"Oh, yeah! I'd do that," says Joel, a firefighter and engineer. "With the red balls, right?"
"That was one of my favorite games!" adds Rob, another engineer. "Are they going to use the red balls?"
Mark Poutenis
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Mitch, my daughter's gentle, bookish English teacher, also signs on alarmingly fast for a man who is considered a role model for children. "I am the king of dodgeball!" he growls, his eyes already hardening.
Rounding out the team with women wasn't so easy. Jennifer, who works for the City of Boulder, explains why: "I grew up in Nebraska, so dodgeball was really big. I remember getting pegged with the red balls. I know the guys who are playing are really competitive, and I didn't want to be a walking target."
Jennifer first heard about South Suburban's tournaments a couple of months ago. With a mixture of anticipation and fear, she phoned Davis to find out the type of balls being used. Assured that soft foam was in and hard rubber was out, she signed up. This would be her second tournament; in fact, she'd talked so glowingly about the first tournament that this time around she was bringing two teams.
My first female commitment is Liz, a physical therapist who, though reluctant at first, has some pleasant associations with blasting a few of her teenage son's friends during an informal dodgeball game staged at a birthday party. Mitch agrees to drag along his girlfriend and another woman, both young, former college athletes.
On the night of the tournament, both Rob and Mitch also bring along friends who plead desperately for a chance to play. After a quick tryout (fun is nice, but this is dodgeball), they are signed up. Together, we are the [Boston] Weltics. The Sheridan Rec Center boasts a suitably old-school gymnasium: folded up bleachers against the walls and a vast canvas curtain bisecting the floor into two dodgeball arenas.
After a few early missteps -- it turns out the light balls are pretty difficult to catch -- the Weltics coalesce into an unstoppable machine. It is just as I remember it, except perhaps without the nagging sense of impending pain: The balls, light but still capable of carrying a decent charge, slapping into flesh; the crowd's collective groans as a throw slams home off someone's head (new rules say head shots don't count, but who cares?). And, of course, the patently false claims of a successful dodge, despite what we all just saw. Joel shakes his head continually. "This game is full of rampant dishonesty," he notes sadly.
Still, it all ends as it should. In the final round, the Weltics face off against the Ball Crushers, who, by virtue of having matching T-shirts, deserve to die. Alas, the Crushers were not to be so easily vanquished. Led by a vicious blond woman with an arm like a howitzer and the elusiveness of a border crosser, they, well, crush the Weltics two games straight.
Fortunately, the tournament is double elimination. Led by Brent, one of our late-arriving ringers -- who, in addition to being six-four with an arm like a trebuchet, happens to be a gym teacher who does permit dodgeball in his classes -- the Weltics regroup. The best-of-three series ends as beautifully as a sunset, with four Weltics pelting a single woman from the Crushers as she cowers against the gym wall like a chipmunk in a Havahart trap.
Watching from the sidelines, Rob breathes a heavy sigh of contentment. "This," he says -- and I would swear his eyes mist up as four balls at once rocket toward the girl, two of them spanking loudly into her legs -- "is what it's all about."
While the Weltic men, like dogs, were happy simply to have demonstrated our complete and total dominance over others, the team's women found satisfaction prevailing in the game's symbolic battles. "When I played as a kid, it was always a thrill getting the ringleader boy out," recalls Claire. "Same thing tonight."
Liz, whose bazooka arm always seemed to catch at least one opposition male underestimating her, agreed: Eliminating the buttheads -- referred to by the Weltics as "knee-brace," "baldy" or "the scary guy with the goatee" -- was sweet.
"The guy with the goatee -- he had those killer eyes -- didn't expect me to come after him. I think he had two balls in his hands. Claire said to me, 'Are you crazy?' as I advanced. But instead of backing up, he just crouched down. So I nailed him. And what really made me all the more satisfied was that he thought I was too chicken to go after him. But he was wrong."
With the glow of victory still warming us like a belt of whiskey, several of the Weltics are already planning for the next South Suburban tournament, on December 13. Beyond that, of course, is the National Amateur Dodge Ball Association's 3rd Annual Winter Nationals, on January 4, in Schaumburg, Illinois, home of the three-year-old NADA. After that, who knows? I'm thinking we could go all the way.
Eat shit, Dave Ringo. We rule.
