Other Crap

Top Ten Most Violent Playground Games

• Brings back a lot of memories. Actually, the list should include British Bulldog, which produced at least one good injury during every lunch period of my childhood. The best part is when there is only one guy left, and he has to try to make it across the field with every other guy trying to tackle him. I made it across once, by using an unorthodox technique, bulling through and hitting the tacklers one-by-one, head-on, ramming them with my shoulders and forearms, or just punching them in the face, instead of trying to avoid them. I managed to avoid any situations where I had to confront too many guys at one time, and the more chickenshit guys just avoided me altogether. Finally, a guy named Dan Pietscher, the best athlete in our school, after having been knocked down once, caught up to me from behind. He was much faster than me and could have knocked me off-balance if I tried to run away from him to the goal line. My solution? I just stopped dead in my tracks, turned around and let him try to bring me down face-to-face. He wasn't strong enough to bring me down, and I wasn't quick enough to keep him from getting his arms around me, so I turned around and dragged him through the snow, as he held on to my legs, for the last ten yards. I was the only guy ever to accomplish this feat in our schoolyard, and I still consider it the greatest accomplishment of my youth! I can still remember every detail as if it were yesterday, including the pummeling I took when I had to turn around and try it again in the opposite direction, and got under a pile-up! Years later, the younger kids from my neighborhood would come up to me in high school and ask if I was the same guy who once "ran the gauntlet" in British Bulldog.
• I was so good at that game that I thought I might play fullback in high school, but I was just too frickin' slow, and you can't really run over 275-pound defensive linemen the way I used to run through normal-sized guys, so I never played high school ball at all!