Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Prevent this trend from ever happening: Kickball

All over the country, people are being hoodwinked by the red menace. Adams Morgan jocks, Greenpoint hipsters, Seattle...err...Web 2.0 start-up dudes; they all are embracing kickball as the combined sports event/social gathering of choice.

How did this travesty happen? Why is this a travesty?

Let's first examine the brief history of kickball as an adult sport. Here is an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article:

Kickball's history as a business, however, dates back just a few years. In 1998, four recent college graduates -- David Lowry, Jimmy Walicek, Rich Humphrey and Mr. LeHane -- were having drinks at a bar here when the conversation turned to finding a way to meet women.
Three of the men had been members of Trigon, a coed engineering fraternity at the University of Virginia, and the group settled on the idea of launching a sports league that mixes athletics and socializing. They decided on kickball, which requires little athletic skill and isn't likely to injure anybody.

The league began on the National Mall here in 1998 with eight teams and grew quickly, fueled by word of mouth and the on-air endorsement of a popular Washington morning deejay who started a team and brought bagpipers and women in bikinis to his games.

You can see the warning signs already: University of Virginia, Washington, D.C., morning deejays, lack of injuries. The UVA/D.C. connection is the most troubling. Two of the most vanilla, old money places on earth combined forces to make kickball a national trend amongst adults; status quo people and counter-culturalists alike. What, ultimately, is the travesty from this?

The travesty is that four extremely boring dudes from UVA have succeeded in bringing an entire nation down to their level.

Well played, gentleman.

Think about it for a second: Kickball is basically a way for guys to meet women and make friends when they can't. Girls have embraced it probably for the same reason. That means these people have been unable to forge relationships through work, bars, concerts, festivals, coffee shops, mutual friends, book clubs, political/charity fundraisers, and Capoeira lessons.

Now think about kickball as a sport: No history, minimal skill, minimal knowledge required about the game.

Kickball is the emptiest activity known to man. It is a way for boring urban Americans to bond over their shared boringness.

For you "men" out there who play it, what pride have you? You should be out there hitting doubles, scoring goals, committing flagrant fouls, or any other actual sport activity. Are you so incapable of meeting women that you need a kid's game? Or are you intimidated of playing in a real coed league like softball or soccer and getting embarrassed?

Luckily, unlike New York and DC, Philadelphia has resisted this trend. The obnoxiously named indiekickball.org has locations all over the states, but not a Philly office. You also never see entire kickball teams take over bars on weeknights.

I think I know why Philly, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of post-industrial decay, has remained pure in the face of kickball:

It's either the 70 dollar registration fee or the goat baked eggs at Standard Tap. Most people choose the latter.

2 comments:

ad said...

the last two kickball games i was involved in included a member of animal collective and several kegs, respectively. does this make it any cooler?



i didn't think so.

Scott said...

Not not even the best geologist could unearth evidence of kickball's usefulness.