movement afoot to ban dodgeball outright, but there are actually people who will passionately defend it. Among those who have lined up to attack the good-hearted and enlightened view that the 21st century can do better than dodgeball are the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher and Bryant Gumbel. Their argument, as eloquently summed up by the conservative Weekly Standard and reiterated on Gumbel's Real Sports: The attack on dodgeball is an extension of an liberal agenda to "wussify" America.
Ordinarily I'd say, dodge ball and let dodge ball. But I'm so irritated by Gumbel and Co.'s blithe dismissal of the case against the game, I feel compelled to stand and be counted. I now say, "Ban dodgeball."
Those who have led the movement against dodgeball believe that it encourages athletically precocious kids to prey on weaker, less talented kids.
Those who defend it agree, but they say that the effort being made to spare the weaker kids the humiliation of becoming targets for the strong will only make kids weaker. Once again, they complain, the PC crowd wants to give kids a false sense of self-esteem, making the "real world" that much harder for them to deal with. Being smacked with a rubber ball, they say, will toughen up the weak -- or at least get them used to being the losers they are -- while allowing the strong and gifted to know what it is to win, to dominate.
As hale and hearty as the defenders of dodgeball may believe themselves to be, they appear to have stopped thinking and growing a long time ago. Afraid of the rapidly-changing world around them, they cling to a sentimental and outdated view of life and of sport: No pain, no gain.
Horseshit. It should never be the function of a sixth-grade gym class to teach all of life's harsh lessons. Physical education at the elementary school level should be about teaching kids how to use their bodies, how to enjoy movement and how to grow athletically. That's all. And that's plenty.
Tom Vannah can be reached at tvannah@valleyadvocate.com
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