Booze, balls, and how grownups fell in love with a children's game words: DAVID RAMSEY
photos: CORA BROWN
Editor's note: This feature was originally slated to run in our summer print issue, which was abandoned at the press. While it might not detail the latest developments in Little Rock Kickball, it remains, to date, the most complete portrayal of the strange phenomenon. For more on kickball, see Jeremy Brasher's column “Installation Instructions in English.”
Though he has just converted the final out of the inning—charging a bunt down the third baseline, spinning on his heels, and firing a perfect line to his waiting first baseman—Boulevard Bread Sox pitcher Jason Neidhardt is not happy. On his way to the dugout, he slams his hand against the fence. “We could just go on dicking around, or we could play!” he bellows at his teammates, who are trailing by five runs midway through the game. Every other word is punctuated by a foot-stomp on the dirt, sending little clouds of dust into bystanders' eyes. “Come on, let's play our game!”
The wiry Neidhardt is wearing a visor over bedhead hair, with his trademark #420 jersey untucked nearly to his knees. He does not appear to be a man who got much sleep the night before. Furthermore, he is probably drunk. Quite possibly high. If he doesn't look much like a baseball player—or even a beer league softballer—that's because he's not.
Instead, he and his dynastic Boulevard squad—in the midst of a tight first round battle—are angling for their third consecutive championship in something far more serious. It's a sport that has recently hooked more than 600 local folks of all (and I do mean all) shapes and sizes. This is P.E. for grownups: a bouncy red ball and an intake of cheap beer that can charitably be described as a touch inappropriate for a Sunday afternoon.
This is kickball.
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Like a lot of folks, my athletic peak came when I was too young to drive. Between fourth and eighth grade, I could play anything and hold my own against anybody. I was one of the better point guards in the YMCA, I led my little league team in batting average, and I was a fleet receiver in backyard games of touch football. Though my competitive drive at the time probably bordered on anti-social (throwing Gatorade coolers onto the field, lambasting referees with all the curse words in my prepubescent vocabulary), the main thing I remember is just how much fun playing sports on a near-daily basis was.
It was one of my favorite things about school. We'd get there early and play in the morning, play during P.E., scarf our sandwiches at lunch and play in the leftover minutes, get out of class and play as a reward for good behavior. I was in an afterschool program, and we'd play all through that too. Not just the major sports, but also all those fantastic kids' games—four square, dodgeball, battleball, kickball, wiffleball, crab soccer, pickleball. (Did anyone else play pickleball? The etymology is baffling, but it was sort of like tennis, with a low net, wooden paddles, and a plastic ball. You weren't supposed to “slam,” but we did anyway, of course. Awesome game.) I recognize that grade school P.E. was a miserable experience for some people, and that nebulously graded athletic competition can be unfair, silly, or downright mean-spirited. But for me, battling for playground supremacy—throwing our bodies around, the result of every point weighted with all the joy and all the pride we had—was as easy and natural and free of spirit as anything I've ever done.
Later, disheartening factors would emerge. As it turns out, most people, including me, can't really hit a curveball. Some of us, including me, will never crack six feet tall. Our once-flawless metabolisms will slow to near a halt. And so forth.
What's more, without the aid of the massive social engineering experiment that is school, most of us quit getting together in big groups to play games. We certainly quit playing games involving bouncy red rubber balls.
Unless, one day, we decide otherwise. “Kickball is one of those things we're weaned from as we get older,” says Larry Betz, the self-proclaimed Grand Poobah of All Things Kickball and the founder of the Little Rock Kickball Association. “Growing up in rural north Arkansas, we'd play in the springtime and it was something I felt comfortable and confident playing. Baseball bored the crap out of me and the ball moved too damn fast, but anyone could play kickball. Then, we're forcibly pulled from the game when we reach a certain age. I never really understood why.”
Betz first came up with the idea to start a local kickball league a couple of years ago. A bartender at the time, he worked all night on New Year's Eve with two buddies, Eric Davis and Brock Mays. When the night finally wound down in the maiden hours of 2003, the guys went back to Betz's house to crash. They had some beers and started talking about how much they missed playing the games of their youth. With an alcohol-induced hardihood, they hatched a plan: they would start a league of their own. Mays was gung-ho about wiffleball; Betz thought they should go with kickball.
It might have been just another drunken chimera if not for a pair of tragedies that cemented the night in Betz's mind. In August of that year, Davis died in a car accident. A month later, Mays took his own life. When New Year's Eve rolled around, it was a tough time for Betz. The two men he had shared the holiday with a year before were gone.
