Butts-Up was an oddly popular game during lunch time in my Jr. High years, partly because the P.E. area (and the string of mulitple racquetball courts) were situated close to the lunch area and cafeteria. There were no limits to the number of players, though I don’t recall more than eight in a court. There were no teams; every player was playing for himself.
I) A person must throw a racquetball from behind the serving line against the back wall of the 3-wall racquetball court – and get out of the way.
II) A different person must catch the returning racquetball in one hand and use the same hand to throw it against the back wall within 1 second.
a) if you cross the serving line while in contact with the ball, you earn a point
b) if you fail to get out of the way (a “hinder” in racquetball) you earn a point
c) if you touch the ball (or it touches you) and the ball subsequently touches the ground, you earn a point
d) if your throw hits the ground or a side wall before hitting the back wall, you earn a point
e) if you slap the ball you earn a point
f) you can ‘bobble’ the ball while trying to catch it; time starts when you grip the ball. If you hold it for more than 1 second you earn a point
g) if you switch hands between catch and throw you earn a point (this was hell on the guys who were good at baseball)
h) if you throw the ball and it touches you before another player throws it, you earn a point
- Any time someone earns a point there is a brief pause. People move around, thinking they’re being strategic somehow. Then someone throws the ball against the back wall to start the game again.
- Any time one or more players earn three points, play stops and the penalty phase begins.
A) All the players who earned 3 points line up in the racquetball court at the back wall. There, they must face the wall, kneel, and place their forehead at the juncture of the ground and the back wall (“The Crotch”). If you can imagine someone kneeling that way, you can understand where the game gets its name.
B) All the players who have not yet earned 3 points queue up at the back line of the court (the Long line in racquetball) and become “pitchers”
C) Each pitcher takes the racquetball, steps up to the serving line#, and throws the ball at the kneeler(s). The goal is to hit someone dead-center. Quite surprisingly, even the best of players tended to have difficulty hitting a kneeler at all, On the other hand, some of the stronger players could make it difficult for kneelers to sit when lunch was over and the next class began…
D) After all the pitchers had one chance to throw at a kneeler, the basic game would resume. In the nice games, everyone’s counters would reset to zero; in the tough games, the kneeler’s points would reset to zero and the pitchers continued their counts.
#) In the wicked games, the pitcher at the front of the queue accepted the ball at the back line. From there, he was allowed to move to the serving line as fast or slow as he wished and was allowed to throw at the kneeler(s) at any point. However, he was still subject to rule (a) and, quite frankly, dashing forward to increase the force of his pitch (to make the kneeler feel more pain) usually had a horrible effect on his ability to aim. This was an excellent lesson for me, and I hadn’t even started taking any martial arts yet: Your speed and force are useless if you can’t hit your target!
Why was this controversial?
I was in ninth grade when I was invited by a few guys to join a game . We played at lunch time during the school week. It went on for a couple months. Then a girl (she was known as kind-of a Tomboy in the neighborhood) saw a bunch of us engaged in what looked like a catch-and-throw variant of handball and asked if she could play. A couple guys nodded, but me and one of the others said ‘no’ and told her it was because she was wearing a dress. A week later the same girl asked again and she and her friend were dressed in jeans like everyone else. She was as good a player as the rest of us and, when it came to the penalty phase, they were good sports about it and dutifully knelt at the back wall. More girls joined; some girls started their own games in different courts while some courts were all guys or mixed. I’m sure there were some girls starting to change and I’m sure I had my hormones raging by that time but I still don’t recall anyone making even the slightest salacious comment – we were preoccupied with the game itself and that just wasn’t the venue for such thoughts.
And then a coach happened to glance at the racquetball courts during lunch at a time when there was at least one girl with her head in The Crotch. He decreed, on the spot, that girls were not allowed in the racquetball courts during lunch time. He must have shared that with his coaching colleagues because another coach came by the next day to make sure the rule was enforced. She decided the game was simply undignified for anyone and decreed that girls were allowed in the courts during lunch but the game was not allowed anywhere on campus any time the school was open. Appeals to administration fell on deaf ears; appeals to our parents yielded laughable results.
Smear the Queer is even easier to explain. It was like tackle football or rugby – except there’s no goal, no end-zone, no points. Whoever has the ball is the Queer. Everyone else is supposed to tackle him. If the ball pops loose, someone – everyone, anyone – is obliged to grab it and try to hold onto it as long as possible. Whoever grabs it becomes the new Queer. If there was an objective at all, perhaps it was to retain the ball for as long as possible – except nobody was tracking the time, either.
Dungeons and Dragons was the fad handed down to the high schools from the college crowd. It was an off-shoot of the Chess club by the time I graduated from ninth grade. By then, the college crowds considered D&D passe and were playng The Assassin Game. We played that on the high school campus until dart guns were banned. We tried rubber knives next but, when I whipped my super-long keychain out of my pocket and trapped a friend’s arm, then redirected the assailant’s rubber blade back into his own chest, a teacher who saw it all happen got freaked out and called for a complete end to the game. But by then TAG had either faded amongst the college crowds or it had morphed into Syndicate or Mafia (for those of us who were politically incorrect). And that game was clearly a variant of TAG that was more organized and subtle. Instead of having teams firing rubber dart guns across classrooms, players in the Syndicate game were given the name of another player to stalk and kill. Once a player killed his target, he picked up his victim’s “contract” and repeated the hunt. The last person remaining won the game. Before we pooled our names, I was told I could not use my chain or any other real or practice martial arts weapons.
I saw a friend in the hallway when I was at my locker between classes. As he passed, I reached out to catch his attention and lightly touched his collar bones. He stopped and we walked together for a while as I asked him a question about our weekend D&D plans. Just before he headed off to his next class I asked who his target was. Naturally, he frowned and reminded me they were supposed to be secret. “Yeah, I know.” I grinned, “But that touch on your collar bones earlier, that was more like a ridge-hand strike to your throat and…they said I couldn’t use weapons, but they didn’t say I couldn’t use martial arts.”
A friend of mine in the cycling class (I had taken that instead of racquet sports or weightlifting as a P.E. elective) handed me a note while we were doing our morning ride. When we reached our mid-point rest stop I read, “I have just jammed my bicycle pump into the spokes of your front wheel, causing you to fly over the handlebars, into traffic, and beneath that 18-wheeler. You are dead. Who was your Contract?”
–G!