Street Games

An old blogpal of mine once told me that my best posts are when I tell stories of my past. Okay, I'll indulge. After all this "happy dad" crap I've been posting, it's time to go into the Spartacus Way Back machine.

What inspired this entry is a recent post by MauiGirl about the New York City Public Schools Athletic Association's inclusion of Double Dutch as an officially sanctioned sport. Like her, I remember this activity fondly; but only because I was always one of those jackass boys who would try and jump into the moving ropes while my sister and her friends were taking their turns. Hey! What brother wasn't a jackass or an asshat or some kind of an *ass to his sister?

But Mauigirl also laments the fact that these games have lost out to more passive activities like video-game playing, chatting on AIM, and hitting social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. (Sorry, but those sites don't need any linking here...)

She wrote:

Making something a competitive sport doesn't mean it will result in more kids getting exercise. What happens is they get driven to the site where the sport takes place; parents must provide snacks for their kids and their friends to eat afterward; kids jump for a short period of time and then their round is over. It's not like the old days when a bunch of friends would gather in a seldom-used street and jump rope all afternoon just for the fun of it, and get real exercise.

She makes a good point here. Even though my kids get out of the house plenty, it's nowhere near the amount of time I spent outside the house playing games back in the 1970s. And growing up poor in the East Village of Manhattan, you learn to get pretty inventive with the games you play.

Some you've heard of before -- Stickball, Handball, Whiffleball, Red Rover and Spin The Bottle are but a few.

A staple of many of the games I played was a pink rubber ball known as the Spaldeen, made by the Spalding®. But spaldeen games are all variations of baseball, so I'll leave those for another post. The games I'm covering here required a great deal of skill, balance, ingenuity, speed, agility, and a tolerance for brutality.



Ah, Let the games begin. Shall we?

Skelsies - I played this game quite a bit in the summer. I lived in Jacob Riis Houses where the skelsie boards like the one on the right were painted onto the asphalt yards between buildings. All you need to play is a ketchup bottle or pickle jar cap, and a good eye for angles. The caps were typically filled with melted wax or crayon. The crayon melts were cool because you could make some pretty neat designs with them.

The object of the game was to shoot your cap into each succeeding box, the winner being the first to reach box 13. The cap must be completely inside the box before you can shoot to the next one. But the game's not as easy as it looks. For one, you can prevent opponents from reaching a box by knocking them out of the way. The way we used to play at Jacob Riis was if you called "kicksies", you can kick someone's cap across the yard if happened to be near yours after a successfully entering a box. Another challenge was avoiding the trapezoidal areas around box 13. Those were the penalty boxes. Land in there with your cap and you lose a turn. We didn't use numbers in our boxes. As I recall, you had to wait a turn or two before you can shoot out of the trapezoid, or you can resume playing if someone was stupid enough to knock you out of one.


Kick The Can - I have a special place in my heart for this game because of kid I knew named Edgardo who was always "it." This game is very similar to hide-and-go-seek except that it's played with a beer or soda can. The game starts with everyone rushing to find a can; the last one to find a can (usually Edgardo) was "it." The first person to find a can was given the honor of being the first to kick or toss the can far enough away for the rest of the group to hide while the "it" person retrieves the can. The "it" kid would then try to find the players who were hiding. The "it" person captured you by tapping the can on the ground and saying "Tap, tap, tap, I see Spartacus behind a tree. One, two, three. One, two, three. Once found, you sat on the "base" bench and waited for someone to rescue you by kicking the can. The "it" guy wins by capturing everyone hiding; the new "it" person being the first person captured. What made this game a hoot for us was when Edgardo was "it". My friends and I would always hide together in the same spot, allowing one or two of us to be captured, before we'd all come out and bum rush the can. I swear, you had to see the desperation on Edgardo's face as he tried to tap us all out. We tortured him. He's probably going through some serious therapy sessions from all those times he was "it". Oh Edgardo, I'm sorry. But damn it what a pisser this game was when you were it.


Okay, you can stop reading here if you're not into brutal acts of violence committed in the name of fun. The next two games make scenes from Los Olvidados look tame.

Hot Peas And Butter - This was one of those stealthy games best played at night. The game required a leather belt, a place to hide it, a safe location called the "base" and lots of speed. If you owned the belt, you got to hide it first while the other players waited at the base. Once hidden, the belt-hider would call out "hot peas and butter, come and get your supper" to begin this masochistic search. The hider would then direct seekers to the hiding spot by telling them whether they were hot or cold. The closer they got to finding the belt, the more animated the hider became. "You're cold. Your getting warmer. You're hot. You're hotter. You're BOILING!!!!!" Can you guess what happens next? Yup! That's right. The person finding the belt gets to chase and whip the shit out of anybody who can't make it back to home base. The best part about this game was the sheer terror derived from seeking the belt. I swear this game was like a urban version of lions hunting antelope on an African plain. It's easy to see why this game fell out of favor. It was sanctioned corporal punishment. But damn it, if you didn't get a good cardio workout out of running from a good ol' ass-whoopin.


