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Step aside, adults, and let kids play dodgeball
© St. Petersburg Times A 20-year-old woman I know doesn't know the name of the only country in history ever to use nuclear weapons against another nation. The kids who wait on me in grocery stores can't make change if there is a power outage and the computer doesn't tell them how much to give. A former vice president of the United States couldn't spell potato. And people still think professional wrestling is real, and Satan can be successfully banned by the municipal government in Levy County, and nudity should be prohibited in Hernando County. But educators and educational administrators, who love to use words like "prioritize," still have time, thank God, to consider whether dodgeball should be banned. A crucial question if ever one there was. Okay, let's be fair. At least two newspapers, including this one and the Los Angeles Times, also afforded a considerable amount of space to the same subject. And the educational system has its triumphs along with its failures. I spent an enjoyable morning recently chatting with some bright Pasco High School kids about the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance while their classmates took in-depth looks at other literary works not designed for the intellectually wimpy. But, speaking of wimpy, ban dodgeball? Dodgeball is a simple game involving a sort of "tag" in which players are eliminated when they are unable to avoid being hit by other players throwing a large, soft playground ball that carries about as much impact as the average powder puff. The rap on the sport, apparently, is that it leads to low self-esteem, that kids can actually get hurt playing it (unlike football, gymnastics, baseball and wrestling), that it provides a lousy cardiovascular workout and it encourages the strong to beat up on the weak. My experience in sports (and I was poor at most of them) was that doing anything you don't do well can be hard on self-esteem. Running the mile during a track meet in high school, I was actually lapped by the leader of the race, an obvious cyborg from another high school who yelled at me as he passed, "Hey, buddy, get off the track; we're running the mile here." I knew that would fade from my friends' memories someday. I found out at my wedding last month that 40 years hasn't quite brought us to someday. The crux of game competition is that some people are better at a sport or game than others. Slow people lose at tag (and track). Those with poor camouflage skills get creamed at hide-and-seek (and in wartime if you stop to think about it), and short folks, generally, don't do great as basketball centers. That's what life is about, and if we are going to avoid the concept of the strong conquering the weak, we ought to stop teaching economics and history too. One thing we learn in playing games, including the ones we aren't good at, is that our skills almost always have value somewhere, and that when we need people with skills we don't have, they are also available somewhere. As for cardiovascular workout, whoever raised that objection never spent his entire softball career out in right field watching, as folk singer Tom Paxton noted, the daisies grow -- or sitting on the bench at a football game or standing on one foot and then the other while everyone else got picked for basketball. From a safety standpoint, I'd rather have my kid looking a red rubber playground ball in the face than learning ethics and sportsmanship from professional baseball pitchers winging 90 mph fastballs at the heads of batters to intimidate them. I usually am first in line to decry the lack of sportsmanship and the overcompetitiveness that pervade sports today at practically every level, but that has to do with how, not whether, the game is played. An improperly supervised kid, whether he or she is armed with a softball bat or a playground ball, might hurt another kid. Aside from making tiddlywinks the national sport, I don't know how to make sure nobody will ever get hurt. Meanwhile we, as a race, get fatter and more sedentary. I say, if you don't want to get hit by the ball, DUCK! It will be good practice for life.
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