Bombardment

Illustration By: Hyacinth Hughes

Dodgeball doesn't hurt anymore (or the pain is different, anyway).

by Patrick Rapa

You can get a concussion playing dodgeball. It happened to a friend of mine. Recently. "When I tell people that, most people don't ask how I am," says the 29-year-old adult who owns a car and has a job. "They say, 'Why were you playing dodgeball?'"

It's a fair question. How on earth did the most brutal of all gym-class incident-makers — the childhood sport with absolutely no fond memories attached — survive to re-injure its favorite victims once they were all grown up?

The answer is simple: The game wasn't the problem. It was the players.

Kids are assholes. They pick on the small, the quiet, the ones with glasses or bad hair or big brains. Give kids free rein to throw something at their peers and, regardless of the supposed "friendly competition" context, you can expect an abuse of the privilege. The strong unite against the weak and hunt them down in packs.

I know, I know. Adults can be that way too. But, unshackled from the societal microcosm of playground politics, we no longer have our opponents chosen for us. We can pick who we play with. When the assholes are not invited — or weeded out once brain beats brawn in the post-high-school era — suddenly the game is not so dangerous.

I hardly know the people I play dodgeball with. Many of us first showed up because of word of mouth or the ornate, wheat-pasted signs we saw affixed to streetlights around town. "Dodgeball," they said in unimposing script. "10:30 p.m., Thursdays, 12th and Carpenter." There is no Web site. Or e-mail list. People just show up, shake hands, exchange first names (or nicknames) and play under the lights. It should be funny that a bunch of strangers meet up in the dark to play dodgeball, but it sort of makes sense.

At 10:30, a tall guy with a Duchamp tattoo bikes up with a canvas sack of lightweight inflated rubber balls. His arms are covered in tar from roofing all day. If the games have an official organizer, he's the man. Most players who show up to play at South Philly's Hawthorne rec center loosely fit his mold: 20- or 30-something non-alpha males or females. Some know each other. Some have just seen each other around at punk shows and other art events around town. If people are there because they're anticipating some kind of dodgeball craze inspired by the Ben Stiller movie, they don't let on.

Technically speaking, the game resembles bombardment more than old-school, straight-up dodgeball. Two teams assemble on separate sides of a tennis court and begin throwing balls at each other. If you're hit, you're out. If you catch it, the thrower is out and anyone on your team who'd already been knocked out is back in.

Sometimes the sole survivor of one team is left to face considerable numbers across the court. This person can run back and forth like a target duck or crouch square to the enemy, hoping to reincarnate his or her team with a catch. Usually it ends with the bass sound of the poor soul getting euthanized by one ball while trying to dodge another. Then it's time for another round.

This format is considerably less oppressive than the version you may remember from grade school, wherein an outer ring of throwers attempted to wound a huddled mass of dodgers in the middle. (There's really nowhere to run that way and there's always the fear of getting hit from behind.)

At 12th and Carpenter, the game is reborn untainted by adolescent underpinnings and sociological tortures.

With the lighted skyline dominating the background, perfect strangers play dodgeball in the cool, evening breeze. There is strategy and comedy and defeat and victory and intensely sore arms. Afterward, there's a walk to the pretzel place at Eighth and Washington that opens at midnight. And there's a satisfying calm you rarely get from more organized and more popular athletic activities. An understanding that it didn't matter who won. That it's just a game.

And that concussion my friend got? It wasn't from getting hit with a ball. He slipped while dodging and banged the back of his head on the asphalt. A freak accident. Four weeks later, the ringing in his ears is slowly subsiding. When they did a CT scan on his skull, the doctors found an extra optic nerve on his right eye. Look for him in medical journals and sideshows this fall! And he has dodgeball to thank. Kind of.