Johnny On The Pony - I saved the best game for last. This is the quintessential "ball-less" team game. It required about five players a side for it to be worthwhile; the more players the better. I recall playing this game as a high school in my junior and senior years in the yard at lunch with as many as 12 kids a side. And these were big kids, too. The team designated as the pony would line up, perpendicular to a wall. One player would stand resting his (or her) back against the wall and act as the pillow allowing the next player to bend at the waist and brace against the "pillow". Each succeeding player would do the same, bending over to wrap their arms around the waist of the player bent before them. The opposing team would then run, one at a time, from a distance of 20-30 feet and vault onto the pony in an attempt to break the pony or ride it until the words "Johnny On The Pony. One. Two. Three." can be repeated three times. Break it or ride it and your team wins. Fall off and your team becomes the pony. Believe it or not players fell off the pony as often as the pony broke. And that's where it gets bloody. Like I said, some of these guys are big. Can you imagine having a 200-pound behemoth fall on a 140-pound 11th grade body? I can because this happened to me. Alot. Thankfully, I suffered no broken bones, but many happy lacerations, scrapes and bruises.

That's all I got for tonight kids. There are more games I played as a kid. These just happened to be the ones I remember best. I would love to hear about your kid games stories.

(h/t to Mauigirl and my special blog friend...)

We Are The Mohawks

I've been playing softball for as long as I can remember. I've played on some great teams and on some stinkers, but none quite like the Mohawks.

I wouldn't exactly call us The Yankees of the Lindenhurst Men's 35 and over softball league. Shit, I wouldn't even call us The Mets. But we are a team that was started in the garage of my best friend Dave, and despite the setbacks we've endured, somehow this team managed to stick together through seven seasons, three different uniforms, about 50 different players, and lots and lots of beer.

Dave and I started this team back in 2001 because we wanted to hook up with guys we knew could play ball and wouldn't mind our company, either. The name of the team had nothing to do with the Native American tribe, however. I feel some shame in saying this, but our team name was drawn from an Opie & Anthony radio bit where callers had to guess how a woman's genitalia was coiffed. Because this was a family league, we could not call ourselves the Two-Fingered Mohawks, so we shortened the name and it stuck. I never said we were saints. We're Mohawks.


There were very few rules on the Mohawks. All we ever asked of our players is to show up on time, play hard, have fun and don't be a dick. We usually carry anywhere between 15 to 18 players to accommodate for vacations and work. But carrying that many players meant that sometimes, some players would have to take a seat. In our league, only 10 players can take the field, but a total of 12 players can bat, and by league rule every player that shows up must play at least one game. Still we had a few who didn't get this concept and complained. They either didn't get it or would not buy into the Mohawks ethos. The rules applied to everyone no matter how good you were. It was the manager's job to enforce these rules. I can honestly say that rules enforcement was one of the parts of managing I enjoyed the least, despite there being so few.

We took a break in 2006 because I just got sick of running the team, and no one stepped up to keep it going. But Dave took over the reins this year because...well....we just could not stand to be away from the ballfield or play for a team other than one named the Mohawks. So, we pulled a Jay-Z, reformed the team, and told the league, "We're back, baby! Ungh! Ungh!"

The pics you see here is from our last game this season, which took place two Saturdays ago. We were bounced out of the playoffs by the what had been the worst team in the league, and I can't say we didn't deserve it. We didn't play terribly well.

But no one was particularly down about this fact that we lost. Quite the contrary. It's not like we never lost a game before, and it's more than likely we'll lose a few more. But as the beer flowed and players told their jokes and stories, it became clear to me why I come back to the team year after year; that somehow this team was something necessary. If not to get our fat asses some exercise, then to reaffirm our need for friendship and camaraderie that we would not get by just being fathers and husbands. We are the Mohawks -- a fraternity of imperfect men who simply want to play a game for the fun of it.

A Simple Game

Tonight I did something I've been meaning to do for a long, long time. I taught my youngest son how to play the game of chess.  He started our boys' game night by asking me to play cards with him. That's when I replied, "why don't we play chess?" "Okay, dad," And off he ran to my bedroom dresser to fetch the chess set that went unused for the last year and half. Mind you, I'm no chess master. Far from it. But I've always loved the game because while it was really simple to play, playing well requires you to be delightfully complex. Teaching him was simple because the the movements of the pieces are well-defined and rule-driven. Oh, but the strategies and moves one can employ are are endless. To be sure, this is a thinking person's game, which requires a great deal of concentration and foresight. One would think that an 11-year old is incapable of such levels of concentration, but that just wasn't the case here. As I was purposely blundering through our first game, I could see his eyes light up as he pondered the board. At one point, he started talking to himself "If I move here, Dad will take his bishop and move here...dang it!!!!" Long story short, he caught on quickly, and saw that I had exposed my King and check-mated me with a pawn and his Queen. (Note to all you chess masters -- please don't ask me how he did it. Remember, I was purposely blundering my moves.) We played a second game where I wasn't as forgiving. He tipped his King after I left him with nothing but a handful of pawns on the board. But I told him he shouldn't be discouraged from the game by that loss, reminding him that games are supposed to be fun regardless whether you win or lose. Finally, with the wife in the room watching this wonderful scene unfold, I jokingly told him that chess was a game that had to be invented by a woman. The wife snickered -- that is, until she heard my rationale. The queen is the only identifiably, female piece on the board, yet it is arguably the most powerful. It can move (and attack) across any number of available spaces and in all directions, and decimate your opponent. I was quite proud of my comment, until she exposed it for the self-serving drivel it was. Her response? "Yeah, but in the hands of a stupid man, she's always easily lost!!!" Check Mate!!!!!! Personal note -- many thanks to my pal, DCup , who promised to RSS my blog if I started writing it again. Well, here you have it. Hopefully it won't be another two months before I make another entry. Until then...peace!