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Installation Instructions in English:
Kickball Addenda
By Jeremy Brasher
So my girlfriend wanted to go watch some friends of ours play kickball. Okay, that sounded like fun, but I had a few cursory questions...
"Is it free?"
"I don't know"
"Can I drink beer out there?"
"I don't know."
"How long does it last?"
"I don't know."
"Where is it?"
"Hindman Park."
"Where is that?"
"I don't know."
Well, I decided to bring beer anyways because spectating isn't really worth spectating without beer. So with my backpack full of Old Mills we arrive to a verdant park in southwest Little Rock absolutely crammed with cars.
After figuring out the parking situation, we get out and begin the trek towards the distant field.
Nearing the field I spot something my mind is telling me I need to react to. It's a table. A folding table, and a guy. A big guy wearing a giant fuzzy blue hat. Now, I stay clear of tables, especially folding tables, and my aversion to giant-fuzzy-blue-hat dudes should be implicit. But the table is the issue here. I am a serious table stayer-awayer, and not without good reason. Ask yourself this: has anyone at a folding table ever done anything good for you? No, the folding table is essentially, to use the parlance of our geography, a deerstand for people who intend to lurk in one place in order to bother passerby. So I begin to circumnavigate the table in a wide arc, expecting that an encounter with the table will result in my being relieved of my potentially unwelcome contraband or worse, having to pay money.
Suddenly I hear a "Hey you guys, come over here!" It's giant-fuzzy-blue-hat guy. Damn, the invisibility ploy failed and I've been spotted. Now I have to go to THE TABLE.
With a sigh, I walk to the table pretty much resigned to whatever cards fate would deal.
Upon arriving, my girlfriend and I are enthusiastically greeted by giant-fuzzy-blue-hat guy who immediately slaps some colored wristbands on us and says just like this: "The free food is over there...," motioning to a spread of barbecue and cookout-style fixins. At this point giant-fuzzy-blue-hat guy said the only thing that would or could ever change my mind about folding tables: "And the free beer is over there," pointing to a group of kegs in a nearby pavilion. What the fuck happened? This is the greatest table I ever tried to avoid ever, and who are you ye benevolent giant-fuzzy-blue-hatted dispenser of fortune? That was the first time I met Larry Betz.
Unlike some, my early sports experience was admittedly limited. It wasn't limited in practice, I was just limited in ability. I played soccer, football, basketball in grade school and jr. high, all bitter memories of mostly sitting on assorted benches. I didn't get it, and by "it" I mean competition. I was a little kid, and my teammates were essentially hairy hulking giants (some were even already working on balding at 14). They didn't like me, because if I got put in the game it meant one of two things:
1. We were so far ahead nothing anyone could do could mess it up in the time remaining. That hardly ever happened. What did happen was the converse...
2. The thing I feared: we were so far lost that nothing anyone could do would turn it around. In that case I got put on a field with a bunch of hulking, losing, pissed off "kids" who played sports at recess while me and my friends were inventing some sort of role playing game or drawing.
How could I compete with those people in their world? They lived sports. Their families lived sports, while sports was just something I did to try and fit in.
It wasn't until a few years later in high school that I discovered that you could "fit in" by not really fitting in at all, and that sports just really didn't matter that much. I was okay with that. My crew of misfit friends and I were doing something more important than anything those sporty cretins were cut out for—we were rockers. We loitered, drank beer, played guitars, did drugs, stole things, and somewhere in there played a few games of kickball. Yes, that's right, ye olde punk rock kickball from back in the day. "The day" being 1992. It was a messy unstructured affair, heading to the park at midnight, cranking up the lights, getting trashed and pegging people with the ball, hard. It would not be improbable to have a "first base player" if you could call them that, passed out sort of near the base in the fetal position. There were essentially no rules, no one really took it seriously. It was just something fun to do, but for the first time in a long time, possibly ever, I felt like I could actually be sort of... good at sports. Of course the night kickball inevitably came to a halt as the police began to crack down on our games; the "goddamn man" as he was known, running us out of the park time and time again. And that was the last time I played kickball, until this fall.
***
I was a spectator at the spring 2005 season at the final day of playoffs. I screamed and yelled as I watched the V's run, kick, and catch their way through their opponents with ease, and when they finally lost and wouldn't be playing again that day, I wasn't leaving, I wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't so much about watching my friends play anymore, or about seeing who would win. It was about scouting the competition. You see, the machinations of a plan had already begun clunking into gear in my head. I knew almost immediately that I had to do this. I had to get in on this shit, somehow.
