New Sport of Kings: SpiderManHeadBall

Growing up with a younger brother, the Mighty Malagan, we spent a lot of time inventing new games to play. They pretty much all involved physical pain and blocking a goal of some sort.

There was the game we played where one of us stood on the sidewalk with a tennis ball and tennis racket and tried to hit any part of the front of our rancher with the ball while the other played "goalie" and tried to block it.

There was the game where we piled all the sofa cushions and pillows at the end of the hallway and the goal was for one of us to run as fast as possible at the other, who blocked the cushiony pile, to try to get to the end of the hall.

There was the game where we put Mylec street hockey pads, a winter coat stuffed with pillows, a waffleboard, a baseball mitt and a street hockey goalie helmet on the Malagan, gave him a broom to hold and whaled lacrosse balls at him from close range.

There was the game we played in the basement of the duplex with mini hockey sticks and buckets for goals which morphed into the game in my bedroom with the IKEA desk as the goal and mini hockey sticks. And fighting. Mini hockey sticks, but full size hockey fights.

And of course, the aforementioned Suicide.

So, where am I going with this? Well, the Jewbaccas and the Sweatys just returned from a vacation to the seashore. The house we stayed in had a pool.

And what better way to spend a summer afternoon, evening, night than in the pool of a rented house playing SpiderManHeadBall??

What is that you say? Imagine water polo without the swimming, the skill, the stamina, or any of the athletic ability.

Imagine two large slightly idiotic, mostly immature mid-30 year old men winging this:



At each other from one end of a small pool to the other. In the dark. Wearing our glasses. In the pool.

I know you're all asking, why is this game called "SpiderManHeadBall?" Very simply, the ball we used was not the one pictured, since I can't find any pictures of it. The ball we used looked exactly like Spider Man's head and was also a ball so there you have it.

The object of this game was quite simply to wing the ball from the shallow end to the deep end, ostensibly to try and score on a goal made of Adirondack chairs on their sides.

For those of you who would like to try and replicate this game in their own pool, here is a picture showing the top two athletes at SpiderManHeadBall in an officially sanctioned SpiderManHeadBall pool:

Sweaty and Jewbacca playing SpiderManHeadBall. Or not. Possibly discussing who would have to go into the jungle on the other side of the fence to retrieve the SpiderManHeadBall and deciding that just floating in the pool drinking beer was a better option...

Mostly the game consisted of firing the SpiderManHeadBall in a fashion that sent it skipping on the water where it would conveniently disappear amongst the trillions of drops of water that splashed onto ones glasses causing them to not see the SpiderManHeadBall until a millisecond before impact. The goal is the two green chairs on their side at the end there in the picture. There was also a vicious suction vent at heel level at the bottom where the goalie stood making things all the more interesting as well as a million watt pool light that burned the crap out of you when you backed into it.

Good times. The only near major injury was when Sweaty fired one right past Jewbacca and he stupidly turned to see where it went as it came careening off the chairs and smashed him the glasses and mouth. Other than that, happily there were no injuries, alcohol-related or otherwise.

Just two 30-something idiots enjoying vacation. And beaning one another with a small dodgeball. That belonged to a 17 month old.