Why Is Dodgeball So Controversial - T-Tees - Your Answers Await, Life's Questions Unraveled

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Do you remember PE as a kid? In my day, we were required to learn a spectrum of sports and their rules. Baseball, basketball, wrestling, flag football, volleyball, trampoline, track and, at the end of the year, we competed for the coveted President’s Physical Fitness Award. We even boxed!

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On days when our coaches were not really interested in working or they wanted to reward us for the miserable things they had heaped upon us in previous classes — does anyone remember wind sprints? — we were allowed to play dodgeball. When that glorious compound word was announced, a joyous cheer went up. Without instruction or coercion, boys divided themselves into two teams, an equal number of balls were distributed to both sides, and when the whistle blew, primordial warlike screams echoed throughout the gymnasium as balls filled the air.

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In our version of the game, the rules were simple: Get hit, you’re out; catch the ball, the guy throwing it is out; head shots were illegal, but kids sometimes took them anyway when the guy on the opposite side was your rival or, better yet, your friend. And let’s face it, in elementary and middle school you haven’t yet developed accuracy, so things happened. Sometimes our coaches played — this would result in jail time now — and lit you up with Nolan Ryan-like fastballs. Eventually, like tug of war, one side gets whittled down sufficiently that the sole survivor is pelted with rubber balls. Game over. Repeat. No harm done.

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Oh, the nostalgia of those glory days!

Dodgeball is about winning — not oppression

But that’s not how everyone remembers it. In an interview with NPR, The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Yang once said that dodgeball “is a systematized opportunity for bullies” to target the weak. He further complained that while head shots were banned, crotch shots weren’t. For most kids, that mistake is made only once.

No matter, such sentiments are gaining momentum. Some school districts around the country have banned dodgeball. Louisiana almost banned the sport in 2017. And now a group of overly protective Canadian social engineers has armed the anti-dodgeball advocates with more reasons to ban this evil sport. According to Fox News, “researchers argue that there is a ‘hidden curriculum’ of dodgeball that reinforces the oppression of those ‘perceived as weaker individuals through the exercise of violence and dominance.’ ”

“Hidden curriculum”? When I first read this, I thought it was a joke. Was this social satire from The Onion? But, no, it is quite serious. At this point, I was thinking these researchers had never played sports of any kind or just weren’t very good at them and were now getting their revenge for all the balls they had taken to the face. I mean, of those games or sports that are lacking in subtlety, dodgeball is certainly among them. There is no hidden agenda. The game is self-evidently about beating your opponent into submission with all the violence that a Voit rubber ball can muster — and that’s not much.

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Apparently scarred from his middle-school years and confusing dodgeball with the Aztec game of Tlachtli, in which the losers were beheaded, researcher David Burns says (as paraphrased by Canadian journalist Joseph Brean), “The moral problem with dodgeball is that it encourages students to aggressively single others out for dominance, and to enjoy that exclusion and dominance as a victory.”

This is the very definition of victory. Remove the word “dodgeball” from that sentence and replace it with words like “business,” “sports,” “war,” “politics” and “teenage girls” and you have a neat summary of life. And did he say, “moral problem”? One suspects Canada has bigger issues to address than the ethics of dodgeball. All of this gives a whole new meaning to O Canada! Think eye-rolling and exasperation.

How could the country that gave the world hockey, a game that the Aztecs might have invented had they any ice, have come to such ruin? To hear these people talk, dodgeball is akin to a Jack Nicholson “Code Red.” And, as the number crunchers at Priceonomics note, dodgeball doesn’t even rank in the top 10 of the deadliest school sports. Such activities as soccer, gymnastics and water polo all rank well ahead of it.

Banning dodgeball won’t solve anything

Surely this marks the beginning of the end of Western civilization. What is to become of us? Yes, according to Plutarch, the West began with Spartan children who were bathed in wine, turned over to the army at age 7 and taught to go to war and “come back with your shield — or on it”; it was preserved by the English King Edward III, who outlawed soccer (a true conservative) and instead encouraged boys to learn the ways of the longbow; it was carried forward by men like Walter Camp — a great American who invented (real) football — and that mysterious (and apparently African) inventor of dodgeball, who gave us sports that steeled boys to the rigors of life and prepared them to win world wars.

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Historian Will Durant wrote, “A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean.”

Indeed. Our Epicurean, dodgeball-less end cannot be far off. It’s time for a Code Red. Because at the end of the day, we want our boys to throw that ball. We neeeeed them to throw that ball.

Larry Alex Taunton is an author, cultural commentator and freelance columnist contributing to The American Spectator, USA TODAY, Fox News, First Things, The Atlantic and CNN. You can subscribe to his blog at larryalextaunton.com.