“On New Year's Day of 2004, I started to reflect back on the time since I'd lost my buddies,” he explains. “I kept reliving that old talk we'd had about kickball and wiffleball.” To honor the memory of his friends, Betz resolved to start a kickball league. “I started to talk to people at the bar about it,” he says, “but of course no one believed that I would really do it.”
Betz admits that organization is not his forte, so the doubts of his friends were not entirely without merit. Still, he pressed on with his plan, and serendipity was on his side: “I was very lucky. Whenever I needed advice on something, I'd randomly run into someone who could help at a bar. It just seemed like it was destined to happen. I don't know how, but everything just fell into place in an orderly fashion.”
It didn't hurt that Betz (who now teaches literature and composition at several local colleges) is a man possessed of both an infectious optimism and a Zen-like calm. He's a huge dude—a good spot over 300 pounds—who often sports a thick, black goatee. He could look like a bouncer, but his naturally affable demeanor quickly belies anything that might be considered menacing. To the folks in the kickball league, he is something between wise patriarch and lovable bad uncle. Or, simply, “The Poo,” the persona he created for himself as the Grand Poobah of All Things Kickball. “I did that jokingly,” he explains. “I used to get home at three in the morning and send e-mails real drunk, saying I was the Grand Poobah. It was accidental, but I created this tongue-in-cheek character that made me seem more accessible. And it's funny—I was no more an authority than anyone. I hadn't played since sixth grade either.”
Betz came home from bartending one night and jotted down some rules, basically lifting the rules from T-ball, with a few twists. He was unaware at the time that leagues were sprouting up all over the country, many of them affiliated with the World Adult Kickball Association, a seven-year-old organization that has been at the center of the adult kickball craze and fancies itself the sport's “authority and governing body.” The Little Rock Kickball Association uses a smaller ball and plays with slightly different rules than their WAKA brethren.
Betz is glad that he bypassed the organization. “We're independent of other leagues, and I'm happy that we did it ourselves,” he says. “It allowed us to develop in a vacuum of ignorance and we've avoided a lot of issues that other leagues have gotten into.” The biggest difference is cost: WAKA charges $65 per person, whereas Betz charges $200 for an entire team to play (the money goes to reserving fields, trophies, and maintaining the website). “They're a large franchise and they're set for profit. There's no way I'm going to ask for that much money when I can do the same thing for less money. It's hard to say you're playing an outsider rogue sport when you're incorporated.” When WAKA officials discovered the LRKA, says Betz, “they sent me a really threatening e-mail, almost implying I was doing copyright infringement. I said, ‘you can't copyright kickball!'” That was the last he heard from WAKA.
Once he had created his rules, it was just a matter of spreading the word, which was no problem for the gregarious Betz, then still a bartender, with all of his connections to Little Rock nightlife. In short order, it became clear that he had struck upon an idea that people had been craving.
“It just got bigger and bigger,” Betz recalls. “It all spread from word of mouth. It started with people that worked in bars and restaurants, and then spread to lawyers and professionals.”
A few of the radio stations picked up on the story and made fun of the fledgling idea: as they saw it, a league for a bunch of fat drunks to play a child's sport. But the taunting was another bit of fortuity for Betz—the publicity only brought more folks into the fold. He was hoping for six to eight teams for the first season, but ended up with 16.
Betz used student-loan money to pay for reserving fields and other costs, so he wouldn't have to charge the inaugural players a dime. Betz himself hadn't played in a couple of decades when he organized an open practice that March for his ragtag group of kickball wannabes. About 30 or 40 players from various teams showed up. “We only lasted about 40 minutes,” Betz recounts. “I'm pretty sure that each and every one of us pulled a quad. That first season, there weren't too many athletes. We had night owls and fat guys. That was the very first lesson we learned: if you're going to play kickball, you'd better stretch.”
By last spring, when I first signed up to play, the LRKA had grown well beyond what Betz could have imagined, with 36 teams competing in the league's third season (next fall, more than 40 teams are expected to register). I joined an upstart squad, the V's, made up of a few of my friends, but mostly older high schoolers. Playing alongside 18-year-olds who just got back from a soccer tournament is a healthy reminder of just how quickly my own body has gone about losing basic functions, such as recovery time or range of motion. Betz is right about stretching. If you haven't kicked a rolling object as hard as you can in a while, muscles that you simply haven't used in a good long time don't work like you remember.
Warming up before my first game, I took a few practice kicks. The first one that I really reared back and kicked hard nearly killed me. I felt my thigh tense up, and there was sharp, fleeting pain all over the place: groin, butt, lower back. The ball, meanwhile, went about 50 feet—25 up and 25 down. I decided I'd stick to bunting when I could, and win or lose, I began to think of each Sunday as a smashing success if I escaped without pulling my groin.
