21 Apr 2008
Do They Feel Hard?
Drafted on 12 Oct 2006 (Cool, my birthday! :))
Bill Cosby once had a theory about playgrounds…
His theory was that monkey bars, roundabouts, and teeter totters, etc… were designed as part of a plot by adults to kill off their own children thereby alleviating their financial woes. Gee, when I put it like that, it sure doesn’t sound that funny.
But he might not have been too far off. I don’t think he ever could have imagined what kids today with their modern technological advantages would be capable of. I’m sure you all remember the scooter/roundabout video debacle in Tilgate Park in Crawley, West Sussex from 2006? I originally had planned on embedding a flash video of the infamous incident (which is still available mind you), but having now seen a few copycat videos of kids exhibiting the same level of stupidity, I’ve decided against it. They don’t need anymore exposure than they’ve already received. This is one of the few times I’ve self-censored my own blog, and might be a bit hypocritical given what I’ll be embedding in the next few paragraphs.
When I was a kid going to elementary school, we didn’t have too many playground toys with which to play. We pretty much had just three different kinds of monkey bars which were all fairly simple in design; one was just a glorified ring, the other a dome, and the last and fanciest of the bunch remotely resembled some kind of large reptilian creature with a straight slide on the front. We also had a trio of what I assume were pull-up bars but not too many people went near them. In the front asphalted part of the school yard were three poles which may have been tether-ball poles sometime in their early infancy, but had since just turned into plain boring poles by the time I started attending. Lastly, in the back asphalted part of the yard were a pair of basketball hoops.
The youngest kids spent most of their time during recess on the reptile monkey bars with the slide. The slightly older ones climbed around on the other bars, while some of the girls played skipping rope or hopscotch on the asphalt out front. The boys slightly older than that played Four Square in the front or back, and the girls stood against the gym wall swinging tennis balls around in their Moms’ old stockings rhythmically chanting songs. Getting older still, the boys played Soccer or Football in the muddy field, trying to avoid dog poop and gopher holes, basketball in the back hoping not to get knocked down into a pile of broken beer bottles left by teenagers the night before, or Wall Ball on the side of the gym with a moist tennis ball (moist because it’s heavier and will hurt more when you smack someone in the small of their back). Don’t really remember what the girls did from this age on except stand around gossiping or generally making mischief. Sometimes there was a game of Freshie or my particular favourite, Prisoner, which was no longer fun after they invented the rule to counteract kids like me from running all the way around the school to come from behind and free a bunch of kids.
Compared to scooters/mopeds and roundabouts, our antics at school seemed tame, the odd kick to the mouth during Soccer or broom to the face during broomball notwithstanding. Also, at some point, some kid realized those boring poles would suit just fine as bases in a game of kickball (using those rubber balls synonymous with dodgeball), and only occasionally would we need to go running out into traffic to fetch balls kicked out of the yard. But I’d never call any of what I just described as being “lethal.”
Inside the gym was maybe a slightly different story. Thirty kids running around in an enclosed space, some wielding balls that could be thrown at breakneck speeds… that’s just asking for trouble.
Like I’m sure most schools did, we played our fair share of Dodgeball, Pinball, and King’s Court (which, from my memory, sounds a lot more like Munkenai), but with the rule that prisoners could also take you out by hitting you. Also, you could pass to your fellow imprisoned teammates, but you had to call your passes, otherwise they were considered throws, which was important because if it ever came down to one person remaining, if that person dodged a certain number of throws (3? 5? 10? Don’t remember.) his/her team would win. I remember that detail because I just so happened to do that once, and was hero for a day. 
The next slightly more dangerous supervised activity we got up to was floor hockey. Not surprisingly, we had a couple of really skilled kids at our school, and one time one kid got a puck from a slap shot right in the nuts. For his sake, thankfully we only played with a hollow, orange plastic puck, and not a frozen chunk of solid rubber. This is where the title of this entry comes from. The kid in question dropped to the ground immediately and word quickly got to our teacher (who wasn’t observing us at the time), who came rushing into the gym. I obviously now know why the question was asked, but back then we were all pretty shocked when the first question that came out of his mouth when he arrived was, “Do they fell hard?” A question the kid was undoubtedly too embarrassed to answer in front of all his buddies standing over him. Long story short, he was okay, but we sure had a good laugh about that question for a while after that.
I wonder if Patrick Thoreson got asked the same question. However, what happened to him is definitely not a laughing matter.
The final activity I want to mention is a game my fellow students came up with in our later grades (6, 7, or 8, I don’t remember which). I recall they had a name for it, but I don’t remember it, partly because it was so long ago, and partly because I chose to never take part in it at all. Suffice it to say, I’ll simply refer to it as “Death Tag.” Having never actually witnessed it myself, I don’t quite know the specifics, but as I understand it, you play in pairs with as many people as possible. One person sits on a wooden scooter while the other stands. A broken hula-hoop or skipping rope is shared between the two, with one pulling the other around the gym as they run around, whipping them about and stuff. I imagine it’s not dissimilar to this:
The only difference is you get multiple pairs of people doing this. Oh, and you close all the doors and shut off all the lights… that’s right, so it’s completely pitch black in there. That’s where the “death” part comes in. Strangely enough, I don’t remember anyone ever getting severely hurt from playing that. The teachers cracked down on it pretty quickly as I remember. I think they locked away all the scooters.
Our gym was never big enough to accomplish something like this.
Apparently they have plastic versions of those scooters now with handles that can be connected, which looks like a lot more fun in my opinion.
