When I was a kid, my brother Tom and I watched a fateful documentary about cattle-herding gauchos in Argentina. Rather than use a lasso to tie up their cattle, they throw a device called a bola, which is just two weights on either end of a string. The string hits the leg, and the weights wrap around the legs a moment later. Instant hogtie.
Naturally, this was something we had to try for ourselves, so we poked holes in tennis balls and forced knotted rope ends through them. Voila. Tennis ball bola. Since they were so easy to make, within a week every kid in the neighborhood had one. Small bola wars soon followed, and I have to say, we all got pretty good at it. Just like in the documentary, if you got hit in the legs with one of these things, you went down like a sack of potatoes.
Unfortunately, shots did go wide from time to time and they had a funny way of hitting overhead power lines. After the third time the local electric company technician cut a bola off the line, he rounded us up and explained that if he had to come out here again, he was going to tell our parents. So ended the bola wars.
What now? We had an arsenal of these things that we couldn't just throw away. Thankfully, Tom had the perfect solution. He simply cut off one end, nailed the rope to a stick and made a flail. Armed with those and garbage can lids, we began playing a game called Spartacus that was basically nothing more than a bunch of kids running around and wailing on each other with tennis ball-and-chains.
That was fun while it lasted, but once again the authorities interfered when various parents disapproved of how beaten up their garbage can lids were getting. One by one, the neighborhood kids retired from the gladiator circuit, leaving only my brother and me. Our flails were showing serious wear and tear and by now our parents had the foresight to keep tennis balls out of the house, so once more, we were forced to improvise. For a while, we went through a series of replacement games until we settled on a winner called Knight Versus Peasant. The game was a strangely lopsided affair in which my brother, the Knight, rode around on a bike with a garbage can lid in one hand and a Wiffle ball bat in the other. Somehow, he managed to steer the bike and swing wildly at the same time. Meanwhile, I was relegated to the role of the Peasant, on my feet armed only with a broom.
KvP wasn't so much a game as it was an exercise in pain tolerance. Getting lit up by a Wiffle ball bat won't put you in the hospital, but it does sting, and after the first nine or 10 shots, any novelty of the experience has most definitely gone away. The game clearly favored my brother who was always the Knight, and who had the advantage of both speed and shielding. The trick, I eventually learned, was not to attack the horseman, but to go after the horse. So one game, I threw the broom like a spear into the spokes of the bike's front wheel. Poor Tom sailed headlong over the handlebars and landed hard, as if every injury he'd doled out to me during our battles had come back to him at once. Victory!
Not surprisingly, KvP ended not long afterward, and my brothers and I pioneered numerous other household combat sports (floppy diskettes make great throwing stars, and Q-tips taped to sewing needles make even better blowgun darts). Eventually, our parents got hip to the fact that we were killing each other, and they tried to talk some sense into us. Didn't we realize how dangerous all of this was? Didn't we know that somebody was going to get very badly hurt, as Tom nearly did when I upended his bike? Didn't we know we were going to shoot our eyes out?
The truth is, we were the ones sustaining the injuries, so we knew better than anyone. Sure, we could have played much more safely had we called a unilateral backyard ceasefire. But where was the glory in that? To this day, we still talk fondly about those childhood battles, as if they really were worth the risk of getting a mess of stitches, or worse.
Will we think the same if our kids take up similarly reckless hobbies? I doubt it. There's nothing like the thought of a trip to the emergency room to justify wanting to bubble-wrap your children. But to be fair, there will always be some part of me that secretly hopes to come home one day and find my own kids squaring off on the lawn, geared up in bike helmets and rollerblade pads, ready to throw down.
Bill Coffin is publisher and editorial director of Risk Management.
