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Illustration by Mario Noche.
Grandview Heights High School recently held a charity dodgeball tournament. The lure? I’d like to say it was the chance to help raise money for a children’s organization, but I believe the big motivator was that the winning team of students got the chance to play the teachers.
This idea sent me into peals of laughter, not just at the good-natured lunacy of teachers submitting to playing dodgeball against 18-year-olds. No, it was the idea of undertaking such a venture in my high school.
Just imagining Sister Cordialla and Sister Cleofa ducking, dipping and dodging as red rubber balls zing toward their heads fills my heart with semi-blasphemous glee. Watch those habits fly!
Or maybe the projectiles would simply halt midair and drop to the ground before reaching the sisters via some spooky nun power. Either option is funny.
Actually, I don’t think you’re allowed to throw balls at nuns, so this couldn’t have taken place at my high school. But the last day before Christmas break, the Fighting Bobcats got the chance to kick Fighting Bobcat Teacher butt.
My son, Riley, had a team. Like his dad, Riley likes to play anything. Indeed, Riley, now a senior, has somehow managed to take physical education every year he’s been in school. Some years twice. We’re so proud.
He enjoys nearly every PE activity, obviously, given his near-obsessive devotion to the class, but he has an oft-spoken favorite. My boy loves him some dodgeball.
I am less of a fan, however. I blame Wade, my fourth-grade nemesis who pummeled me without mercy every gym class devoted to the sport. I’d have fought back were I able to dodge and/or throw, but, alas, I lacked the skills.
Riley put together his own team of six, called Montezuma’s Revenge, which consisted of a runner and baseball and soccer players. Perhaps they should have named themselves the Skinny Boys. It was a good recruiting plan because they disappear when they turn sideways.
Two of Riley’s teammates were a set of twins with crazy skills, such as running up a gymnasium wall to avoid being hit. It was like watching something out of The Matrix. They were dodgeball ninjas.
Riley was an intimidating presence on the court as well. He’s a pitcher, so he’s mean-accurate and throws hard—showing no pity. He and his wily teammates obliterated team after team and found themselves facing a squad made up mostly of football seniors whose team name I won’t repeat. I don’t know what it means, but Riley promises it’s not fit to print.
Riley’s buddy Nate led the big kids, and there was some fun trash-talking, but the true goal was not really in one team humiliating the other; it was in one team getting past the other to get the opportunity to humiliate the teachers. It’s astonishing how motivating that carrot really was.
Montezuma’s Revenge found themselves in the underdog role, with most of the school assuming the more muscular athletes would pummel them. But you know what? Football players make big targets. Riley and his ninja posse made quick work of Nate and his buddies and then looked forward to the carnage to come.
You know what else makes big targets? Adults. Slow-moving adults taking a literal beating for the greater good.
My husband was on hand to film the spectacle, capturing the evil glee with which six wiry, athletic young men caught, repelled and fired dodgeballs.
Of course, that means scrambling, fleeing and flailing as well as blood spatter, was captured, too. Not that I’m threatening to put said video online or anything like that. I’m just floating the information out there.
You see, it’s good to have a little protection against repercussions, what with each of the defeated handing out grades before graduation day. You can be relentlessly smacked in the head by a red rubber ball for only so long before you begin to hate the wildly grinning boy responsible for your humiliation and pain.
Believe me, I know. I’m looking at you, Wade.
Hope Madden is a film critic for The Other Paper and a freelance writer.