It's enough to make you think twice about that waiver you signed to play in the league in the first place. The risks of kickball, according to the LRKA, “include, but are not limited to: injury to internal or external organs; loss of or damage to sight, hearing, or teeth; pain; and scarring or disfigurement.” Okay, the risk of disfigurement is low, but folks do play hard, and as embarrassing as it is to go to a doctor for a kickball incident and end up on crutches, it does happen. A good friend of mine tore his ACL on a slide, a severe injury to a ligament in the knee that I've mostly heard of in the context of professional running backs.
The league has also become seriously competitive. While there are still plenty of teams that seem more intent on getting drunk than winning games, part of the experience now is watching grown men and women yell at umpires, teammates, opponents, and themselves. There hasn't been a physical fight yet, though it's gotten close on a couple of occasions. “We had a couple of girls roll in the mud one time, but we've never actually had physical violence,” says Betz, who himself seems to be of two minds about the ways that the LRKA has changed. “I liked the laid-back Sundays when we were just hanging out. But I also enjoy watching a good game. It's human nature that people get competitive. I like the fact that it's all-inconclusive. Whatever your age or ability, there's a niche for you.”
One niche that most folks in the league share: beer. “We're a social organization first,” notes Betz, “with the thin veneer of a competitive sports league.” Not everyone drinks (half of my team wasn't even legal), but for most, it just wouldn't be kickball if you weren't a little snookered. A haggard approach is standard, whether a baserunner is rounding third at a dead sprint with a cigarette still hanging in the mouth, or a shortstop takes the position with a beer still in hand. Even the umpires are typically taking sips between pitches.
Part of this is a simple matter of hair-of-the-dog, since it's not easy to play anything with a Sunday morning hangover. Kickball in the throes of dehydration, headaches, and general weariness is pretty miserable, not to mention that such a state causes noticeable problems in areas vital to performance, such as body control or depth perception. At that point, one is best advised to start drinking again.
Whatever happened the night before, drinking together on a Sunday is a vital part of the kickball experience. Even as the league has grown more athletic and competitive, the coaching more impetuous, and everything more, well, serious, the LRKA thrives because of that loose and silly spirit of boozy camaraderie. It thrives because of instead of staying home to sleep in or watch television, we get out on Sunday and get together. To get hammered, yes, but also to run around outside and hang out and talk shit and play together, like we used to.
My team, as luck would have it, was one of the better squads (the relative youth of my teammates was a huge plus, as they were usually more in shape and more sober than anyone else out there by a long shot). Our competition ran the gamut. The league is a bizarre cross-section of the community. There are bartenders, stockbrokers, lawyers, politicos, writers, waiters, artists, students, teachers, and the perpetually unemployed. Ages range from 18 to 60. There are players who weigh barely 100 pounds and a few probably pushing 400. There was an all-women team, No Boys Allowed (a rule states that each team must play at least three women in the field, but no such minimum exists for guys), and an all-black team, the Super Friends. “I would never have predicted the universality of kickball,” says Betz. “But if you think about it, we've all probably played it as a kid, so it makes sense. No matter how different the walks of life we may come from are, when you meet a grownup that likes to play kickball, that's not something surface-level, like sharing a profession. That's a real, strong tangible connection.”
The Super Friends are the league's most entertaining team. They take the field with style: Donning superhero capes, they were fond of entering games to thumping hip-hop blasted over bass-heavy speakers that they brought out to the park. Each has a super-identity such as Spiderman or Mr. Incredible. The team is composed of eight brothers and sisters aged 18-28, along with various cousins and folks related by marriage. “We've been playing together all of our lives,” says team captain Kamal Rahmaan, “so everyone knows what everyone else is going to do on the field.” Keeping it in the family also means a healthy dose of sibling feuding. While some in the league have accused them of poor sportsmanship, almost all of their trash talking and rancor are directed at each other. This can occasionally cause problems. I once saw a Friends outfielder become so frustrated at his teammate at first base that he abandoned the actual play on the field and pegged his own first baseman.
The Friends' goal this year was the same as every other squad: to finally beat Boulevard. Heading into the playoffs last spring, the Bread Sox had never lost in the three-year history of the league, a streak of more than 30 games. They don't overwhelm with their talent, but they always seem to find a way to win. A scrappy group, they have an incredible knack for taking advantage of other teams' mistakes, which is the perfect approach in a league where newcomers, drunks, and non-athletes make miscues by the dozens.