One night in early fall with friends—one a soccer player, the other a baseball fanatic—I threw out the idea of starting a kickball team. Not that this was the first time I had thought about it, or talked about it. This was no lark, I had been hell-bent on the idea ever since the few games I had watched during the summer, and the registration date was approaching. We speculated about the possibility of a team whose aesthetics would be of equal or greater value than a winning record, like performance art in a way. I had only seen a few teams that one day and they were good and competitive but not very interesting outside of their ability. The Super Friends came pretty close, with their uniforms and capes and massive P.A. system, but what I envisioned was some kind of pro wrestling/kickball intersection. What would the thing be? What was the hook? It was not long until the concept of a squad of slow-moving, blood-spewing zombies materialized. Boom. We could put on fake blood and go out there and look berserk and win or lose at least we would endear ourselves to a crowd, or alienate them completely. Either way, it was on.
I told the rest of my friends about the zombie idea, and it went over much better than I could have possibly expected. People were getting excited, myself most of all. Two weeks later I had the Zombie team put together. Some players were added over beers, some were hesitantly cajoled into participating, others overheard the plans for a team and wanted in. I realized rather rapidly that not only did I have a team, I had an unbelievably massive team, all friends of mine and even more people wanted to be on the team. It was getting insane. There was one minor problem: I didn't know what I was doing.
Realizing the possibility that I could very well be in over my head I tried to talk a friend who knew the ins and outs of baseball fairly well into coaching our fledgling team, but he was going to be gone for several months so no dice. I had to do it myself. I had to learn the game, the tactics, the strategy, drills and stuff. We had to practice, I mean, some people are natural athletes, but we were not those people. Practice was to begin immediately if we were to internalize the list of rules and get somewhat acclimated to running around, or just running period before the season started.
If you want to test how good of friends you are with 17 other people, ask them to be on a competitive league kickball team with you for three months, then decide who are the better players and arrange them for maximum effect.
It's almost—wait, let me rescind that—it IS impossible to make 17 people happy at the same time. Somehow I managed to work out a tenable situation with minimal controversy. Initially, I told everyone my goal was to win about half of our games—I thought that would be pretty a respectable go of it. Then we started practicing. A lot. Probably more than anyone else in the league, ever. Our team was assembled, we had the blood, our gear, and were ready to go. By this point we were fairly certain that we could take over the world after we were done winning this kickball thing. We worked hard, and our first game...we lost. We switched some people around in the lineup and...we lost again.
If you think kickball is all fun and games, you are sadly mistaken. Kickball can have almost narcotic effects, it can make you feel good, make you talk a lot, make you want more. And if you get completely consumed, it will leave you as an angry shell of a human being who people despise, and like hard drugs, things just seem to get worse the longer you do it. You mess with the kickball bull you may get the proverbial horns.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of fun and competitive people who have a realistic perspective on things. However, there is a dark side. Friends can turn on friends, antagonism spews from both teams, rules are harped on and scrutinized to no end. People get kicked off of teams, harbor grudges, injure people, and play mean. In fact, I have never seen such a bunch of sore losers, sore winners, or physically sore people as in the kickball league. Often it seems appropriate that this is a kid's game, because it can make adults act pretty childish. The tension can get...palpable. But you can't stop. Because when it's good, it's really good.
Finally, on the proverbial third try at moving people to different positions...we won. And won, and won. All in all, we managed to finish out the regular season with a 6-3 record, not a bad showing for a first season team of completely inexperienced players. We even made it to the playoffs, which we were promptly knocked out of.
A lot of things have changed in the fall season, the Boulevard Bread Sox team lost a few players, picked up others, hired on a coach, changed their team name to the "Boulevard Killer B's," thus resulting in a change of the "Boooulevard!" chant to the hilariously improved "Booo-Bees!" But even the Boo's couldn't save them from a first time regular season loss at the hands of the Super Friends, who came into the playoffs with an undefeated regular season only to be trounced in the first round by Larry Betz's own underdog Grand Poo Ballers. Kickball Kamp made their typically stellar showing in the regular season only to lose in the playoffs to another new team of veterans, the Bush Hawgs, a team they'd defeated in the regular season just weeks before. The V's came out of their 6-3 season to stomp their way up the playoff ladder taking out the Boulevard B's and going all the way to the finals game only to lose to the team that would go on to be the champs for the fall season, the Bush Hawgs.
And us? We went out there and did what we do, getting zombied up and doing our best. Yeah we lost some, but we looked awesome. The initial plan worked out, and we will be back for more.
Jeremy Brasher is a writer and musician living in Little Rock. His column, “Installation Instructions in English,” will appear monthly herein. You can reach him at jeremy_brasher@yahoo.com.
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