Ball-slinging Oafs

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When I was a kid I loved sports, games, and just about everything about recess. Except dodgeball. I felt compelled to play because not doing so would have singled me out, but the game made me as nervous as an Arab in Alabama.

My virtues as an athlete were dexterity, agility and speed, so in activities like footraces, baseball, soccer, football, jungle gym, etc., I excelled. But even though I had a full beard at the age of 9, strength was not my forte as a grade-schooler so I was no good at slinging that giant rubber ball at high speed, the way some of my bigger, more oafish classmates were. The speed thing helped me get out of the way, but when Todd Wesley (6 ft. tall, 185 lbs in the sixth grade) would take that ball into his frying-pan hand and hurl it at the line of terrified children squirming against the wall, if my name was on it, there was little I could do to get out of the way.

Apart from the tattoo-inducing sting of Todd's missile (I think I read that line in a porn novel), once hit, you stayed "it" until you hit someone else. And there was my problem. To Todd, the ball was the size of a cantaloupe. To my much more age-appropriately-sized body, it was the size and weight of a beachball made of solid clay, so getting any velocity on it or aiming it accurately was virtually impossible. I stayed "it" longer than the bigger kids and nearly dislocated my shoulder trying to sling a winner.

As an adult, I'm still on the smaller side of average here in the U.S. Which is one of the many reasons I love visiting Central America. The average height of adults in Guatemala, for instance, is about 5 feet, so I tower over them like a Swahili in Japan. I love it. I've even managed to talk a few of them into playing dodgeball with me and it's awesome. I've tattooed many a Guatemalan with my stunning strength and accuracy. In some neighborhoods of Antigua, I am known as "El Gringo Grande."

Yeah, baby.