Boulevard also has brash self-assurance to spare, with the tone set by their cocky, trash-talking pitcher, Jason Neidhardt, the kickballer that everyone loves to hate. On the popular LRKA internet message board, Neidhardt takes the humble moniker “Defending Champs,” and last spring, he enjoyed needling opposing teams with suggestions that only a few squads could even compete with Boulevard, while the rest of the teams should be designated “lower level.” “A lot of what he said was rude,” admits teammate Kara Bibb. “But it was all in good fun. It was a little disheartening that everyone always booed us this season. But that was our cheer this year: ‘Boo is for Boooolevard.'”
On the other end of the spectrum were several lovably incompetent crews, such as the Freeps and the Uncivil Libertines, both of which managed to lose every single regular season game. Josh Doering has captained the Freeps since the LRKA was formed. “I first joined up mostly to have an excuse to drink and smoke on the Lord's Day,” he explains. The first edition of the Freeps was raucous and pretty bad, but last fall's squad managed to win about half their games. With a taste of success came a more competitive approach which wasn't as entertaining as far as Doering was concerned, so he got an entirely new batch of folks for the spring season. “My goal was to lose every single game this year and we accomplished that,” he explains. “We're 30, 40, 50 years old, and we're running around out there playing kickball. It's just more fun to revel in the absurdity of it.”
On a torrid summer afternoon, I took my spot at catcher with the V's up 2-1 in the bottom of the seventh and final inning of our second round game of the LRKA playoffs. We were matched up against Los Barrachos, the top-seeded team in our conference, and the game had been a grueling defensive battle. I myself had reached base a couple of times (once on a dive at first—a bad strategic maneuver, as any baseball coach will tell you that it's faster to run through the bag, but diving is much more thrilling) but failed to score.
Los Barrachos were masters of the bunting strategy, getting their fleet players on base before the big kickers would try to boot them home. In the bottom of the seventh, they were executing the bunt perfectly, and with the help of a series of errors on our part and a few bad calls (okay, sometimes I'm the idiot arguing over kickball), they managed to tie the score. With one out and the bases loaded, the Barrachos' kicker came to the plate with a simple mission: if he could get a flyball deep enough, the runner on third could tag up and score.
He let a few errant rolls from our pitcher, Jessi Beaver, go by before he saw a pitch he liked and thumped the ball in a tall arc to center. As our fielder made the catch, the runner tagged and headed for the plate. No matter your arm strength, the physics of the bouncy ball make the deep toss difficult, and despite a valiant effort, the throw came late, on one hop, to Beaver. She desperately tried to swat it at the runner, who was nearly home, but it sailed harmlessly into the fence behind the plate. Their runner was safe, and the game—and our season—was over.
Despite the nostalgic comforts of the old “good game, good game…” handshake line ritual, it was a heartbreaking loss. Still, we had fallen to a worthy opponent, and a teammate had just the right consoling words: “At least now, we can just focus on getting drunk.” And so we did.
Like the overwhelming majority of the crowd, we took an anyone-but-Boulevard approach to cheering. The Bread Sox had survived a tough battle against the Black Diamonds in the first round the previous week, taking advantage of a bevy of errors in the field to mount a 6-run rally in the bottom half of the final inning to take the win. They also employed the clever strategy of aiming for a particularly hungover/still-drunk Black Diamonds outfielder, who, I was informed by his teammates, had passed out the night before at Willy D's Piano Bar, woken up the next morning still at the bar, and gone straight to the game.
It was a major scare for the defending champions, but when I asked Neidhardt if he had ever been worried, he was, as usual, unbowed: “Never!” he told me. “We always wait until our backs are against the wall, but then we always come through. That's why we're Boulevard.”
In fact, that would be the last time in the playoffs that their backs were really against the wall. They cruised by The No-Homers Club in the second round and then outlasted the Super Friends in the semifinals. It was a typical match for both teams: the Bread Sox were hyper-aggressive on the basepaths and the Friends were overeager to drill baserunners with the ball, leading to errors, which in turn led to the Friends' assorted brothers and sisters nearly ripping each other apart. Which, finally, allowed Boulevard to prevail.
Los Borrachos fell in an upset to Kickball Kamp in the other semifinal. Alas, the Kamp proved no match for Boulevard, who dominated the final for their third consecutive championship.
Even if the V's fell short and the bad guys won in the end, I was happy (and plastered) when it was all over. The spring season had been the first organized kickball I'd played since I was a boy, and I couldn't wait to do it some more.
“The biggest difference between now and when we were kids is the fact that most of us can see beyond the immediate game, see the uniqueness of it,” says Betz. “As a kid, you don't realize how lucky you are. Now you realize Sunday is something you can look forward to. The ball is malleable; it fits to whatever you want it to be. All of us have that common denominator: we play kickball.”
David Ramsey attends graduate school at the University of Florida. He is the former editor of Localist. Tell him you miss him at wiffleballnation@yahoo.com.
